Ask a cleaning company owner what their general liability policy is for and they'll say: "In case we damage something." It's a reasonable answer. It's also, under most GL forms, wrong — and the gap is written into the policy in plain English, under an exclusion labeled damage to property, subsection (4): property in the care, custody, or control of the insured.
Why the exclusion exists
General liability was designed to cover damage you cause to other people's property in the course of your operations — the car you back into, the neighboring building your fire spreads to. It was never meant to be a warranty on your own workmanship, and insurers reasoned that if you're holding, handling, or working on something, the risk of damaging it is a business risk, not an insurable accident. Fair enough for a contractor installing a cabinet. Catastrophic for a cleaning company, whose entire operation consists of handling, holding, and working on property that belongs to someone else.
What it looks like in a claim
- A floor machine with a worn pad gouges 400 square feet of terrazzo in a bank lobby. Repair estimate: $38,000. Excluded — the floor was in your care while you worked on it.
- A crew applies the wrong stripper to a sealed concrete floor in a distribution center and lifts the finish. Excluded.
- A cleaner knocks a monitor off a desk, or unplugs a server to vacuum behind it. The monitor is probably excluded; the server outage may be as well, depending on how the policy reads "control."
- Carpet extraction leaves a client's conference-room carpet permanently discolored. Excluded if the carpet was the thing being cleaned.
In each case the client's first call is to you, and the second is to their own property carrier, who pays the claim and then subrogates against your company. Without coverage, the money comes from your balance sheet.
How to close the gap
There are three common structures, and the right one depends on what you clean.
1. A care-custody-control (CCC) endorsement on the GL policy. Some carriers will narrow or buy back the exclusion with a sublimit — often $10,000 to $100,000 — for property damaged while being worked on. It's the simplest fix and often the cheapest. The weakness is the sublimit; a $25,000 CCC limit on a hospital account is a false comfort.
2. A property-of-others or installation floater on an inland marine form. Inland marine policies are built to cover property that isn't yours and isn't at your location. A "property of others in your care" floater can carry higher limits than a GL endorsement and responds on a first-party basis, which means faster claims handling and no fight over whether you were negligent.
3. A specialty janitorial GL form. A handful of carriers write cleaning-contractor programs with the CCC exclusion already modified for the class. These are often the best fit for companies that clean high-value environments — medical, data centers, laboratories, Class A office — because the form was written with those claims in mind.
The question to ask before renewal
Pull your client list and ask, for each account: what is the most expensive thing my crew works around, and what would it cost to replace? That number, not the contract's GL minimum, tells you what your CCC limit should be. Then ask your broker to show you — in the policy, not the proposal — where that damage is covered. If the answer is a shrug or a certificate, you don't have coverage. You have paperwork.
The scratched floor is coming. The only question is whether you've already decided who pays for it.
