The bid is won. The property manager sends over the service agreement, and page 14 is titled "Insurance Requirements." You forward it to your agent, get back a certificate of insurance, send it to the client, and start work Monday. Somewhere in that sequence, something went wrong at roughly a third of the cleaning companies we meet — and they won't find out until a claim.
The five clauses that matter
1. Limits. The contract asks for $1M per occurrence / $2M aggregate GL, $1M auto, and a $2M (or $5M) umbrella. The aggregate is the number that catches people: it's the most the policy will pay in a year across all your clients, and if you have forty accounts sharing one $2M aggregate, one bad claim can leave the other thirty-nine effectively uninsured. Ask about a per-location or per-project aggregate endorsement.
2. Additional insured. The client wants to be covered under your policy for claims arising from your work — if a visitor slips in a lobby your crew mopped and sues the building owner, your policy defends them. This requires an endorsement on your policy (typically CG 20 10 for ongoing operations and CG 20 37 for completed operations). A certificate that says "additional insured" without the endorsement behind it is a promise your carrier never made.
3. Primary and non-contributory. Your policy pays first and the client's own insurance doesn't have to contribute. Without this language, two carriers will argue about who pays while the client — your client — waits. It's a specific endorsement, and many standard policies don't include it automatically.
4. Waiver of subrogation. After your carrier pays a claim, it normally has the right to recover from whoever was at fault — including your client, if their negligence contributed. The client wants you to waive that right. It's routine, it's usually inexpensive, and it has to be endorsed on GL, auto, and workers' comp (where it's a separate form and a separate charge).
5. Notice of cancellation. The contract requires that the client be notified 30 days before your policy cancels. Most carriers will only notify certificate holders of cancellation for non-payment, and only on 10 days' notice. Promising 30 days you can't deliver is a breach of contract waiting to happen; negotiate the language or get the endorsement.
The certificate is not the coverage
A certificate of insurance is a snapshot issued by your agent that says, in effect, "as of today, these policies exist." It is explicitly not a contract, confers no rights, and can't amend the policy. Every ACORD 25 form says so in the box at the top. If the endorsements aren't actually on the policy, the certificate is evidence of a problem, not a solution to one. When we review a contract, we check the policy forms against the contract language — and we fix the policy before we issue the certificate.
When the contract asks for more than you have
Three options, in order of preference. Buy it: a $2M umbrella for a well-run cleaning company is often less than owners expect, and it will be required by the next contract too. Negotiate it: many requirements are boilerplate copied from a construction contract, and a property manager will often accept $1M umbrella from a janitorial vendor if asked. Decline it: a contract that requires $10M of coverage for a $60,000 annual cleaning account is telling you something about the client's risk tolerance, and it may not be a client you want.
What you shouldn't do is sign and hope. The insurance section is the one part of the contract that will be enforced exactly as written, by a professional, on the worst day of the relationship. Read it first.
