Certificates of insurance for Miami GCs: how to pass the site packet without lying

An ACORD 25 is a snapshot. It lists the carrier, the limits, the dates, and who asked to be shown. It does not change the policy. If the GC wants additional insured status, we endorse the general liability (and sometimes the auto, sometimes the umbrella). Then we issue the cert. That order is the whole game.

Hold-harmless language in a contract is not insurance. We can point to it. We cannot make a certificate replace a missing umbrella.

GL $1M/$2M, auto $1M, workers comp statutory with employers liability, umbrella $1M or $5M, additional insured ongoing and completed ops, waiver of subrogation, primary and noncontributory, 30-day notice of cancellation. Some of those we can blanket. Some we schedule. Some require a call to the carrier. Thirty-day cancellation notice is often “we will try” — many policies say we will endeavor to mail notice. We will not print a promise the form does not make.

If the bid is municipal or airport-adjacent, the exhibit gets stranger. Send all pages.

GCs want the umbrella to follow the GL additional insured. Not every umbrella does, automatically. We check. A $1 million GL with a $1 million umbrella that does not follow AI is $1 million of real additional insured, not $2 million.

This is the Palmetto habit: read the umbrella, then type the cert. Not the other way around.

If you chase five GCs a month, a blanket additional insured endorsement is how you stay sane. If you have one big job for six months, a scheduled endorsement with that GC’s exact legal name — LLC suffix included — is how you pass their risk manager. Names matter. “ABC Construction” is not “ABC Construction of South Florida, LLC.”

We copy from the contract header, not from your text thread.

In-force policies with blanket AI: often same day. New endorsements: days, not minutes. New policies: the bind, then the cert. Start a commercial or business quote if you do not have paper yet. If you already sit with us, email the spec and the job name. Doral or Palmetto Bay — same certificate, same refusal to fiction.