Two certificates, one afternoon: what a Florida GC checks before your crew gets on site

The email arrives on a Thursday and it is four lines long. Send your COI with us named as additional insured, send your comp exemption, start Monday.

It usually turns into two weeks. The broker gets called, the broker asks for the legal entity name and the project address and the limits written into the subcontract, none of which are to hand, and the certificate that finally lands has the general contractor typed into the wrong box. Meanwhile the exemption certificate is a PDF attached to an email from a job that closed in 2024. By the time both pages are right, the coordinator has given the scope to the sub whose paperwork arrived first.

Here is why this is more than an errand. In Florida the insurance is not a general contractor's preference, it is your license. Section 489.115(5) makes proof of public liability insurance, property damage insurance and workers' compensation a condition of obtaining a contractor's license and of renewing it, so the same coverage that gets you on Monday's schedule is what the board wants to see on August 31 of an even numbered year. Let it lapse across a renewal and the license goes delinquent, then null and void, and s.489.128(1) makes a contract signed by an unlicensed contractor unenforceable in law or in equity by the unlicensed contractor. Section 489.13 lets the department add an administrative fine of up to $10,000 while it is there. On the workers' compensation side the arithmetic is blunter still: s.440.107(7)(d)1 assesses two times the premium you avoided with a $1,000 floor and arrives attached to a stop-work order, and s.440.107(7)(c) charges $1,000 a day for working through one. Set a $140,000 framing package you cannot sue for against a certificate request you could have answered by five o'clock, and the trade is not close.

By the end of this page you will have the two limits your license class carries under Rule 61G4-15.003, a single email to your broker holding every fact needed to issue a correct certificate the first time, your exemption certificate pulled off a public record instead of hunted through your inbox, the three records a coordinator checks all saying the same company name, a written rule for subcontractors that keeps you off the hook under s.440.10(1)(b), and both expiry dates sitting somewhere that warns you sixty days out. Every figure below names the statute or rule it comes from.

Get the two numbers off the rule before you dial the broker

Rule 61G4-15.003 sets minimum public liability and property damage limits by license class, and there are only two pairs of numbers in it.

Read that as a floor for holding the license, not as an answer to the subcontract. The number written into the general contractor's agreement is a separate question and it is the one the coordinator is measuring your certificate against. A contractor who carries the rule minimum and nothing more will pass the board and fail the bid list, which is a bad way to find out.

Two adjacent facts are worth having in your head before the call, because they change what you are buying rather than how much of it.

The first is mold. A mold remediator or assessor credential is required for mold work over ten square feet, and holding a general contractor's license does not cover it. That credential carries its own insurance condition: a general liability policy of at least $1,000,000 that includes mold specific coverage. A standard construction general liability policy is not that policy. If remediation is in your scope, the certificate you are about to order will not satisfy it, and the separate credential behind it is the Florida mold license.

The second is that electrical and alarm work sits with a different board entirely. The Electrical Contractors' Licensing Board runs under Chapter 489 Part II with its own rules in Chapter 61G6, its own renewal cycle and its own continuing education mix. The 61G4-15.003 table is the construction board's table. An electrical contractor asking what limits to carry is asking a question on the other side of that line, and the answer sits in the Florida electrical contractor license.

Put every fact in one email and the certificate comes back right the first time

A broker can issue a certificate of insurance in minutes off a policy that already exists. What takes two weeks is the round trip, and the round trip happens because the request went out missing something. Send all of it at once.

The single most common reason a perfectly good policy produces an unacceptable certificate is the additional insured line. Additional insured is not a coverage you have, it is an endorsement that puts the general contractor onto your policy for the work you do for them. Typing their name into the description of operations box does not do it. Ask your broker in these words: issue the certificate with a blanket additional insured endorsement, or a scheduled endorsement naming this entity, and attach the endorsement form itself.

While you have their attention, three more questions earn their airtime. Does the policy cover the subcontractors you hire, or does it assume you are collecting their certificates. Is the truck covered for business use, because a personal auto policy very likely excludes it and the tools in the bed are usually a separate line. And what is excluded that a contractor in your trade routinely does. That last one is the question that finds the gap, and it is worth asking plainly.

Attach the resulting certificate to the reply you send the coordinator. Do not send it as a link to a broker portal that requires a login, because that turns your afternoon into their afternoon.

Pull the exemption certificate off the public record, not out of your inbox

The second page is the workers' compensation answer, and in Florida it takes one of two forms.

Florida construction triggers mandatory coverage at one employee, officers and members included. There is no four employee grace here: the four employee threshold you keep hearing quoted belongs to non-construction employers. So either you carry a policy, in which case the workers' compensation section of the same certificate does the work, or you hold a certificate of election to be exempt and you send that instead.

The exemption is a corporate officer or LLC member, recorded at ten percent ownership or more, on a DWC-250 filed electronically under s.440.05(3), at $50 under s.440.05(8)(a), valid two years, with a maximum of three exempt officers across a group of affiliated corporations. The filing order, and the Sunbiz condition that quietly invalidates it, is the Florida workers' comp exemption.

The part that saves the afternoon is this: an active exemption is a public record. It sits in the Division of Workers' Compensation Proof of Coverage database, searchable by name, which is where the general contractor is going to check it anyway. That means the certificate in your 2024 inbox was not the only copy, and hunting for it was wasted time. Search your own entity, print the result, and send that alongside the certificate of insurance in the same reply.

It also means the coordinator can find out what you would rather they did not. If the exemption expired eleven months ago, if the entity behind it was administratively dissolved after a missed May 1 Sunbiz annual report, or if the officer named on it is not the officer signing the subcontract, that shows on the same screen. Search yourself before you send. Two minutes spent finding your own problem is very different from a coordinator finding it.

Make the three records the coordinator checks say the same name

A large general contractor's compliance step is not a judgement call, it is a checklist with three lines on it, and the three lines have to tie out.

1. The DBPR license record. Your license number, the class, the status, and the name of the qualified business organization behind it.
2. The certificate of insurance. The named insured, the limits, the policy dates, and the additional insured endorsement.
3. Proof of Coverage. An active policy or an active exemption, in the same name.

Here is how a real company fails a checklist it should pass. The truck says Reyes Framing. The certificate names Reyes Framing LLC, because that is what the broker was told in 2021. The license is qualified for Reyes Construction Group LLC, which is the entity that actually holds the certificate of authority under s.489.119. The subcontract is being drawn to a fictitious name registered to neither. One company, one owner, one crew, and a coordinator with three lines that do not match.

The coordinator is not trying to trap you. The coordinator has a file to close and a form that will not accept a mismatch, so the file goes to the bottom of the pile and your call gets returned on Wednesday. Fixing it costs a Sunbiz amendment and one email to the broker, and it is worth doing once, deliberately, rather than at the start of every bid.

Section 489.119(5)(b) is the reason to settle this before the next proposal goes out rather than after. It puts your license number on every advertisement, bid, offer and proposal, in every medium. The number that appears there is the number the coordinator will look up, and it names an entity. Make sure it is the entity that signs, insures and gets paid. Which entity that should be, and what the qualifying agent relationship does to it, is the Florida qualifying agent.

Collect the same two pages from every sub before the first hour is worked

The duty you are on the receiving end of runs downhill from you too, and in Florida it is written into the statute rather than left to good practice.

Section 440.10(1)(c) requires a contractor to require a subcontractor to provide evidence of workers' compensation insurance. Section 440.10(1)(b) supplies the consequence: where a subcontractor working on sublet work has no coverage, the contractor becomes the statutory employer of that subcontractor's employees. The injury claim is yours. So is the sub's payroll when the premium audit runs, which is a second bill arriving months later for a job you have already closed out.

Section 440.02(18)(c) closes the door most people try to walk through. In construction, a person you pay on a 1099 is your employee unless they hold their own entity plus their own exemption, or their own coverage. Calling somebody an independent contractor does not de-employ them. A helper with no LLC and no certificate is an employee for Chapter 440 purposes from his first hour on site, and you are an uninsured construction employer from that hour forward.

So run your own version of the coordinator's checklist, and keep it short enough that you actually do it:

• Certificate of insurance from the sub, general liability, with your entity as additional insured.
• Either their comp policy on the same certificate, or their exemption confirmed in Proof of Coverage.
• Their DBPR license record, active, class matching the scope you are handing them.
• All three in the same legal name as the subcontract you are about to sign.

Verify rather than trust, and re-verify on the expiry date rather than on the relationship. Their certificates run on their own clocks, and those midnights are not the same as yours.

Give both expiry dates somewhere they cannot pass quietly

The reason this becomes an emergency every time is that both documents expire silently. A general liability policy renews on its anniversary, a comp exemption expires at midnight two years from its issue date under s.440.05(6) with no grace period written into that sentence, and both facts live in PDFs.

On AEC Stack that is a credentials list on your business record rather than a folder. Add a row per document with the type, who issued it, the policy or certificate number, the issue date, the expiry date, and a warning window that defaults to sixty days. The list sorts by what dies first and raises the soonest one on the dashboard, and each row carries a days remaining count so the answer to "is my COI still good" is a glance rather than a search.

Two switches on that row are worth understanding. The visible to clients flag publishes the row into your client portal, grouped under Insurance, which means a general contractor's coordinator can check your coverage themselves instead of emailing you on a Friday afternoon. And the warning window is per credential, so the comp exemption can warn at ninety days, because a lapsed exemption on a two year cycle needs a filing rather than a phone call.

The license renewal is the third date and it belongs on the same screen. Answer the CILB question on your business profile with your license and its issue date, and the compliance calendar computes August 31, 2026 against the seeded Florida rule set, naming Rule 61G4-18.001 as the authority and the fourteen continuing education hours behind it. Answer the exemption question with the date printed on the certificate and a twenty four month clock appears against s.440.05(6). Three dates, one list: the policy anniversary, the exemption midnight, and the renewal that s.489.115(5) will not process without proof of both.

<!-- CAPTURE LATER: the credentials list on a Florida business record showing a general liability row with insurer, policy number and days remaining, a workers comp exemption row with its 24 month expiry, both marked visible to clients, and the fl_contractor_licence_renewal clock resolved to August 31, 2026 underneath. Blocked in this wave: the demo tenant is Ontario. -->

What it costs

There is no monthly subscription. The platform fee is 2.5% of each invoice processed through AEC Stack, collected on payment due dates.

The premiums belong to your insurer and this page deliberately does not guess at them, because they are set by what you actually do and by your payroll rather than by anything printable. Everything else on this page is a state fee or a state penalty.

The bottom four rows are the reason the top four are cheap. A certificate costs you an email and the exemption costs $25 a year, against a penalty structure that starts at four figures and a contract that s.489.128(1) will not let you enforce.

Do the retrieval before anybody asks for it. Open your business record at start your business, add one row for the general liability policy with the number and the expiry off the declarations page, and one for the comp exemption with the date printed on the certificate. Then mark both visible to clients. The next four line email you get on a Thursday becomes a reply with two attachments, sent before you have finished reading it.