A vendor's worker gets hurt on your property. Three policies could pay, and only one usually does

A landscaping crew is trimming a tree at your property. One of them falls off the ladder and breaks a wrist.

Three policies could conceivably respond, and which one does determines whether this is a $12,000 claim on somebody else's policy or a lawsuit against the owner. Most compliance programs collect all three certificates and cannot explain the difference between them, which is a problem when the difference is the whole point of collecting them.

Each of the three answers a different question

Workers compensation answers: does the injured worker get medical care and wage replacement without suing anybody? It is a statutory, no-fault system. The worker gets paid, and in exchange gives up the right to sue their employer. That trade is called the exclusive remedy, and it is the single most valuable thing in your vendor insurance requirements.

Employer liability, which appears on the same certificate as workers comp in Part B, answers: what happens when the exclusive remedy does not hold? It covers the employer for injury suits that escape the workers comp bargain. Third-party-over actions, spousal claims, dual capacity claims. It is the backstop on a system that mostly works.

General liability answers: what happens when the vendor injures somebody who is not their employee? Your resident, your staff, a passerby. GL specifically excludes injury to the vendor's own employees, which is the exclusion that surprises people.

So in the ladder scenario, workers comp pays. GL does not, and no amount of GL limit changes that.

The failure mode is a vendor with no workers comp

Here is the actual exposure, and it is not exotic.

A vendor with no workers comp has an injured worker with no statutory remedy. That worker's only path to compensation is a negligence suit, and they will name every party with a connection to the site. The property owner, the management company, and the general contractor if there is one.

At that point the question is whether your general liability policy responds to a claim by a contractor's employee. Sometimes it does, partially, after a fight. Sometimes there is an exclusion. Either way you are now a defendant in an injury case that a $4,000-a-year workers comp policy would have absorbed entirely.

That is the mechanism behind the whole category. Uninsured contractor exposure is not mainly about property damage. It is about bodily injury with no exclusive remedy.

Read Part B, because most people only read Part A

On an ACORD 25, workers comp occupies its own section with two parts.

Part A is statutory. There is no limit shown because the statute sets the benefit, so the box is often blank or says "statutory."

Part B is employer liability, and it has three limits: each accident, disease per employee, and disease policy limit. The standard is $1,000,000 across all three, and $500,000 shows up on smaller policies.

A certificate showing workers comp with $100,000 employer liability limits is a signal about the size and appetite of the vendor's program. It is not a rejection on its own, and it is worth noticing.

Check the state, because workers comp is written state by state

This is where a certificate can be technically valid and operationally useless.

Workers comp policies list covered states. A policy written for Texas does not cover an injury in Oklahoma unless Oklahoma appears in the policy, either as a listed state or through the "other states" endorsement.

For a vendor working one market this rarely matters. For a portfolio spanning three states with vendors that cross lines, it matters constantly, and it is nearly always missed because nobody looks at the state field on a workers comp certificate.

Four states also run monopolistic funds where coverage comes from a state entity rather than a private carrier, which changes what the certificate looks like. Confirm what applies in your markets rather than assuming a uniform document.

Waiver of subrogation on the workers comp policy is separate

A waiver of subrogation on general liability is not a waiver on workers comp. They are different policies and each needs its own endorsement.

Without one on the comp policy, the vendor's workers comp carrier pays the injured worker and then sues you to recover, arguing your negligence caused the injury. That recovery action is exactly what the waiver blocks.

Requiring it on GL and forgetting it on comp is one of the most common gaps in an otherwise well-written insurance requirement, and it leaves the largest single category of claim unprotected.

What IDCore does with this, and where it stops

The AI reads the ACORD form and matches every field against your requirement set, including workers comp presence, employer liability limits per part, listed states, and whether a waiver of subrogation endorsement is attached rather than merely claimed in the description box. Non-compliant vendors surface with the specific failed check rather than a generic flag, and our own automation rate on that reading sits around 90%.

The remaining 10% is the honest part. Handwritten certificates, unusual carrier formats, and description-box language that requires judgment go to human review. Any vendor in this category claiming 100% automated reading of insurance documents should be asked to run your ugliest certificate through it.

Two other boundaries. We read the certificate and track its dates; we do not confirm with the carrier that the policy is in force at this moment, so the protection against a mid-term cancellation is the reminder ahead of expiration rather than a live status check. And we do not give legal advice on what your requirements should be, because the right limits depend on your leases, your lender, and your counsel.

Check one certificate today

Pull the workers comp certificate for whichever vendor does your highest-risk work. Find four things: is there Part A coverage, what are the three Part B limits, which states are listed, and is there a waiver of subrogation endorsement attached.

Most programs cannot answer the third and fourth for any vendor. Which could you answer?