What General Liability Actually Covers on a Snow Job
General liability pays for bodily injury and property damage you cause to other people while you clear snow and ice. In this trade that means two things above all: a person who slips on a surface you were contracted to treat, and the property you catch with a blade, a spreader, or a loader bucket at 4am in a whiteout.
- Slip-and-fall on a serviced surface — the tenant, shopper or employee who goes down on a lot or walkway you plowed, shovelled or salted
- Plow and blade damage — curbs, bollards, wheel stops, light-pole bases, landscape edging, parked vehicles, garage doors, storefront thresholds
- Completed operations — the claim that lands after you left, which in snow work is nearly all of them: the fall happened at 7am, you plowed at 3am
- Personal and advertising injury — libel, slander and copyright claims tied to how you market the business
Snow is a completed-operations trade
You are almost never on site when the claim happens. You clear at 3am and the fall is at 7am; you salt on Tuesday and the freeze-thaw refreezes it Thursday. That gap is why products-completed operations coverage matters more here than in almost any other contracting niche, and why a policy that quietly excludes it is worth nothing to you.
The Exclusions That Bite Snow Contractors
A general liability policy sold to a landscaper is not automatically a policy that responds in January. Before you sign, read for these four things — they are where snow claims get denied.
- A snow and ice exclusion. Some GL forms written for green-season landscaping exclude snow and ice operations outright. If snow is a real part of your revenue, the policy has to say so.
- Care, custody and control. Damage to property in your care is generally excluded from GL. That is the gap that catches you when you damage the building you are servicing rather than a third party's car.
- Subcontractor warranties. If you push volume to subs, the policy may require them to carry their own limits and name you as additional insured. Fail the warranty and the claim is yours alone.
- Prior-work or retroactive dates. A policy that starts in November may not answer a claim from last February's storm. Continuous coverage is what protects prior seasons.
Limits, Certificates and What Property Managers Ask For
Most commercial snow contracts specify $1,000,000 per occurrence and $2,000,000 aggregate as the floor. National retail, healthcare campuses and municipal contracts commonly push higher, and pair the requirement with an umbrella of $2M to $5M sitting over the top.
| Contract type | Typical GL requirement | Usual extras |
|---|---|---|
| Small commercial lot / HOA | $1M / $2M | Additional insured, 30-day notice |
| Retail centre, grocery-anchored | $1M / $2M | Umbrella $2M+, primary and non-contributory |
| Healthcare, campus, municipal | $1M / $2M | Umbrella $5M, waiver of subrogation, hold-harmless |
The certificate is not the policy. An additional insured endorsement is what actually extends your coverage to the property owner; a certificate of insurance is just a piece of paper describing it. We issue both, and we read the contract's insurance exhibit before you sign it rather than after a claim.