TL;DR
A certificate of insurance is the one-page summary a contractor's insurance agent issues as evidence of active coverage, listing the carrier, policy numbers, limits, and expiration dates for general liability and workers' compensation. Verifying it protects the homeowner directly: if an uninsured worker is hurt on the property or a crew damages a neighbor's home, the owner's assets and homeowner's policy become the target.
What it means
A certificate of insurance is the one-page summary a contractor's insurance agent issues as evidence of active coverage, listing the carrier, policy numbers, limits, and expiration dates for general liability and workers' compensation. Verifying it protects the homeowner directly: if an uninsured worker is hurt on the property or a crew damages a neighbor's home, the owner's assets and homeowner's policy become the target. Diligence means receiving it from the agent rather than the contractor, confirming dates span the project, checking limits, commonly 1 million per occurrence for liability, and being named certificate holder so cancellation triggers notice.
Where it sits in the glossary
Certificate of insurance is part of the Certifications group inside the ProFix Directory glossary. Browse every term in this category from the glossary index.
Why Ohio homeowners should know it
This is a term Ohio homeowners encounter when reading contractor quotes, hiring paperwork, or inspection reports. Understanding it well enough to ask one good follow-up question is usually all the protection a homeowner needs.
ProFix Directory keeps definitions short on the index page and saves the longer context — Ohio-specific rules, where the term comes from, and which ProFix tools touch it — for these per-term pages so the term is easy to cite and easy to share.
ProFix tools that touch this term
See also
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