×
INTELLIGENT WORK FORUMS
FOR ENGINEERING PROFESSIONALS

Log In

Come Join Us!

Are you an
Engineering professional?
Join Eng-Tips Forums!
  • Talk With Other Members
  • Be Notified Of Responses
    To Your Posts
  • Keyword Search
  • One-Click Access To Your
    Favorite Forums
  • Automated Signatures
    On Your Posts
  • Best Of All, It's Free!
  • Students Click Here

*Eng-Tips's functionality depends on members receiving e-mail. By joining you are opting in to receive e-mail.

Posting Guidelines

Promoting, selling, recruiting, coursework and thesis posting is forbidden.

Students Click Here

Jobs

Structural Liability Insurance
2

Structural Liability Insurance

Structural Liability Insurance

(OP)
It appears that my structural liability insurance premiums increase by 40% yearly. At this rate small offices would be out of business very quickly.

Any info on cost, limits, etc. would be appreciated.

RE: Structural Liability Insurance

Welcome to the club.

My office we do multi-discipline engineering. Our insurance couple of years back went from $6 k to $24K with same insurer. We never had any problem and or claims. We consider ourselves to be very high quality engineering firm. Half of our revenues comes from federal work that does not require liability insurance. All they require that we fix our errors at our expense. We never had any of those situations either. The brilliant insurance company adds the revenue to our company's total income that makes our rates go up.

We have PEs in all disciplines. We have engineers with postgraduate degrees. Average experience is over 20 years.

I am right now in the process of renewing our policy. The current underwriter came back with about 30% increase with $10,000 deductible.

Here is the way I see the insurance cost: Lets say that the policy will be around $10,00 annual premium. To earn this income, I have make $10,000 profit which means that I have to do $100,000 worth design work and be guaranteed that I will have 10% profit. We all know that 10% is not always three. You make some and you lose some.

You can go without, which I do not advise! The other option is to shop for more and increases the deductible. We carry one million and that is all we can afford. If a client wants more than one million, we can get it but we ask them to pay for the additional premiums.

I see no end in sight for this problem. I think sometimes that we are lucky to find an underwriter! I think the health insurance is much bigger of a problem for us and far more expensive.

This is a fact of life and additional stress for the small firm owners.

Regards,

 

Lutfi
www.cdeco.com

RE: Structural Liability Insurance


I went through similar situation this year. Our rates were going to double so I spent some time trying to get more quotes. In our area(Ontario Canada) one company seems to have the majority of business and we were having trouble getting quotes from anyone else.

I looked at our historical rates ($1 000 000 coverage with deductable edging up every year)noting we have never had a wiff of a claim.

First 3 years (small business progam) $2.10 per $100 billings. Increased by about 20% per year until it reached $5.50 per $100. When we got their quote for this year it was going to $11.00 per $100. The agent explained it was due to our billings increasing, so I converted the premiums to $ per $100.

In the end I did find another insurance company , my rates dropped back to about $5 per$100 and my deductable dropped from $5000 to nil.

Red Flag This Post

Please let us know here why this post is inappropriate. Reasons such as off-topic, duplicates, flames, illegal, vulgar, or students posting their homework.

Red Flag Submitted

Thank you for helping keep Eng-Tips Forums free from inappropriate posts.
The Eng-Tips staff will check this out and take appropriate action.

Reply To This Thread

Posting in the Eng-Tips forums is a member-only feature.

Click Here to join Eng-Tips and talk with other members!


Resources