Your contractor was approved when the project started.
Three months later, their Certificate of Insurance shows coverage that has reached its expiration date.
Now what?
An expired certificate should trigger a review rather than simply disappearing into a spreadsheet. The COI tracking spreadsheet guide covers the points at which a manual tracker stops catching this.
1. Confirm the Expiration Date
Start with the policy information associated with the contractor.
Determine:
- Which policy reached its expiration date?
- When did it expire?
- Is the contractor still performing work?
- Has replacement documentation already been provided?
Don’t assume that an expired certificate necessarily means the contractor currently has no insurance. It means your documentation needs to be updated and reviewed.
2. Request Updated Insurance Documentation
If the contractor is still active, obtain current documentation through your established compliance process.
Keep the previous certificate as part of the project’s documentation rather than overwriting your history.
3. Review the New Certificate
Don’t assume that a renewal contains identical coverage.
Check the new documentation again for:
- Named insured
- Insurance carrier
- Policy dates
- Coverage types
- Policy limits
- Certificate holder
- Additional-insured requirements
- Required endorsements
- Project-specific requirements
How to verify a Certificate of Insurance covers what each of those fields should be measured against.
4. Compare It With the Project Requirements
The contractor’s insurance should continue to be evaluated against the requirements established for the project.
A renewed policy can still contain changes that require attention.
5. Document the Review
Maintain a record of the certificate and the compliance review associated with it.
For projects involving multiple contractors, this becomes increasingly important as policies expire at different times.
Why Expiration Monitoring Matters on Longer Work
Policies run for a term. Projects run for however long they run. The two are set by different people for different reasons, and they do not line up.
A contractor engaged for an eighteen-month scope on a twelve-month policy will renew at least once during the work. So the certificate that cleared them at mobilisation describes coverage that stops part-way through — and nothing about that is visible from a process that only asks whether a certificate was received.
What changes at renewal is the part worth watching:
- The carrier can change, which means a different insurer behind the same contractor.
- Limits can be reduced, including below the minimum your contract requires.
- Endorsements do not automatically carry across — an additional insured or waiver of subrogation endorsement on the expiring policy is not evidence of one on the new policy.
- The named insured can change if the contractor has restructured.
- The renewal can simply not happen, and a lapse is not announced to you.
This is why the check is a date to monitor rather than a box to tick. On a project running across policy periods, coverage that expires mid-scope needs to be identified while there is still time to ask for the replacement, not discovered afterwards.
Keeping that visible across a set of contractors is what COI tracking software is for, and contractor insurance tracking follows the whole loop from certificate received through to ongoing monitoring.
Vendors Expire Differently From Contractors
An expired insurance certificate on a construction project gets found, because the project has a schedule and somebody is watching it. An expired Certificate of Insurance for a standing vendor often does not, because the relationship has no review point built into it — the cleaning crew keeps coming, the invoices keep clearing, and nothing in the process notices that the coverage behind them lapsed in August.
The asymmetry is worth naming because it inverts the attention. Contractors with the shortest engagements get the most insurance scrutiny; vendors with multi-year presence onsite get the least, and have had the most renewals since anyone looked.
Two practical consequences. First, vendor insurance expiration needs to be tracked on its own schedule rather than as part of a project close-out. Second, the replacement certificate needs the same comparison as the original — a renewal is a new policy, not a continuation of the old one. Vendor insurance tracking covers the standing-vendor version of the whole loop.
The Problem With One-Time COI Collection
Collecting a certificate before work starts solves only part of the problem.
- Projects continue.
- Policies expire.
- Contractors renew.
- Documentation changes.
- Requirements can differ between projects.
That makes contractor insurance compliance an ongoing process rather than a one-time document collection exercise.
Reviewing the replacement certificate
See Which Contractors Need Attention
Verisova helps organize contractor certificates by project and surface insurance items requiring review.
Instead of relying entirely on spreadsheets and calendar reminders, teams can see which contractors need attention from one place. Expiration status is recalculated against the current date and against each project’s own dates, so coverage that has already lapsed reads differently from coverage that will lapse before the work finishes.
The replacement certificate then gets the same review as the original — COI verification software covers how that comparison is made.
Know who’s covered before they go onsite.