What If Something Gets Broken?

What liability insurance actually covers

General liability covers damage the contractor causes to your property: a broken pane, a cracked sill, a damaged light fixture knocked loose by a ladder rung on the way up. It also covers injury to third parties who happen to be nearby during the work, a neighbor or a delivery driver walking past at exactly the wrong moment, but not injury to the contractor's own employees, which is a separate policy called workers' compensation entirely, covering a different kind of risk. Both matter for different reasons and cover different people on your property, and a company should be able to produce evidence of both without hesitating, changing the subject, or promising to email it later and never actually following through on it.

Why an uninsured crew becomes your risk

If someone without workers' compensation coverage is injured while working at height on your property, the cost can end up landing on your own homeowner's insurance policy rather than staying with the contractor who was actually doing the work and should be the one carrying that risk. That is the real reason insurance matters for work at height specifically, more than for most other home services, and it is a far larger financial exposure than a broken window, even though the broken window is the scenario most people picture first when they think about what could realistically go wrong. Any reluctance to discuss insurance specifics, general liability or workers' compensation separately, is itself worth treating as the answer to the question you actually asked.

Ask for the certificate, not the assurance

A certificate of insurance is a standard document naming the insurer, the policy period, and the coverage limits, issued directly by the insurance carrier rather than typed up by the company itself on its own letterhead. Reputable companies produce one on request without any fuss, usually within a day of asking for it, and property managers and HOAs ask for one as routine practice before allowing any outside crew on site at all. A verbal assurance that a company is insured is not evidence of anything real or checkable, and a company that stalls, changes the subject, or offers a screenshot instead of an actual carrier-issued certificate is telling you something worth listening to very carefully indeed right there on the spot.

The damage nobody covers

Pre-existing conditions are the common dispute in this trade. A pane with an existing stress crack can fail during an otherwise normal cleaning without anyone doing anything wrong at all, because rapid temperature change, cold water landing on glass that has been sitting in direct sun, can be enough to finish propagating a crack that quietly started years earlier from a small edge chip nobody noticed. Failed double-glazing seals, rotten window sills, and already-scratched glass fall in the same category, since none of those are actually caused by the cleaning itself even though they sometimes only become visible during it. A good crew points these out before starting rather than after, which is worth considerably more than any argument that follows a job gone sideways.

What a reasonable process looks like when something does break

A reasonable process is not complicated and does not need to be treated like one. The crew tells the homeowner the same day rather than hoping something small goes unnoticed until later, documents the damage with photos before anything is cleaned up or quietly moved back into place, and the company works out repair, replacement, or fair reimbursement depending on what actually broke and how. That is what general liability insurance exists to back up in practice, not just on paper somewhere in a filing cabinet. A company operating without it has no real mechanism behind a verbal apology, and any promise to make it right is only ever as good as whether there is actual coverage standing behind it when the bill comes due.