Original research · Licensing
Does Your Roofer Have to Be Insured?
“Licensed and insured” is four separate instruments in three words. This study reads what eight states and cities actually require, at the statute, code or application form.
Written by HyreRoof Research Desk Primary-source research and fact checking
The finding
Whether a roofer must carry insurance depends on where the roof is, and in several places the answer is no. Minnesota makes a $15,000 bond, general liability cover and workers’ compensation conditions of its roofer license, by statute.
In Austin, Texas, a roofer can lawfully work with no state license, no city registration, no liability policy and no workers’ compensation, because Texas makes it elective for private employers. Denver licenses roofers on documented experience and requires no insurance to hold the license.
Four instruments, not one
- General liability insurance
- Protects you. Covers property damage and bodily injury the contractor causes to third parties: the ladder through your window, the tear-off that let water into your ceiling, the neighbor’s car under the debris chute. This is the policy people mean when they say “insured”, and it is the one most worth confirming.
- Workers’ compensation
- Protects the crew, and therefore protects you. Pays medical costs and lost wages when a worker is injured on the job.
- Its significance to a homeowner is indirect but sharp: where a roofer carries no workers’ compensation, an injured worker’s route to recovery may run through the homeowner’s own liability cover instead.
- On a trade performed at height, this is not a theoretical concern.
- Surety bond
- A financial backstop, not a quality assessment. A three-party guarantee under which a surety pays out, up to the bond amount, and only up to it, if the contractor fails to meet obligations the bond covers.
- The contractor is then liable to repay the surety. A bond is not insurance for you; it is credit for them, and the sums can be small relative to a re-roof.
- Certificate of insurance
- Evidence, not cover. A one-page summary describing policies that existed when the certificate was issued.
- Several states legislate its status explicitly: a certificate is issued as a matter of information only, confers no rights on the holder, and does not amend, extend or alter the coverage of the underlying policy.
- It can be genuine and still describe a policy canceled the following week.
These four do different jobs and a jurisdiction can require any combination of them, including none. Compressing them into “licensed and insured” hides the information that matters.
Required for the license, or required by law?
One distinction comes before any table below.
Whether an instrument is a condition of the credential is a different question from whether it is required by law at all. Denver does not require a roofing contractor to carry workers’ compensation in order to hold a Denver roofing license.
That is not the same as saying a Denver roofer with employees may lawfully go without workers’ compensation. State employment law is a separate body of rules with its own thresholds and enforcement, and Colorado’s is set out further down.
The two questions have different practical consequences. If cover is a condition of the credential, the licensing authority checked it at least once and will normally have a record.
If it is only an obligation of employment law, nobody checked it at the point the credential was issued, and there may be no register to consult at all.
The matrix below records only the first question: what the credential itself demanded. Workers’ compensation as general employment law is handled separately, further down.
What eight jurisdictions require to issue the credential
Two states sit at one end requiring all three instruments. Four jurisdictions sit at the other requiring none, and one of those, Austin, requires none because there is no credential in existence to attach a requirement to.
HyreRoof analysis: the pattern that emerges is not a simple strong-to-weak gradient. It is that competence checking and financial checking are almost independent of one another. Denver checks competence hard and money not at all.
Washington checks money and, as our state licensing study established, does not examine roofing competence whatsoever. Only Minnesota and San Antonio’s structural tier do meaningful amounts of both.
The verified requirements in full
| Jurisdiction | Level | Credential | General liability | Workers’ comp | Surety bond | Src |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Minnesota | State | Residential roofer license | Statute: $100,000 per occurrence and $300,000 aggregate for bodily injury, plus $25,000 property damage, or a single limit of $300,000 per occurrence and $300,000 aggregate. The department’s summary page states it differently; see the note below | Required, unless the applicant has no employees and no intention of hiring any other than a spouse, parent or child | $15,000 surety bond with power of attorney | 1, 2, 3 |
| Washington | State | Contractor registration, roofing specialty | Statute: $50,000 for property damage, $100,000 for injury or death to any one person, $200,000 for injury or death to more than one person. May be met by an assigned account instead of a policy | Mandatory for nearly every employer, and only from the L&I state fund or certified self-insurance. The account number is part of the registration application | $15,000 for specialty contractors; $30,000 for general contractors, since July 1, 2024 | 4, 5, 6, 7 |
| San Antonio, TX home improvement tier | Municipal | Home Improvement Contractor registration | At least $300,000 per occurrence combined for property damage and bodily injury, $600,000 aggregate, $300,000 products and completed operations | not verified | not verified | 8 |
| San Antonio, TX structural tier | Municipal | Residential Building Contractor registration | At least $500,000 per occurrence, $1,000,000 aggregate, $500,000 products and completed operations | not verified | not verified | 9 |
| Denver, CO | Municipal | Specialty Class D roofing license | None. Insurance appears nowhere in the eleven contractor responsibilities at Section 126.1 | Not a condition of the license | None requested on the application | 10, 11 |
| Dallas, TX | Municipal | Contractor registration, roof contractor | None. Section 1103.1 enumerates six categories of required information and insurance is not among them | Not a condition of registration | None in Subchapter 11 | 12 |
| Austin, TX | Municipal | none, roofing does not register with the city | There is no roofing credential to attach a requirement to | No credential, and no state requirement either | No credential | 13, 14 |
| Texas | State | none, roofing is unregulated at state level | No state roofing credential exists | Private employers “can choose to carry workers’ compensation insurance coverage, but it is not required in most cases” | No state roofing credential exists | 15, 16 |
Each row read at the statute, the issuing agency or the municipal code on September 3, 2026.
Every figure describes what is required to obtain or hold the credential. None of them describes what a particular contractor actually carries today, which no register can tell you and only a current certificate from the insurer can.
The verified minimum liability limits, ranked
The highest verified municipal requirement, San Antonio’s structural tier at $500,000 per occurrence, is higher than either state minimum on this page. The lowest verified requirements are zero, and four of the eight rows are zero.
HyreRoof analysis: it is worth being clear about what these numbers are and are not. A statutory minimum is a floor set by a legislature or a building department, not a recommendation and not an estimate of exposure. Minnesota’s statutory limits are a threshold for holding a license.
Whether a minimum is enough for the damage a roofing crew can do to a house is a separate question the statute does not address. A minimum is the least the law will tolerate, never a measure of sufficiency.
The two poles, in the jurisdictions’ own words
Minnesota, all three, by statute, before the license issues
Minnesota is the most complete case on this page. Minn. Stat. § 326B.86, subd. 1 provides that “A licensed residential roofer must post a bond with a penal sum of at least $15,000.”
Subdivision 2 requires commercial general liability insurance, including products and completed operations cover, “with limits of at least $100,000 per occurrence, $300,000 aggregate limit for bodily injury, and property damage insurance with limits of at least $25,000”, or a single limit of $300,000 per occurrence and $300,000 aggregate.
Workers’ compensation is wired in from a different statute. Minn. Stat. § 176.182 requires every state and local licensing agency to “withhold the issuance or renewal of a license or permit to operate a business in Minnesota until the applicant presents acceptable evidence of compliance” with the workers’ compensation requirement.
The department accepts a written explanation instead from an applicant with no employees and no intention of hiring any in the next year, other than a spouse, parent or child.
HyreRoof analysis: a homeowner who confirms an active Minnesota residential roofer license has, by that single fact, confirmed that all three instruments existed when the license was issued or renewed. No other jurisdiction on this page lets one lookup do that much work.
Minnesota also disagrees with itself, and the statute wins
This is worth recording carefully, because it is the kind of error that propagates. Minnesota’s Department of Labor and Industry summarizes the requirement on its roofer license page as “Liability insurance with limits of at least $300,000 per occurrence, which must include at least $10,000 property damage coverage.”
That does not match § 326B.86, subd. 2, which sets property damage cover at $25,000 on the split-limit option and contains no $10,000 figure at all.
Nor does it match the department’s own binding paperwork: the Certificate of Insurance in the residential roofer license packet reproduces the statutory language verbatim and certifies compliance with § 326B.86, subd. 2.
HyreRoof analysis: the $10,000 figure most plausibly originates in a neighboring section of the same chapter, Minn. Stat. § 326B.46, subd. 2, which governs plumbing contractors and does require property damage insurance “with limits of at least $10,000”.
Where an agency summary and the statute it summarizes disagree, the statute governs, and the form the agency actually makes you sign is the better guide to what is enforced. We publish both and flag the conflict rather than silently choosing the tidier number.
Washington: the money is checked, the competence is not
RCW 18.27.040(1) requires “a surety bond issued by a surety insurer who meets the requirements of chapter 48.28 RCW in the sum of $30,000 if the applicant is a general contractor or $15,000 if the applicant is a specialty contractor.” Roofing registers as a specialty.
Those figures took effect on July 1, 2024. L&I recorded at the time that the general bond had “more than doubled” from $12,000 and that specialty bonds were “rising to $15,000 from the previous $6,000”.
It called this “the first time general and specialty contractor bond amounts have been raised since 2001”, and contractors move to the new amount at their next renewal.
The insurance requirement sits in RCW 18.27.050(1): insurance or an assigned account of “fifty thousand dollars for injury or damages to property, and one hundred thousand dollars for injury or damage including death to any one person, and two hundred thousand dollars” where more than one person is hurt.
It is a split-limit form, and it may be satisfied by an assigned account acceptable to the department rather than by a policy at all.
HyreRoof analysis, and it is the sharpest thing in the Washington record: the legislation that raised the bonds in 2024 left the insurance minimums alone. Those figures date from 2001.
Washington has revisited what a contractor must post as a bond within the last two years, and has not revisited what a contractor must carry as liability cover in a quarter of a century.
Workers’ compensation is mandatory for nearly every Washington employer, with an enumerated exclusion list at RCW 51.12.020 that does not reach roofing, and it is wired into registration directly.
RCW 18.27.030(1)(c) requires the application to carry “Evidence of workers’ compensation coverage for the applicant’s employees working in Washington”, by industrial insurance account number or self-insurer number.
Washington also does not permit private workers’ compensation coverage at all: an employer buys from the L&I state fund or becomes a certified self-insurer.
So Washington verifies a bond, a liability policy and a state-fund workers’ compensation account, and, as our state licensing study established, requires no roofing examination and no experience. Washington checks whether there is money behind the contractor. It does not check whether the contractor can roof.
Texas: the one state where workers’ compensation is elective
Texas Labor Code § 406.002 is headed “COVERAGE GENERALLY ELECTIVE” and provides that “Except for public employers and as otherwise provided by law, an employer may elect to obtain workers’ compensation insurance coverage.”
The Texas Department of Insurance puts it in plainer terms: “In Texas, private employers can choose to carry workers’ compensation insurance coverage (subscribers), but it is not required in most cases.”
TDI also makes the comparative claim itself, which is why we are willing to repeat it: “Texas is the only state that allows private-sector employers the option of not purchasing workers’ compensation insurance or becoming ‘non-subscribers’ to the state system. It has been this way since 1913.”
The carve-outs are real: public employers must carry it, and so must private employers working under a building or construction contract with a governmental entity.
A non-subscriber is not free of obligations. Section 406.004 requires written notice to the Division of Workers’ Compensation that the employer elects not to obtain coverage.
Section 406.005 requires the employer to tell each new employee at hiring whether coverage exists, and to post notices “at conspicuous locations at the employer’s place of business”. Failing either is an administrative violation.
And the trade-off is written into the statute. Under Section 406.033(a), when an employee of a non-covered employer sues, “it is not a defense” that the employee was contributorily negligent, assumed the risk, or was hurt through a fellow employee’s negligence.
A Texas non-subscriber trades the no-fault system for ordinary negligence liability stripped of its three classic defenses. That is a deliberate legislative bargain rather than an oversight, but it means an injured roofer’s route to recovery runs through litigation rather than through a claims process.
The complete null case
Put the verified facts about Austin, Texas end to end. The state does not license roofing. The city registers mechanical, electrical and plumbing trade contractors, and not roofers.
Asphalt shingles replacing asphalt shingles are exempt from a building permit outside the Wildland-Urban Interface, so there is no permit and no final inspection. And workers’ compensation is elective for private employers in Texas.
A roofing crew can therefore work legally on an Austin house with no license, no registration, no permit, no inspection, no general liability insurance and no workers’ compensation. Every one of those is verified at a primary source, and each is individually unremarkable.
It is the stack that is remarkable, and nothing in the transaction discloses it to the homeowner.
Where cities fill the gap the state left
The Austin stack is not what Texas looks like everywhere, and the difference is entirely municipal.
San Antonio, under the same state rules, requires a roofing contractor to file a Certificate of Liability Insurance from a carrier authorized in Texas, naming the city as certificate holder, valid at application and for at least a year forward.
The home-improvement tier requires at least $300,000 per occurrence, $600,000 aggregate and $300,000 for products and completed operations; the structural tier requires $500,000, $1,000,000 and $500,000.
San Antonio also places the maintenance obligation on the contractor in terms: if the certificate expires, “it is the responsibility of the registered Home Improvement Contractor to renew and submit the updated Certificate of Insurance”.
That is a meaningfully stronger construction than a one-off filing, because it makes lapse a registration problem rather than a private matter between contractor and insurer.
Dallas, in the same state, requires none of it. Its contractor registration provision enumerates six categories of information the application must contain, all of them names, addresses, email addresses and telephone numbers for the firm, the responsible person and the place of business, and insurance is not among them.
The full municipal picture is in our companion study, the cities that license your roofer when the state will not.
HyreRoof analysis: this is the practical reason the state map is not enough. Two homeowners in the same state, both hiring a contractor who is fully compliant with every rule that applies to them, can be standing behind completely different amounts of insurance, $300,000 in one city and nothing at all in another.
A real license with no money behind it
Denver deserves separate treatment because it is the case most likely to mislead. Denver runs a genuine roofing licensing program: three distinct roofing certificates, two years of documented field experience evidenced as 24 projects across 24 different months for the commercial certificate, and a building official who assesses that evidence.
It attaches no insurance requirement to any of it. Denver’s contractor license application asks for a supervisor certificate, Secretary of State filings, identification and a fee: no certificate of insurance and no bond.
Section 126.1 of the Denver Building and Fire Code lists eleven responsibilities of a licensed contractor and insurance is not one of them.
The only contractor insurance requirement in the administrative chapter is Section 126.4, “Demolition and Moving Liability Insurance”, which requires an ACORD certificate from contractors demolishing or moving buildings and does not reach roofing.
HyreRoof analysis: a Denver roofing license is strong evidence of one thing and no evidence at all of another. It says a building official reviewed a documented project history.
It says nothing about whether there is a policy behind the company if a ladder goes through a window.
A homeowner who treats “city licensed” in Denver as covering both has made a reasonable inference from the word and an incorrect one from the law.
A bond is not insurance, and the difference matters
What a surety bond does
Three parties: the contractor (principal), the surety, and whoever the bond runs in favor of (obligee), often the state or the city rather than you directly.
If the contractor fails to meet the obligations the bond covers, the surety may pay out up to the bond amount and no further. The contractor is then liable to reimburse the surety in full.
It is therefore closer to a line of credit the contractor guarantees than to protection purchased on your behalf. It also functions as a soft screen: a surety underwrites before issuing, so a bonded contractor has passed somebody’s financial check.
Verified amounts on this page: $15,000 in Minnesota, and $15,000 for a Washington specialty contractor: the latter raised from $6,000 on July 1, 2024, the first increase since 2001.
What general liability insurance does
Two parties and a promise to pay third-party claims: property damage and bodily injury the contractor causes in the course of the work.
Limits are expressed per occurrence and in aggregate, and the two are different protections. San Antonio’s home-improvement tier requires $300,000 per occurrence but $600,000 aggregate: the aggregate is the total the policy will pay across the whole period, across every claim.
The products and completed operations aggregate deserves attention. It is the part that responds after the crew has left, which, for a roof, is when defects in the work can show.
San Antonio requires $300,000 of completed-operations aggregate on the home-improvement tier and $500,000 on the structural tier.
If you can only confirm one thing, confirm general liability with completed operations. A $15,000 bond can be a fraction of a re-roof: a partial refund in a bad month, not protection against a ruined ceiling.
What a certificate of insurance actually proves
The certificate of insurance is the document a homeowner is most likely to be shown. Several states have legislated its status, and the statutory language is unusually blunt.
Minnesota, which has the strictest roofer licensing on this page, also has the clearest statement.
Minn. Stat. § 60A.39, subd. 1 defines a certificate as “a document that provides evidence of property or liability insurance coverage and the amount of insurance issued, and does not convey any contractual rights to the certificate holder.”
Subdivision 3 requires a certificate issued to anyone other than the policyholder to carry the statement “This certificate or memorandum of insurance does not affirmatively or negatively amend, extend, or alter the coverage afforded by the insurance policy.”
Texas legislates the same principle in its own chapter. Tex. Ins. Code § 1811.051(b) provides that “A certificate of insurance or any other type of document may not convey a contractual right to a certificate holder”, and § 1811.101(a)(2) requires an approved certificate form to carry the phrase “for information purposes only” or similar language.
Three consequences follow, and all three are practical.
A certificate is a snapshot, not a subscription. It describes the position on the day it was issued. A policy canceled for non-payment two weeks later leaves the certificate looking exactly as valid as it did before.
This is why San Antonio’s construction, placing an ongoing duty on the registrant to renew and submit an updated certificate when the old one expires, is meaningfully stronger than a single filing, and why a certificate dated eleven months ago tells you very little about today.
The cancellation-notice line does not protect you either. Minnesota closes this explicitly: § 60A.39, subd. 4 provides that a certificate “must not provide for notice of cancellation that exceeds the statutory notice of cancellation provided to the policyholder or a period of notice specified in the policy.”
The familiar “30 days written notice” wording on a certificate confers no right on you to be told when the roofer’s policy lapses mid-job.
A certificate cannot give you rights the policy does not. Being handed one, or named on it as certificate holder, does not make you an insured party.
Being named as an additional insured is a different thing entirely, and it is done by policy endorsement rather than by the certificate.
New York’s Department of Financial Services put the general rule as plainly as any regulator: “A certificate of insurance cannot confer new or additional rights beyond those set forth in the referenced insurance policy.”
HyreRoof analysis, and the neatest artifact we found: Minnesota’s own residential roofer license packet prints that disclaimer on the face of the Certificate of Insurance the state requires. The document the state demands as proof of cover tells you, in the state’s own words, that it does not amend, extend or alter the coverage.
The defense is simple: ask for the certificate to reach you directly from the insurer or the broker named on it, rather than from the contractor. That single step establishes authenticity and currency at once, which is more than any license lookup in this study can do.
Workers’ compensation as employment law, not licensing
| Jurisdiction | Position for construction employers | What the statute or agency says |
|---|---|---|
| Texas | Elective | Tex. Lab. Code § 406.002: “an employer may elect to obtain workers’ compensation insurance coverage.” TDI: private employers “can choose to carry… but it is not required in most cases”, and Texas “is the only state that allows private-sector employers the option”. Non-subscribers must notify the division, notify and post for employees, and lose the contributory-negligence, assumed-risk and fellow-employee defenses. |
| Florida | Required from the first employee | Fla. Stat. § 440.02(20)(b)2 defines employment to include “all private employments in which four or more employees are employed by the same employer or, with respect to the construction industry, all private employment in which one or more employees are employed by the same employer.” Roofing falls inside the § 440.02(10) definition of construction industry. |
| Tennessee | Required from the first employee | The Bureau of Workers’ Compensation states that “All employers in the construction industry… with one or more employees are required to obtain workers’ compensation insurance coverage”, against a general threshold elsewhere of five or more employees. Owners of construction businesses must cover themselves unless separately exempted. |
| Washington | Required, and only from the state fund | Mandatory for nearly every employer, with an enumerated exclusion list at RCW 51.12.020 that does not reach roofing. Washington does not permit private coverage: an employer buys from the L&I state fund or becomes a certified self-insurer. RCW 18.27.030(1)(c) makes the account number part of the contractor registration application. |
| Minnesota | Required, and tied to the roofer license | Minn. Stat. § 176.182 requires every licensing agency to withhold issuance or renewal of a business license “until the applicant presents acceptable evidence of compliance” with the coverage requirement. Minnesota is the clearest verified case of employment law and licensing being deliberately wired together. |
| Colorado | Required from the first employee, but not checked at licensing | The Colorado Department of Labor and Employment states that “If you have one or more employees working for you in Colorado, you must have workers’ compensation insurance and maintain it at all times”, applying to part-time, full-time and family members alike. Denver does not verify it when issuing a roofing license. |
Colorado is the row that shows why the distinction at the top of this page matters. A Denver roofer with employees is required by state law to carry workers’ compensation, and the city that licenses them never checks. The obligation is real; the verification is absent.
Florida and Tennessee are the pattern worth noticing in the other direction: both drop an otherwise higher threshold to one employee specifically for construction, because of what the work is. Texas applies no threshold in either direction.
Why the workers’ compensation question is really a homeowner question
Workers’ compensation can look like the contractor’s business and not yours. On a roof, it reaches you.
Roofing is performed at height, on a sloped surface and outdoors, and its injuries can be serious. How the federal record counts them is set out in the roofing fatality atlas.
When an injured worker has no workers’ compensation to claim against, the routes to recovery that remain run toward whoever else might be liable, which can include the property owner, and therefore the homeowner’s own liability cover.
Workers’ compensation exists precisely to keep those claims inside a no-fault system, and where it is absent, they can leave it.
HyreRoof analysis: this is why the Texas position deserves more attention than it gets. Being a non-subscriber is entirely lawful, and some employers run their own occupational injury plans instead.
But “lawful” is not “equivalent”, and a homeowner can fairly ask which arrangement is on their roof. The useful question is not “are you insured” but “do you carry workers’ compensation, or are you a non-subscriber?” That question has only two answers and both are informative.
We deliberately publish no injury or fatality statistics on this page and leave the federal record to the fatality atlas. The argument here rests on the structure of the liability rules, not on injury counts.
What to actually ask for, in order
This one step establishes authenticity and currency at the same time, and it is the single highest-value check available to a homeowner in any jurisdiction on this page.
Roof failures can show up after the crew has left. Completed operations is the part of the policy that responds then. San Antonio requires it explicitly.
Ask whether they carry it or are a non-subscriber. In Texas both answers are lawful, which is exactly why the question is worth asking rather than assuming.
A policy can expire mid-job for mundane reasons. Compare the certificate dates against your expected start and finish, not against today.
Do not read a bond as insurance. A $15,000 bond against a re-roof is a partial recovery route capped well below the contract value, and the contractor must repay the surety in any event.
In Denver, Dallas and Austin a credential proves nothing about cover, because cover is not a condition of it. Even in Minnesota, where it is, the license proves cover existed at issue or renewal, not that a policy is in force today.
Method
For each jurisdiction we identified the authority that issues the roofing credential, if one exists, and retrieved either the governing statute, the issuing agency’s own published requirements, or the current application form, and where both a code and a form existed, both.
Every figure on this page is quoted from one of those documents and dated.
Requirements are recorded in three states: verified required, verified not required, and not verified.
An instrument was recorded as not required only where the governing document enumerates what an application must contain and the instrument is absent from that enumeration, Dallas Section 1103.1 and Denver Section 126.1 are both of that kind, or where no credential exists at all.
Where we did not reach the relevant document, the cell is left unverified and drawn as unverified. San Antonio’s bonding and workers’ compensation position is unverified for that reason and is not rendered as an absence.
The distinction between a condition of the credential and a general legal obligation is maintained throughout and is the reason for two separate tables.
Collapsing them misleads in both directions: it reports states as not requiring workers’ compensation when they require it of employers generally, and it reports credentials as proving insurance when they never examined it.
One conflict is recorded rather than resolved. Washington’s Department of Labor and Industries publishes its liability requirement as “$200,000 in public liability and $50,000 property damage, or $250,000 combined single limit”.
RCW 18.27.050 expresses the same obligation as $50,000 for property damage, $100,000 for injury or death to any one person, and $200,000 for injury or death to more than one person.
These are compatible framings of one requirement rather than a contradiction, but they are not interchangeable sentences, so both are published and the chart uses the department’s per-occurrence public liability figure.
No claim on this page is taken from a secondary summary, an insurance broker’s guide, a contractor directory or a licensing service.
Limitations
Three states and five municipal programs (San Antonio has two tiers) are charted here, and three more states appear in the workers’ compensation table. The page demonstrates that the range runs from three required instruments to none; it is not a survey, and no jurisdiction not named should be inferred from one that is.
Neither appears on the registration applications we retrieved, but we did not read Chapter 10-115 of the San Antonio Code of Ordinances itself, so both are recorded as unverified rather than as absent.
The department’s roofer license page states liability limits of $300,000 per occurrence including $10,000 property damage.
Minn. Stat. § 326B.86, subd. 2 sets $100,000 per occurrence, $300,000 aggregate for bodily injury and $25,000 property damage, or a $300,000 single limit, and the department’s own certificate form reproduces the statute.
We treat the statute as governing, publish the conflict, and do not present either figure as uncontested.
We verified that Colorado requires workers’ compensation of employers with one or more employees, and that it is not a condition of a Denver roofing license.
We have not confirmed at a state source whether Colorado licenses roofing at all: the Department of Regulatory Agencies page refused our automated request (HTTP 403), as recorded in our state licensing study.
The Houston Permitting Center returned HTTP 403 and the Public Works document server failed DNS resolution on September 3, 2026. Secondary sources describe a voluntary roofing registration carrying insurance requirements, which would be directly relevant here. It is unverified and therefore absent.
Minnesota and Texas are cited as verified examples of states legislating the status of a certificate, with New York’s regulator on the general rule. Other states may have comparable provisions. Nothing here establishes the position in a state we did not name.
Every figure on this page is a statutory or departmental minimum for holding a credential. None of them is an assessment of whether that sum is adequate to the damage a roofing crew can do.
Even where insurance is a condition of the credential, the authority verified it at issue or renewal. Policies lapse between renewals and no license register tracks that.
Statutes and municipal ordinances are amended frequently. Confirm the current position with the authority and the insurer before relying on it.
Questions
Is a roofer legally required to be insured?
What is the difference between general liability and workers’ compensation?
Is a surety bond the same as insurance?
Is workers’ compensation really optional in Texas?
Why should a homeowner care whether the crew has workers’ compensation?
Does a license prove the roofer is insured?
What does a certificate of insurance prove?
How do I check a certificate of insurance is genuine and current?
What is “products and completed operations” and why does it matter for a roof?
How much liability insurance does a Minnesota roofer need?
Why do Minnesota’s own two sources give different figures?
Is a statutory minimum enough cover for a re-roof?
Denver licenses roofers. Does that mean Denver roofers are insured?
Does Washington require roofers to buy workers’ compensation privately?
If my city requires insurance, does anyone check it stays in force?
Written and audited by
HyreRoof Research Desk
Primary-source research, data analysis and fact checking
We are a research desk, not a sales floor. We read the statute, the licensing board’s own pages, the code section or the federal dataset ourselves, and every figure we publish carries the document it came from and the date we retrieved it.
Where a number cannot be traced to a primary source, we publish the shorter page and say what we could not verify.
On our first study that rule removed a Minnesota exam statistic and left two states blank. Those gaps are on the page, not in a file somewhere.
- 155
- primary sources read and cited
- 53
- government domains among them
- 181
- citations carrying a retrieval date
- 11
- research studies published
How this desk works
- Primary sources only. Statutes from the legislature’s own publishing system, licensing rules from the board that issues the license, datasets from the agency that collected them. Never a directory, an aggregator or another guide.
- Three states, not two. A requirement is recorded as verified present, verified absent, or not verified. Folding the third into the second would turn an unchecked cell into a factual claim.
- Retrieval dates on everything. Regulation changes. A citation without the date it was read is not a citation.
- Failures are published. When a source blocks automated retrieval we record the failure and leave the row empty, rather than filling it from a secondary summary.
- Authorship is organizational. Research is attributed to this desk, never to an invented expert. Outside commentary, where used, is attributed to named and verifiable people.
Data as of September 3, 2026. Authorship on this site is organizational: the analysis belongs to the desk rather than to a named individual, and we do not publish credentials we do not hold. Our editorial policy sets out how we source, date and correct what we publish.
Sources & retrieval dates
Working out the size of the job first?
Insurance limits only mean something against a contract value. If you are still establishing what the work is and roughly what it costs, start here, neither tool asks for your details.
HyreRoof does not perform roofing work, does not sell insurance, and has no commercial relationship with any insurer, licensing authority or contractor named on this page.
This is general information and not legal or insurance advice. If a figure here is out of date or wrong, tell us and we will fix it in place and note the correction.