Almost every flooring company in the Triangle puts “licensed and insured” on its truck, its website, and its business card. We do too.
Here’s the part nobody tells homeowners: in North Carolina, for most residential flooring jobs, that phrase is close to meaningless as a legal claim. There is no flooring license in this state. General liability insurance is optional. Workers comp is only required past a certain headcount. A guy with a van, no insurance, and no license can legally print “licensed and insured” on a magnet and nothing automatic happens to him.
Which doesn’t mean the phrase is worthless. It means you have to ask for the paperwork instead of the slogan. Below is exactly what to ask for, what the documents should say, and how to check them yourself without taking anyone’s word for it. Ten minutes, start to finish, and you can do it from your phone while the estimator is still in your driveway.
What North Carolina actually requires
Three separate things get bundled into “licensed and insured,” and they have almost nothing to do with each other.
A trade license. North Carolina does not issue one for flooring. There’s no state flooring board, no flooring exam, no flooring license number. Electrical, plumbing, and HVAC all have their own boards. Flooring doesn’t.
A general contractor license. Required under North Carolina General Statute 87-1 once the total cost of a project reaches $40,000, labor and materials combined. Most single-room or single-floor flooring jobs land under that. Whole-house renovations and bundled remodels often don’t.
Insurance. General liability is not legally required for a contractor in North Carolina. It’s a business decision. Workers compensation is required, but only for employers who regularly employ three or more people under the Workers Compensation Act, and corporate officers count toward that three even when they’ve excluded themselves from the policy.
So a two-person flooring crew doing a $9,000 job in Durham may legally carry no license and no insurance of any kind. That’s not a loophole, it’s just the law. The question isn’t whether they’re breaking a rule. It’s what happens to you if someone gets hurt or something gets destroyed.
The three documents to ask for
1. A certificate of liability insurance
This is a one-page form, almost always an ACORD 25, and any real contractor can have their agent email it to you within a few hours. Most of us have a current one sitting in a folder because HOAs and property managers ask constantly.
What to look for on it:
- The named insured. It should match the company name on your quote exactly. If the quote says one business name and the certificate says a different one, ask why before you go further. Sometimes it’s an honest DBA situation. Sometimes it isn’t.
- The policy dates. Check that today falls inside them. Expired certificates circulate for months.
- General liability limits. For residential flooring, one million per occurrence and two million aggregate is the common structure. Lower isn’t automatically disqualifying, but you should know the number.
- The certificate holder box. Ask them to list you and your property address. A certificate made out to someone else is still informative, but one issued to you means the agent generated it for this job, today.
The thing a certificate does not do is guarantee the policy is still in force. It’s a snapshot from the day it was issued. Which is why the next one matters.
2. Proof of workers compensation
Ask for this separately. It’s often on the same ACORD form, in its own section, with a policy number and dates.
This is the document that can cost you real money if it’s missing. If an uninsured worker gets hurt in your house, the injury can end up pointed at your homeowners policy. And there’s a wrinkle specific to construction in North Carolina: under NCGS 97-19, a contractor who hires a subcontractor without first getting a certificate of coverage from that sub is on the hook for the sub’s injured employees, even if the sub has fewer than three employees and would otherwise be exempt. That tells you something about how seriously the state treats the paper trail, and it’s a good reason to ask any company that subcontracts whether they collect certificates from their subs.
3. A general contractor license number, if the job needs one
Only relevant if your project crosses $40,000. If it does, ask for the number and the classification, because licenses carry project value limits and a contractor working above their limit is operating unlicensed for that job.
How to verify all of it yourself
Here’s the part most homeowners skip, and it’s the part that actually tells you something.
Workers comp. The North Carolina Industrial Commission runs a free Insurance Coverage Search under its Workers’ Compensation Claims section. Type in the business name and it returns the employer’s address and coverage information.
Read the Commission’s own caveat before you rely on it, though, because it’s unusually candid: the database is not proof of workers compensation insurance, and it may not reflect cancellations or reinstatements that haven’t been reported yet or that were reported within the last 30 days. So a company showing coverage there could have lapsed last week, and a company showing nothing might have bound a policy ten days ago. Use it as one signal next to the certificate, not instead of it.
General contractor license. The NC Licensing Board for General Contractors has a free lookup on its site that matches partial names, so you don’t need the exact legal entity. It also runs a Homeowners Recovery Fund for people who lost money to a licensed general contractor who did dishonest or incompetent work, which is worth knowing exists.
The insurance certificate itself. Call the agent listed on it. The producer’s name and phone number are printed in the top left box of every ACORD form. Agents field this call constantly and will confirm whether a policy is active. This is the single most reliable check available to you and it takes about four minutes.
What “bonded” means, and why we mostly ignore it
“Licensed, bonded, and insured” is the full version of the slogan and the middle word does the least work in residential flooring.
Bonds are generally required for public and commercial work, or by a licensing board as a condition of holding a license. A surety bond protects the party that required it, which in most arrangements is not the homeowner. For a typical residential flooring job in Durham, nobody required a bond and the word is on the website because it sounds like a third layer of protection.
We’d rather you spend the question on workers comp.
What we hand over, and how fast
We carry general liability and workers compensation on every crew member, and we send certificates to homeowners, HOAs, builders, and property managers routinely. If you ask during the estimate, you’ll have it by the end of the day. Ask us to name you as certificate holder and we will.
We don’t subcontract, so there’s no second company’s paperwork to chase. The crew in your house is our crew and they’re on our policy. That’s partly why we built the business this way: chasing certificates from three different subs on every job is a real administrative burden, and the companies that do it badly are the ones that eventually hand a homeowner a problem.
For condo and townhome work, where HOA boards tend to have their own underlayment and approval requirements, we’ve found it saves a week to send insurance documents to the management company before anyone asks.
A caveat that cuts against us
Insurance is not a proxy for skill.
We’ve seen beautifully papered companies do mediocre work, and we’ve seen two-man crews with no website and a flip-phone number lay a floor that was tight and flat and still perfect eight years later. Documentation tells you what happens when something goes wrong. It tells you nothing about whether the seams will be tight.
So verify the paperwork, then go look at the work. Ask for a job in a house like yours. Our gallery is one place to start with us, and we’ll connect you with past customers who can tell you what the process was actually like.
If you want the broader version of this conversation, we wrote up the twelve questions we’d ask a flooring contractor if we were the homeowner, of which licensing and insurance are only two.
The ten-minute version
Ask for the certificate of liability insurance and proof of workers comp by email, today. Check the named insured against your quote and check the dates. Call the agent in the top left box. Search the company on the Industrial Commission’s coverage tool and read their caveat. If the job is over $40,000, look up the GC license and confirm the classification covers your project value.
Any company that gets annoyed by this has told you something useful for free.
Ask us for ours
We’re a flooring company in Durham, NC, family run, installing and refinishing floors around the Triangle since 2009. We do hardwood, laminate, LVP, epoxy, floor coatings, and tile, plus residential cleaning after the install. We also work as a flooring company in Raleigh and across the surrounding towns.
Estimates are free and done in person. The quote is written and fixed. Insurance certificates go out same day on request.
Vilchis Hardwood Floors 237 Obie Dr, Durham, NC 27713 (919) 794-1116 [email protected] Monday through Friday, 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM
Serving Durham, Raleigh, Cary, Chapel Hill, Carrboro, Hillsborough, Apex, Morrisville, Garner, and Wake Forest.
Request a free in-home estimate
Frequently asked questions
Do you need a license to install flooring in North Carolina? No. North Carolina does not issue a trade license for flooring. A state general contractor license is required only when the total project cost reaches $40,000 or more, labor and materials combined, under NC General Statute 87-1.
Is a flooring contractor required to carry insurance in North Carolina? General liability insurance is not legally required. Workers compensation is required for employers who regularly employ three or more people, and corporate officers count toward that total even if they exclude themselves from the policy.
How do I check if a contractor has workers comp in NC? Use the Insurance Coverage Search on the North Carolina Industrial Commission website. The Commission notes the database is not proof of coverage and may not reflect changes reported in the last 30 days, so pair it with a current certificate and a call to the insurance agent.
What is an ACORD 25? The standard one-page certificate of liability insurance. It lists the named insured, the policy numbers and dates, the coverage limits, and the insurance agent’s contact information. It is a snapshot of coverage on the day it was issued, not a guarantee the policy is still active.
What does “bonded” mean for a flooring contractor? A surety bond protects the party that required it, which for residential flooring work is usually not the homeowner. Bonds matter more on commercial and public projects. For a typical home flooring job, workers compensation coverage is the more useful question.
Will Vilchis Hardwood Floors send insurance certificates to my HOA? Yes. We send certificates of general liability and workers compensation to homeowners, HOA boards, builders, and property managers on request, usually the same day. Call (919) 794-1116.
