Production Insurance Explained: Liability, Equipment, and the COI

You book a location for a two-day commercial. The space is perfect, the rate is fair, the deal is basically done. Then the property manager sends one line back: "Please have your production company add us as additional insured and send a COI for two million before load-in." If you know what that sentence means, you forward it to your broker and the certificate lands in their inbox the same afternoon. If you do not, you spend the next two days scrambling, and you learn that insurance is not something you buy after you win the job. It is something you already have, or you do not have the job.

Insurance is the least glamorous line in the production budget and the one that quietly gates everything else. Rental houses will not release a camera package without it. Studios, city film offices, and most commercial locations will not let you through the door without it. And the day something goes wrong, a light stand tips into a client's window, a grip rolls an ankle, a hard drive of footage walks off a cart, it is the only thing standing between a bad afternoon and a business-ending invoice. This is a working breakdown of the four coverages a production company actually carries, what each one does, and how to read a certificate request without guessing.

General liability is the floor, not the whole building

General liability, usually just called GL, is the base policy every production company carries and the one almost every COI request is asking about. It covers third-party bodily injury and third-party property damage: someone who is not on your crew gets hurt, or something that is not yours gets broken, because of your production. A passerby trips over a cable run on a sidewalk. A C-stand goes over in the wind and cracks the tile floor of the location you rented. A pedestrian walks into a light on a public street. GL is the policy that responds.

The standard limits are near-universal, which is why the numbers show up on requests so often you stop reading them as choices. One million dollars per occurrence and two million dollars aggregate is the default commercial-production expectation. "Per occurrence" is the cap on any single incident; "aggregate" is the cap across the whole policy term, usually a year. When a location says "two million," they almost always mean the two-million aggregate on a standard 1/2 policy, not a special higher limit. Some studios, municipalities, and larger brand clients will ask for higher limits or an umbrella policy stacked on top, and that is a real request you handle by calling your broker, not by ignoring it and hoping.

What GL does not cover is the part that trips up new production companies. It does not cover your own gear. It does not cover injuries to your own crew. It does not cover the footage. GL is the policy for harm your production does to other people and other people's things. Everything you own or are responsible for lives under a different coverage, which is exactly why one policy is never the whole answer.

Inland marine is the coverage for your gear, and its name makes no sense

Here is the single most confusing thing in production insurance, so let us kill it early. The coverage that protects camera bodies, lenses, lighting, grip, audio, and rented gear is called inland marine. There is no water involved. The name is a holdover from centuries-old cargo insurance, when "marine" policies covered goods in transit and "inland marine" extended that idea to property that moves around on land. That is all it is: coverage for movable equipment that does not sit in one fixed building. For a production company, that describes essentially everything you own.

Inland marine responds to theft, loss, and physical damage to gear, whether it is yours or rented in. A camera package stolen out of a cube truck overnight. A lens that takes a fall on set. A rented light that comes back to the rental house with a cracked panel. You insure your owned equipment up to a scheduled value, meaning you and your broker agree on a dollar figure for the kit, and you carry a separate or expanded limit for rented and borrowed equipment. That rented-equipment limit is the number a rental house cares about, because it is their gear you are walking out the door with.

This is where the money gets real fast. A working owner-operator camera package, a cinema body, a set of primes, support, and media, is comfortably a six-figure replacement cost. Add lighting and grip and you can clear a quarter million in owned gear on a mid-size production company's shelf without trying. When a rental house asks you to insure a package, they are asking for a rented-equipment limit that matches the value of what you are renting, plus their name on the certificate. If your inland marine limit is fifty thousand and you are trying to rent an eighty-thousand-dollar package, the rental house will decline, correctly, because a loss would leave them holding the gap.

Workers comp is the one you cannot buy your way around

General liability covers people who are not on your crew. It does nothing for the people who are. If a gaffer falls off a ladder, a grip throws out their back lifting a sandbag, or a PA is in a fender-bender on a coffee run, workers compensation is the coverage that pays their medical bills and lost wages. It is a separate policy, it is legally distinct from everything above, and in most of the country it is not optional.

Texas is the well-known asterisk here, and it gets misread constantly. Texas is the one state where private employers are generally not required to carry workers comp. That does not make it a free pass, and it does not mean a Texas-based production company should skip it. Two things bite. First, if you go without coverage, you become a "non-subscriber," which strips away the legal protections comp normally gives an employer and leaves you personally exposed to an injured worker's lawsuit with fewer defenses than you would have if you carried the policy. Second, and more practically for a working shop, plenty of clients, studios, and payroll companies will require proof of workers comp on the COI regardless of what state law says. A national brand's legal team does not care that Texas is optional; their vendor requirements ask for it, so you carry it to be hireable.

The other wrinkle is who counts as an employee. The freelance crew you hire day to day, the DP, the gaffer, the sound mixer, are often paid as contractors, but a workers-comp carrier and a court may still treat them as employees for injury purposes depending on how the work is directed and controlled. This is exactly the kind of question you do not want to be answering for the first time after someone is already hurt. The clean answer for a production company that hires crew is to carry the policy and talk to your broker about how your crew is classified, before the season starts, not after the ambulance leaves.

The COI is a request, and it has three parts you can actually read

A certificate of insurance, the COI, is not a policy. It is a one-page summary that proves a policy exists. When a client, location, studio, or rental house asks for one, they are almost never asking you to buy new coverage on the spot. They are asking you to have your broker generate a document that shows the coverage you already carry, formatted the way their requirements demand. Once you can read the request, the scramble disappears, because a COI request is really only asking three things.

First, what coverages and what limits. This is the "GL two million, workers comp statutory, rented equipment to X" part. They are telling you the minimum policy limits they will accept. If your limits already meet or exceed the ask, the certificate is a five-minute email to your broker. If they do not, that is a real conversation about raising a limit, which brokers can often do quickly but not always for free.

Second, additional insured. This is the phrase that confuses people the most, and it is the one that matters most. When a location asks to be named as "additional insured," they are asking that your policy extend to protect them too, for claims arising out of your production, not just you. It is not a formality and it is not the same as the third item below. Adding an additional insured actually changes who your policy defends. Most GL policies allow it, often with a small endorsement, and a legitimate location or client is right to ask for it. What you should notice is scope: they should be named as additional insured for the work you are doing on their property, not blanket-added to your entire business forever.

Third, the certificate holder and the wording. The certificate holder is simply who receives the document, the entity that wants proof. The wording covers the small specifics: the exact legal name to list, the dates of coverage, whether they want a waiver of subrogation (an agreement that your insurer will not later try to recover from them), and where to send it. These sound like fine print, and they are, but getting the legal name or the coverage dates wrong is the most common reason a certificate bounces back and you lose a day you did not have to lose.

What this costs, and why it is cheaper than the alternative

Numbers vary by state, payroll, gear value, and claims history, so treat these as orientation rather than a quote. A production company running a modest annual volume can expect general liability in the rough range of a few thousand dollars a year, inland marine scaled to the value of the gear you schedule, and workers comp priced as a percentage of payroll. Many working shops carry these under a bundled commercial package or a business owner's policy, and a lot of small productions start with short-term or per-project policies before graduating to annual coverage once they are shooting often enough that the annual math wins.

The temptation, especially early, is to treat this as overhead to defer until a job forces it. That is the expensive read. The first time a location asks for a COI you cannot produce, you either lose the location or scramble to bind a rushed policy at a bad rate. The first time gear is stolen and you are uninsured, the replacement cost comes straight out of the business, and for a camera package that is a number that ends companies. Carrying the coverage before you need it is not caution for its own sake. It is the thing that lets you say yes to the two-day commercial the same afternoon the location asks, instead of watching a better-insured production company take the booking while you are still on hold with a broker.

Insurance does not make anyone a better filmmaker. It makes you a company a serious client, studio, or rental house is willing to work with, and it means the worst day on set stays a bad day instead of becoming the last one. Get the four coverages in place, learn to read a certificate request in the thirty seconds it deserves, and the whole subject goes back to being the boring, handled line item it should have been all along.