Coverage line
Contractors Equipment Coverage for Paving Fleets
The policy written around your own iron — the paver, the rollers, the milling machine, the tanks and the rigs — whether the loss happens in the yard, on a trailer or halfway through a lot.
Contractors equipment insurance is inland marine cover written around the machines themselves, and it pays for physical loss or damage to your paver, your rollers, your milling machine, your sealcoat tank and your striping rig wherever they stand when the loss happens. Its trigger is damage to the unit rather than your legal responsibility to anybody else, and that distinction settles most of the arguments about which policy answers.
A paving operation carries more of its value in iron than in anything else it owns, and almost none of that iron sits still. Cover that travels with the unit instead of with an address is what the word floater describes, and it is why this line sits in inland marine rather than beside the building coverage on a property policy.
There is also no uniform industry form to name here. Equipment cover is written on company wordings, so policies bought on the same day can differ in what they schedule and how they value it. What every version has is a schedule of units, and the schedule is the part worth reading.
Property insurance for machines that do not stay still
The floater asks a physical question: something happened to a described unit, and the policy asks whether that unit is on the schedule and whether the cause is one the wording covers. Nobody needs to be at fault and no stranger needs to complain, which is the structural difference between this line and every liability policy in your file.
The same structure explains what the floater declines, and these handoffs account for nearly everything it sets outside its own edge:
- Harm to other people and their property. The boundary is written into the liability form rather than into yours: CG 00 01 04 13 excludes property damage to property you own, rent or occupy, so a damaged paver was never a liability claim.
- Injury to the people on your payroll. A crew member hurt beside a machine is a workers compensation matter, whatever the machine was doing.
- The yard itself. The building, the shop and the material stored inside belong to commercial property insurance, not to the floater.
- A registered truck’s own body and chassis. Once a unit is plated, the auto policy is where that vehicle is written; the equipment bolted to it is what an inland marine underwriter is asked about.
Read together, they describe a fleet insured in pieces by design: who was harmed, what was damaged, who was at fault and what was registered each have their own form. The work is making sure no machine has fallen between two of them.
Putting an asphalt fleet on a schedule, unit by unit
Cover is arranged in one of two shapes, scheduled or blanket. A scheduled arrangement lists each unit with a value attached, which makes the policy exact and makes it stale the moment you buy a machine and forget to report it. A blanket arrangement insures a class of equipment up to a limit with a ceiling on any single item, which tolerates a changing yard but leaves your largest machine short if that ceiling sits below what it is worth.
An asphalt fleet is longer than most contractors expect once written down. Pavers and screeds, tandem and pneumatic rollers, milling machines, crack routers and sealing kettles, plate compactors, skid steers, sealcoat tanks and spray rigs, striping rigs, tack distributors, lowboys and equipment trailers all belong on it. Walking the yard with the schedule in hand is dull work that has prevented more trouble than any endorsement.
Equipment rented from a dealer or borrowed from another contractor is a separate exposure your policy has to have been arranged to reach, and the rental agreement usually makes you responsible for the machine by contract as well. Read both before it is delivered.
Hand tools and small gear sit in their own category rather than on the schedule with the machines, which is reasonable, but a category sized when the business was smaller quietly stops matching the trucks.
The equipment side of the mobile-equipment seam
A roller is named in the liability form and insured on the floater at the same time. Those are not competing claims about one machine but two forms answering different questions, and the question in front of you picks the form.
Its definition of mobile equipment takes in vehicles maintained primarily to provide mobility to permanently mounted road construction or resurfacing equipment such as graders, scrapers or rollers. That language was written with this trade in view: your rollers, pavers and milling machines are inside the liability policy’s idea of equipment. What it decides is only whose harm that policy answers for; it says nothing about repairing the machine.
The repair question is closed by a different line in the same form. Exclusion j.(1) of CG 00 01 04 13 removes property damage to property you own, rent or occupy, and your paver is property you own. So the liability policy that recognizes the paver as mobile equipment will not pay to fix it, whatever the cause: the form took your own property out of scope at the start.
Registration moves the other boundary. The same definition closes by saying that mobile equipment does not include land vehicles subject to a compulsory or financial responsibility law where the vehicle is licensed or principally garaged, and that such vehicles are considered autos. Plates change the answer. A tack distributor on a registered chassis is an auto for liability purposes even though the equipment it carries would otherwise have qualified as mobile equipment, which is why a spray unit is the machine most likely to touch every policy at once: the floater for the machine, the liability form for what it does to others, the auto policy for the chassis.
Transit is where the auto form speaks about equipment directly. Section I.C.2 of CA 00 01 10 13 makes mobile equipment a covered auto while it is being carried or towed by a covered auto, so while the paver rides your lowboy that combination is the auto policy’s to answer for. It still says nothing about the paver’s own damage: a machine that shifts on the deck and wrecks itself is an inland marine claim.
The question that resolves it. Ask what was damaged before asking who was at fault. If the answer is your machine, you are on this page. If it is somebody else’s person or property, the general liability page has it. If a plated vehicle was being driven, the commercial auto page picks it up.
The losses that bring a floater into play
Categories rather than stories, because a claim example carrying a figure is a fabricated figure wearing an anecdote.
Theft and vandalism, at the yard and on the job
Machines disappear from open lots overnight, attachments walk off separately from the units they fit, and tanks parked at the perimeter of a job are damaged by people with no business near them. Storage and how a machine is immobilized overnight are what an underwriter asks here.
Overturn, impact and soft ground
A machine rolls on a grade, a screed strikes something invisible from the seat, a unit is driven into a structure at close quarters, or a heavy tank sinks into subgrade that was never compacted and is damaged being recovered. These losses rarely involve anybody else’s property, which is precisely why no liability policy is looking at them.
Damage while the fleet is moving
Loads shift, tie-downs fail, machines are damaged loading and unloading on uneven ground, and a low clearance meets a machine measured for a different route. Transit losses cross into the auto policy for the liability they create and stay here for the damage to the machine.
Machines that belong to somebody else
Equipment you do not own asks its own questions: whether your policy was arranged to reach rented and borrowed units, what the rental agreement made you responsible for, and what the owner is entitled to claim beyond the repair while the machine is out of service.
Valuation, caps and the shape of the cover
No figures appear here, and their absence is deliberate. A value quoted as usual on a web page is a number nobody underwrote, and the right structure comes out of your own equipment list rather than out of what is common.
Valuation decides what a total loss pays. Actual cash value reflects the machine as it stood, with age and wear against it. Replacement cost looks instead at what it takes to put an equivalent machine back in the yard. A stated amount fixes the figure for a unit in advance, when the schedule is built. Which basis applies to your fleet is a term of your own policy rather than a rule of the class.
Caps come next. Tools carry their own allowance, and equipment rented from others is commonly written with a separate limit of its own. That is the limit contractors find first, when a rental house invoices for loss of use as well as for the machine itself — an amount owed under the rental agreement, which is a contract question sitting beside the insurance one.
Deductibles are the last of them, and the part most worth setting deliberately rather than accepting as issued: a deductible calibrated to a fleet of compactors reads very differently against a milling machine.
Why we ask for the equipment list first
Because on this line the schedule is the policy. Everything above describes how equipment cover generally behaves, and a general description cannot tell you whether the tack distributor you bought last season was added, whether rented units are reached, or what basis your machines are valued on. The schedule and the declarations answer all of that in short order.
Independent means we take that list to the specialty markets whose appetite currently fits a paving, sealcoating and striping fleet. It also means somebody reads your equipment schedule beside your liability and auto policies and tells you where the seams described above fall on your own machines.
We are licensed across the states we publish, and a licensed agent reads every submission. What you run, where it works and how it is stored are the inputs; the recommendation comes back in plain language.
This page describes how contractors equipment cover generally works and names the liability and auto forms by their edition as printed. There is no standard industry form for the equipment cover itself, so nothing here describes specific wording. Your own policy and its schedule control your claim.
Keep reading
Coverage lines beside this one
- General Liability — what your work and your machines do to other people and their property.
- Commercial Auto — plated trucks and trailers, on the road and at the jobsite.
- Property — the yard, the shop and the material stored in them.
Operations we write
Public agencies
Questions we get about equipment cover
Is my paver insured while it is riding a trailer between jobs?
Transit is one of the reasons this cover exists, and it is worth confirming rather than assuming, because the wording is a company wording rather than a uniform industry form. A floater follows the described unit instead of an address, so a machine chained to your own lowboy is ordinarily still described property — but transit is also a place where policies differ, and where a schedule that lists the paver and forgets the trailer leaves a gap that only shows up after a loss. The liability side of the same moment is answered elsewhere: the CA 00 01 10 13 form treats mobile equipment while it is being carried or towed by a covered auto as itself a covered auto. That is about responsibility to other people, not about repairing your machine.
A milling machine I rented in for a job was damaged. Which policy answers?
Rented-in equipment is a distinct exposure from owned equipment, and a floater will not answer for it unless the policy was arranged to. Two documents decide it, your own policy and the rental paperwork. The policy has to extend to equipment rented, leased or borrowed from others, on terms worth reading; the rental agreement, meanwhile, commonly puts the machine on you by contract, and an obligation you accepted in writing is not created or removed by your insurance policy. A contractor who reads the rental paperwork and the equipment section of their own policy in the same sitting rarely gets surprised.
A skid steer was taken from our yard overnight. Is that this policy or the property policy?
Theft of a scheduled machine is an equipment question, wherever the machine was standing when it went. The floater is written around the unit rather than around a location, so the yard is simply where this particular loss happened. What the yard does bring in is a second policy: the building, the shop, the fencing and the material stored inside them are commercial property rather than inland marine, and a break-in that takes a machine and damages a door has produced a claim on each. Our commercial property page covers that side.
My striping rig is plated and registered. Is it on the floater or the auto policy?
Registration is the switch, and it switches the liability answer first. The CG 00 01 04 13 form says its definition of mobile equipment does not include land vehicles subject to a compulsory or financial responsibility law where the vehicle is licensed or principally garaged, and that such vehicles are considered autos — so a plated rig belongs to the auto policy for what it does to other people and their property. The equipment mounted on it is the part an inland marine underwriter is asked about. Registered units therefore need both conversations, and the useful question is never which policy owns the truck but which policy answers the loss in front of you.
Are hand tools and the small gear in the trucks included?
Small tools are usually handled as their own category rather than as scheduled units, with a cap that sits inside the policy rather than beside the machines. That arrangement is sensible — nobody wants to schedule every grinder and lute — but it is also where contractors find out that the category was sized for a crew smaller than the one they now run. The practical step is to total what actually rides in the trucks, compare it with what the policy sets aside for tools, and adjust the arrangement rather than discover the difference at a claim. Employee-owned tools are a further question worth asking about directly.
The sealcoat tank sank into soft subgrade and was damaged getting it out. Is that covered?
That shape of loss is exactly what an equipment floater is asked about, because the trigger here is physical damage to a described unit rather than fault or a complaint from anybody else. Nobody needs to have been negligent and no third party needs to be involved. What decides the claim is whether the tank is on the schedule, whether the cause is covered under the wording your carrier issued, and how that wording values the machine. Damage the same incident did to the surface you were treating is a different question on a different policy — the general liability page takes that one.
What is the difference between actual cash value, replacement cost and a stated amount?
Actual cash value, replacement cost and a stated amount are three answers to one question: what the policy owes when a machine is destroyed. Actual cash value reflects the unit as it stood, with age and wear taken into account. Replacement cost looks at what it takes to put an equivalent machine in the yard. A stated amount fixes a figure for a unit in advance, at the point the schedule is built. Which basis your policy uses is a term of your policy, not a general rule, and it is printed on your schedule rather than inferred from the class — so the answer for your fleet comes from reading yours, and it is a term worth negotiating before a total loss rather than after one.
Send the equipment schedule
A licensed agent reads it beside your liability and auto policies, tells you what is missing from it, and comes back with what the specialty markets will do with the fleet.