By ALLEN MCQUISTON
Jemez Insurance Agency
Serving Los Alamos Since 1963
A guy is up on your roof on a bright June morning replacing the flashing around your chimney. You hired him because a neighbor used him and he came in a few hundred dollars under the other bid. He’s good, he’s fast, and he’s been at it an hour when you hear the scrape, the shout, and the sound nobody wants to hear. He’s on the ground beside the ladder, his leg is clearly broken, and he can’t get up.
You call 911. You do everything right in the moment. But once the ambulance pulls away, a quieter and much larger question is already forming: who pays for this?
Because that broken leg is going to mean an ambulance ride, an ER visit, possibly surgery, weeks of physical therapy, and months this man can’t climb a ladder or earn a living. The bills could run well past $100,000. And depending on a few things you probably never asked about, sorting out who’s responsible for that can get complicated in a hurry.
Why this isn’t automatically the contractor’s problem
Most people assume that if someone gets hurt doing a job they were hired to do, that’s between the worker and their own business. And often it is. But “often” is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
How smoothly this gets resolved tends to come down to questions you likely never thought to ask when you were comparing bids:
- Does the contractor carry workers’ compensation insurance? This is the coverage built to handle an injured worker’s medical bills and lost wages. A legitimate, fully insured contractor carries it. A guy working solo, off the books, for cash, often does not.
- Does he carry general liability insurance? This is meant to respond to injuries and property damage connected to his work. The cheaper and more informal the operator, the more likely there’s a gap.
- Is he actually an established business, or just a person you found? This is the one that surprises people. The more informal the arrangement — cash, no paperwork, no insurance of his own — the murkier and more contested the question of responsibility can become if something goes wrong.
That’s the trap hiding inside the low bid. The same decision that saved you a few hundred dollars — going with the uninsured solo guy instead of the established, insured crew — is the decision that can turn a clean answer into a tangled one.
Where the difference really shows up: who’s in your corner
Here’s contractor show you a current certificate of insurance — and does it list both general liability and workers’ comp?
- Is that certificate active right now, or did it lapse two months ago?
- For a bigger job, is it worth asking to be named as an “additional insured” on their policy?
- Have you ever actually reviewed your own homeowners coverage with someone who could explain how the pieces fit together?
- If you regularly have workers on your property — a house cleaner, a landscaper, a babysitter — is that something you’ve ever talked through with an agent?
None of those questions are obvious, and most homeowners don’t know to ask a single one of them. That’s the whole point. The difference between a contractor’s fall being a bad afternoon and a drawn-out headache usually comes down to factors that were decided weeks earlier — often without anyone realizing a decision was being made at all. It’s the kind of situation where it pays to have already talked it through with someone who thinks about these gaps for a living, and who’ll pick up the phone when you call.
Before You Hand Over the Ladder
The cheapest bid is only the cheapest bid until something goes wrong. The few hundred dollars you save hiring an uninsured worker is a quiet bet against a risk you’re taking on yourself — invisible right up until the moment it isn’t.
So ask for the certificate of insurance, and keep a copy. And sometime before the ladder ever goes up, it’’ worth knowing not just what’s in your policy, but who you’d actually call when something happens — and whether that person is working for a company, or working for you. It’s not the fun part of fixing a roof. But it’s the part that decides whether a bad fall stays a bad fall, or turns into something that follows you for months.