Reading a certificate of insurance

Last reviewed 27 August 2026. Ontario construction.

A certificate of insurance tells you what a policy looked like on the day somebody printed it. That is less than it appears to promise, and it is still the document your contract asks for.

What arrives

Usually an ACORD 25, the standard North American form, filled in by the contractor's broker. Sometimes a broker's own template with the same information in different places. Often a photograph of a printout taken on a job site at an angle, or a scan of a fax, because the person you are chasing is an electrician in a truck rather than an office.

The four fields worth checking

1. The named insured. Does it match the legal entity you contracted with? A certificate for a related numbered company, or for the owner personally, is a common and expensive mismatch.
2. The commercial general liability limit. Most construction contracts in Ontario ask for $2M, some for $5M on larger work. What matters is what your own contract requires. A certificate showing less than that is not invalid, it is a trade who has not met your terms.
3. The policy expiry date. The single field that turns a good certificate into a worthless one, and the one nobody diarizes. Policies renew on their own anniversary, so this date has nothing to do with the WSIB's quarterly cycle.
4. The certificate holder and any additional insured. If your contract requires you to be named as an additional insured, being listed only as the certificate holder does not achieve that. Certificate holder means you were sent a copy. Additional insured means the policy may respond for you.

What a certificate is not

It is not the policy. It is a summary, and it carries wording saying it confers no rights and does not amend the policy. If the coverage question ever becomes real, the policy wording governs and nobody will be reading the certificate.

It is also not evidence about today. A certificate says a policy was in force when it was issued. It can be cancelled the following week, and outside a few specific situations you will not necessarily be told. That gap is why brokers advise asking for confirmation directly when a claim or a dispute is on the horizon, rather than relying on the paper in the folder.

What to do with them in practice

• Record the expiry date somewhere that will interrupt somebody. A date in a spreadsheet nobody opens is the same as no date. This is the single highest-value five minutes in the whole process.
• Ask for the renewal before the expiry, not after. A trade whose broker is slow can take two weeks to produce one, and the gap in the middle is uninsured work on your site.
• Keep the file, not a transcription of it. Whoever asks about this later will want the document, not your notes about the document.
• Read the limit against your own contract, every time. The question is never whether a limit is adequate in the abstract. It is whether it is what this trade agreed to carry for you.

Where this fits beside the WSIB

Insurance and WSIB clearance are separate obligations with separate documents and separate expiry schedules. The two side by side sets out which risk each one covers, because an office that tracks one and assumes the other is covered is the most common way a roster ends up half documented.