The truck is insured. The trailer, the tools, and the employee's own car often are not.

$1 million combined single limit is the common contract requirement for contractor commercial auto, and larger jobs typically want an umbrella above it. Contracts often also demand additional insured and waiver of subrogation on the AUTO policy, not only on general liability, which is a requirement contractors regularly satisfy on one policy and miss on the other.

When a personal policy stops working

The test is ownership and use, not how many vehicles you have. A vehicle titled to the business, or used primarily for the business, generally belongs on a commercial policy, and a personal auto carrier can deny a claim on business-use grounds.

The genuinely grey area is the personally owned truck used for work, which is common in one-person operations. That is a conversation about titling, primary use, and what your personal carrier actually knows, rather than a clean rule. It is worth having deliberately, because discovering the answer at claim time is the expensive version.

The three gaps around the vehicle

First, trailers. They generally have to be scheduled, and covering the trailer itself is a different thing from liability while towing. For landscaping and excavation, the trailer and its load can exceed the value of the truck, and this is where contractor auto policies are most often thin.

Second, tools. Commercial auto covers the vehicle and liability from its use, not the contents. A van break-in is usually an equipment claim, not an auto claim.

Third, other people's vehicles. Hired and non-owned auto covers rented trucks and employees driving their own cars for work. That last one is a genuine gap: an employee's personal policy may not respond to a business errand, and without hired and non-owned, neither does yours.

What it costs, and what moves the number

Commercial auto is rated off the number and type of vehicles, your radius of operation, the driving records on the policy, and your limits. A single service van for a clean-record operation prices very differently from a fleet hauling equipment across state lines.

Driver records move the number more than most owners expect. A single driver with a poor record can reshape the whole policy, and carriers increasingly want the driver list managed rather than submitted once and forgotten. Treating it as a live document is a real cost lever.

The driver schedule, and the excluded-driver trap

Policies are written around a list of drivers. An undisclosed driver is a coverage argument waiting to happen, and some policies explicitly exclude named individuals, usually after a bad record. If an excluded driver takes a truck out and has an accident, that is a very bad day with no coverage behind it.

Keeping the list current when crews change is the least interesting maintenance task in a contractor's insurance file and one of the most consequential. It is the item we most often find out of date at renewal.

Questions worth asking before you sign

Ask whether every vehicle used for the business is actually on the policy. Ask whether your trailers are scheduled. Ask whether hired and non-owned is included for employees using their own cars. Ask who is on the driver list and whether anyone is excluded. Ask whether the contract limits and endorsements are satisfied on the auto policy, not just on general liability.