In Oregon, you are an employer at one person.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission processed 88,201 charges in fiscal year 2025 and recovered 660 million dollars for 17,680 people, of which 528 million came through pre-litigation enforcement rather than lawsuits (EEOC enforcement and litigation statistics and agency results release). Retaliation was alleged in 54,350 of those charges, more than any other basis. Those figures count only charges filed with the EEOC and exclude the state civil rights agencies, which in California take roughly seven times the EEOC volume.

Contractors carry this exposure differently from an office. Hiring runs in seasonal bursts, crews are assembled and stood down against the weather and the schedule, supervision happens at a distance, and the tone on a site is set by whichever lead is standing there. Those are the conditions that produce employment claims, and they are ordinary features of running a trade rather than signs that something has gone wrong.

The headcount threshold is not what you think

Federal law is where most owners get their sense of scale, and federal law starts high. Title VII and the Americans with Disabilities Act apply at 15 employees, and the Age Discrimination in Employment Act at 20. A four-person plumbing outfit reads that and reasonably concludes none of it applies.

The states in our footprint do not agree. Oregon defines an employer as any person who uses the personal services of one or more employees, under ORS 659A.001, with a separate six-person threshold for disability claims under ORS 659A.106. California applies its discrimination provisions at five employees and its harassment provisions at one, expressly including people providing services under contract, under Government Code sections 12926 and 12940. Washington sets the line at eight under RCW 49.60.040. Idaho sets it at five employees in each of twenty or more calendar weeks under Idaho Code 67-5902, but its definition separately reaches any contractor or subcontractor furnishing material or performing work for the state, with no headcount qualifier at all, which catches small shops doing public work.

What general liability will not do

A contractor general liability policy responds to bodily injury and property damage caused to third parties. An employment claim is neither of those things, and most general liability forms carry an employment-related practices exclusion that removes any argument about it. This is not a grey area or a coverage dispute waiting to be argued. It is a designed gap, and EPLI is the product built to fill it.

Workers compensation does not close it either. Compensation answers physical injury arising out of employment and is generally the exclusive remedy for that injury. It has nothing to say about how somebody was hired, supervised, promoted or dismissed. A crew member who falls is a compensation claim. The same crew member alleging they were dismissed for reporting the condition that caused the fall is an employment claim, and those two things can arise from one afternoon.

How long your exposure stays open

The filing windows are longer than most owners assume and they vary sharply by state. The federal window is 180 days, extended to 300 days in states that operate their own fair employment agency, which includes Oregon, California, Washington and Idaho. That extension is the number most people have heard.

State windows run much further. Oregon allows five years for discrimination, harassment and disability claims under ORS 659A.030, 659A.082 and 659A.112, and Oregon does not cap compensatory or punitive damages, allowing the prevailing party to recover attorney fees as well. Other Oregon claims stay at one year, including whistleblower retaliation under ORS 659A.199 and workers compensation retaliation under ORS 659A.040. The distinction is worth knowing, though retaliation for opposing discrimination or filing a complaint falls under ORS 659A.030 and keeps the five-year window. California allows three years to file with its Civil Rights Department. By contrast, federal law caps combined compensatory and punitive damages by employer size, at 50,000 dollars for employers with 15 to 100 employees rising to 300,000 dollars at 501 or more, and juries are not told those caps exist. The state route is where the money is, and in Oregon the discrimination and harassment route stays available for half a decade.

California is a different animal, by statute

Calling California plaintiff-friendly is a description. The statute is more specific than that. Government Code section 12923 states that a single incident of harassing conduct is sufficient to create a triable issue regarding a hostile work environment if that conduct unreasonably interfered with the plaintiff's work performance or created an intimidating, hostile or offensive working environment. The same section states, in the legislature's own words, that harassment cases are rarely appropriate for disposition on summary judgment.

The practical effect shows in the volume. California's Civil Rights Department received 33,505 intake forms in 2024, and 16,924 of those were immediate right-to-sue requests in employment matters, meaning the worker was free to go straight to court rather than through an agency investigation. The department secured settlements in 872 cases totaling 99.4 million dollars in the same year. For a contractor working in California, the realistic risk is not an agency investigation. It is a private lawsuit filed by an attorney working on contingency.

What the industry data actually shows

Construction-specific federal charge data is thin, and it is worth being honest about that rather than filling the gap with something invented. The EEOC's published charge statistics break out by statute, basis and state rather than by industry, so there is no official construction share of national charges to quote. What does exist is the enforcement docket, and it carries real dollars. In February 2025 the agency entered a 730,000 dollar consent decree against an Orange County construction company over race, national origin and sex harassment of a class of Hispanic and Latino workers, together with retaliation against those who complained.

The other honest number cuts the other way. Of the 37,613 harassment charges the EEOC resolved in fiscal 2025, 60.6 percent closed with a finding of no reasonable cause. Most charges do not end in a determination against the employer. Every one of them still required a response, a document production and usually counsel. That is the shape of the exposure, and it is why this coverage is bought for the defense obligation rather than the expected payout.

The exclusions that decide an employment claim

The first one is timing. Most EPLI is written on a claims-made basis, meaning it responds to claims first made while the policy is in force, not to conduct that happened while it was in force. A prior-acts date on the policy can quietly exclude everything before you bought it, so a claim about a termination from two years ago may fall outside a policy you have carried for one. Ask what the retroactive date is and whether prior acts are covered.

The rest are the usual suspects and each has a real-world shape. Wage and hour is commonly excluded or held to a defense-only sublimit. Bodily injury is carved out, because that is workers compensation. Deliberate or criminal conduct is excluded once established, though defense usually continues until it is. Contractual obligations you took on in an employment agreement are generally outside the policy. And breach of an employment contract is not the same as discrimination, so read which one your policy is actually answering.

What it costs, and what moves the number

Employee count is the primary rating factor, which is why a small crew is not automatically a small premium once the state is factored in. A California employer pays more than an Oregon employer with the same headcount, for the reasons in the section above, and carriers price that difference deliberately. We quote from the market rather than publishing a range, because on this line the spread between carriers for the same account is wide enough that a published figure would mislead you.

What moves it: headcount and which states those people work in, your industry and turnover pattern, prior claims and any open charge, the retention you accept, the limit, and whether defense costs sit inside or outside that limit. The one you control directly is documentation. Carriers ask whether you have a written employee handbook, a documented termination procedure and a complaint process, and answering yes to those genuinely moves both the price and the availability. That is worth doing before you apply rather than after.

Questions worth asking before you sign

Ask whether defense costs sit inside the limit or outside it, because inside-the-limit defense means a long case erodes the money available to settle. Ask whether third-party claims are covered, which matters for anyone working inside occupied homes. Ask how the policy handles wage and hour allegations, which are commonly excluded, or capped by a sublimit that sits well below the policy limit, and which commonly arrive bolted onto a discrimination claim. Ask what the retention is, which is the amount you pay before the policy responds, and whether it applies per claim or per policy year. And ask who has the right to choose defense counsel, because in an employment matter the lawyer is most of what you are buying.