DRYMEDIC RESTORATION

DRYmedic Restoration runs more than 50 franchises offering water damage, fire restoration, and mold remediation, backed by the Authority Brands franchisor family. Crews handle water extraction, structural drying, fire cleanup, and mold removal at residential and commercial properties.

Two things shape a DRYmedic insurance program. The first is the brand's "medical-grade" positioning, which frames the franchisee as practicing a clinical standard — and raises the professional-judgment exposure accordingly. The second is structural: there is no DRYmedic franchise disclosure document on file with us, so there is no franchisor-required insurance floor to anchor to. That makes this page different from a brand with an extracted FDD. Instead of mirroring a required list, it explains the real restoration exposures and the Rikor benchmark a DRYmedic franchisee should build the program around — then tells you exactly how to confirm your own franchisor's requirements before you bind.

Most brand pages in this system open with a compliance box — a table mirroring the franchise disclosure document's required insurance, line by line. This page cannot, and it is important to say why plainly.

We do not have a current DRYmedic FDD on file, and the exact DRYmedic franchisor legal entity could not be confirmed from our research. That matters for one specific reason: the legal entity name is what goes on your certificate of insurance as the additional insured — the party your policy is extended to protect. Putting the wrong entity on a certificate, or guessing, creates a compliance problem that surfaces at the worst possible moment. So rather than invent a requirement or an entity, this page tells you where the real numbers come from and how to verify them.

Insurance requirements vary by franchisor and update annually. Request the most recent DRYmedic FDD from your franchise consultant or DRYmedic's franchise development team, and read Item 1 for the exact franchisor legal entity and Item 8 for the required and recommended insurance. Confirm the entity name and the required limits directly against that document before binding any policy. What follows is not a substitute for your FDD — it is the restoration exposure map and the Rikor benchmark to measure your franchisor's requirements against.

Every restoration contractor makes professional judgments — reading moisture, setting the scope of remediation, deciding when a structure is safe to close up. Those judgments create errors-and-omissions exposure for any brand. DRYmedic raises the stakes, because the brand markets a "medical-grade" standard. When you tell a customer your remediation is clinical-grade, you set the bar your work is measured against — and a court will measure a failure against the standard you advertised, not a lower one.

Professional liability — also called errors and omissions, or E&O — covers a claim that you got a professional judgment wrong, even when nothing was damaged by accident. A standard general liability policy does not cover professional errors. General liability (GL) covers accidents: the ladder through the window, the hose that floods a floor. The misread moisture meter that lets mold grow, or the remediation that was declared complete but missed a contaminated cavity, is a professional error — and it is exactly the claim a "medical-grade" customer is primed to bring.

Because there is no DRYmedic FDD on file to require E&O, the responsibility to carry it falls entirely on the franchisee. Rikor's restoration benchmark is professional liability at $1,000,000 per claim and $1,000,000 aggregate, written with no mold exclusion. Restoration professional liability is almost always claims-made — meaning it covers a claim only while the policy is active — so it must be paired with a tail, also called an extended reporting period, of at least two years to answer claims filed after the policy ends. For a brand whose whole promise is a higher standard of care, this is not an optional line. It is the coverage that matches the claim the brand invites.

This is the claim restoration franchisees fear most, and the brand promise makes it sharper for DRYmedic. You extract the water, set the drying equipment, hit the readings, and sign off. Weeks later the homeowner finds mold in a wall cavity the drying missed, and names your business — for the remediation cost and sometimes for a family member's illness.

A standard general liability policy treats mold as a pollutant and excludes it. Mold, fungus, sewage, and biological contamination are all written out of the standard GL form, even when the water came from a clean residential pipe. So the policy most franchisees assume covers their core service is the policy that denies the mold claim.

The coverage that responds is Contractors Pollution Liability (CPL) — a separate policy built for contractors working around chemical and biological exposure. CPL covers bodily injury, property damage, and cleanup costs from pollutants released by your work, including after the job is finished. For a restoration contractor, it is not optional. Rikor's restoration benchmark is CPL at $1,000,000 per occurrence and $1,000,000 aggregate, with affirmative mold coverage — meaning the form covers mold as growth, not just a sudden dispersal event, since the most common mold scenario is slow growth from a missed moisture pocket. Because DRYmedic has no FDD floor, the franchisee has to make sure this policy is in place and written correctly without a franchisor requirement prompting it.

For most contractors, pollution is a side risk. For a restoration franchisee it is central, and the standard general liability gap is wide. Beyond mold, restoration work involves sewage from category-three water losses, antimicrobial chemicals applied during remediation, and the disturbance of lead paint and asbestos when crews tear out materials in older homes. Every one of those is treated as a pollutant under a standard GL form, and every one is excluded.

This is the strongest argument for the Environmental Contractors and Consultants (ECC) package structure — a single program that combines general liability, contractors pollution liability, and professional liability under one carrier. The advantage is not just convenience. When pollution, mold, and professional-error claims overlap — which they routinely do in restoration — a single carrier eliminates the coverage disputes that arise when three separate insurers each argue the loss belongs to the others. Rikor's restoration benchmark treats the ECC package as the preferred structure for exactly this reason.

What a DRYmedic franchisee must confirm, with no FDD to enforce it, is that the pollution coverage names what the work actually involves: mold as growth, sewage and bacteria, and incidental lead and asbestos. A pollution form that excludes asbestos, or restricts mold to dispersal events, leaves the most likely losses uninsured. Read the form, not just the certificate.

When a water or fire loss is serious, the contents come out so the structure can be dried and cleaned. Your crew moves the customer's furniture, electronics, documents, and valuables — to another room, into your vehicle, or back to your warehouse for the days the work takes. The moment that property leaves the customer's control and enters yours, your legal position changes.

You become a bailee — someone holding another person's property for a purpose, with a legal duty to return it in the condition you received it. Standard general liability does not cover property in your care, custody, or control. Standard commercial property covers your own equipment at your location — not a customer's belongings in your warehouse. The gap between those two policies is exactly where a pack-out loss falls.

With no FDD setting a bailee minimum, the DRYmedic franchisee has to size this coverage deliberately. Rikor's restoration benchmark sets bailee coverage to the value of the largest realistic inventory of customer property your crew could hold at one time — typically anchored at $250,000 and adjusted up for full household pack-outs, commercial jobs, or homes with valuable contents. The same job also relies on your equipment, which leads to the next coverage: an inland marine equipment floater for the air movers, dehumidifiers, scrubbers, and extraction units that live at job sites and in vehicles, where standard business property does not cover them.

A DRYmedic program's two biggest lines — general liability and workers compensation — are both auditable, which means the premium you pay at policy start is an estimate that gets trued up at year-end. Understanding the mechanics keeps the reconciliation from being a surprise.

How general liability premium is built. GL for a restoration contractor is usually rated on gross receipts — a rate per $1,000 of revenue. The carrier estimates your annual revenue when the policy binds and charges on that estimate. At year-end it runs an audit, a reconciliation comparing your estimated revenue against what you actually collected, then adjusts the premium up or down. That adjustment lands as a single bill or refund a few months after the policy year closes.

A realistic DRYmedic example. You estimate $220,000 in revenue at policy inception. A busy first full year pushes your actual revenue to $360,000 — a $140,000 difference. If your GL is rated near $8 per $1,000 of revenue, the audit adds about $1,120 on that difference. Restoration carries a higher rate than light residential trades because the claim severity is higher.

How workers compensation premium is built. WC is calculated as payroll divided by 100, multiplied by your state's rate for each class code, multiplied by your experience modification. The per-$100 rate is set by your state's rating bureau — NCCI in most states — not by the carrier. Restoration payroll generally falls under NCCI code 5610. The insurer applies the state's number and runs the same year-end payroll audit as GL. If you add field crews and that payroll was not in your estimate, or was coded under the wrong class, the carrier corrects it at audit and bills the difference. That correction is a premium reconciliation, never a claim denial. 

Misclassification is an audit exposure, not a coverage event.

The cost range. Without an FDD figure to anchor to, the realistic full-stack range for a DRYmedic startup territory — GL, CPL, professional liability, auto, WC, bailee, inland marine, EPLI, cyber, and crime — runs roughly $15,000 to $28,000 per year, based on Rikor's restoration benchmark first-year estimates. The pollution and professional lines, written in the specialty environmental market, drive the upper end. Standard carriers do not write CPL for this class; the specialty market does.

The cash-management point. Estimate your revenue and payroll close to reality at policy inception. If the business grows materially mid-year, ask your carrier for a mid-term premium adjustment that spreads the increase across your remaining installments instead of delivering it as one lump sum after the year closes.

Because there is no FDD floor, this section is not "beyond the minimum" it is the baseline itself, drawn from Rikor's restoration benchmark and calibrated to a newer franchisee's operational profile. These numbers scale up with revenue, payroll, crew size, and commercial work. Treat them as the program to build and the standard to measure your franchisor's actual requirements against once you obtain the FDD.

Professional liability at $1,000,000 with a two-year tail. The medical-grade promise makes this the defining line for DRYmedic. Carry it at $1,000,000 per claim and aggregate, with no mold exclusion, on a claims-made form paired with a minimum two-year extended reporting period so a late-filed claim still has a policy to answer.

Contractors pollution liability at $1,000,000. The core restoration line. Confirm affirmative mold coverage (growth, not just dispersal), plus bacteria, sewage, and incidental lead and asbestos. The ECC package — GL, CPL, and professional liability under one carrier — is the preferred structure because it eliminates inter-carrier disputes when claims overlap.

General liability at $1,000,000 per occurrence / $2,000,000 aggregate, occurrence form, with completed operations, an independent contractors liability endorsement, and no subcontractor or pollution exclusion that would gut the CPL strategy.

Commercial auto at $1,000,000 combined single limit for the emergency-response fleet, covering owned, hired, and non-owned vehicles.

Workers compensation regardless of state law, with employers liability at $1,000,000 each accident, disease per employee, and disease policy limit. The "regardless of state law" framing closes the Texas opt-out gap that would otherwise leave a field crew uninsured.

Bailee and inland marine. Bailee sized to your largest realistic pack-out, anchored near $250,000. An inland marine equipment floater for air movers, dehumidifiers, scrubbers, and extraction units in transit and at job sites — sized to fleet replacement value, typically $50,000 to $150,000 and up.

Umbrella — sized to your real severity. DRYmedic crews work inside occupied homes and commercial buildings where a single water, fire, or mold loss can exceed a $1M/$2M primary stack. An umbrella adds a layer on top of GL, auto, and employers liability. For a residential-leaning startup, $1,000,000 is a reasonable baseline; once you take commercial accounts or property-manager referrals that require certificates above the primary limit, $2,000,000 becomes the practical threshold. The recommendation follows your worst realistic loss, not a fixed rule.

EPLI, cyber, and third-party crime at $250,000 each. EPLI covers employee claims — wrongful termination, discrimination, harassment — with third-party liability for client interactions. 

Cyber covers a data breach or fraudulent transfer of customer and insurance information. Third-party crime covers theft of a customer's property by your employees while crews are inside displaced homes; general liability excludes employee theft, so without crime coverage the loss is uninsured. Carry crime on a Loss Discovered form, which covers a theft found during the current policy period regardless of when it occurred.

And confirm the independent contractors liability endorsement on the GL, because any 1099 worker without a current certificate of insurance at audit becomes your payroll exposure. See how subcontractor compliance works →