PAUL DAVIS RESTORATION

Paul Davis has operated since 1966 and runs more than 300 franchises. Its crews handle water extraction, structural drying, fire and smoke cleanup, and mold remediation — and then they reconstruct. The FDD describes the business as general contracting specializing in insurance restoration. That reconstruction scope is what separates Paul Davis from every dry-and-leave brand.

The 2026 Paul Davis franchise disclosure document requires general liability, employers liability, contractors pollution liability, commercial auto, bailee coverage, cyber, and a $4,000,000 umbrella — the highest umbrella requirement in this restoration group. It also carries a "Complex Loss" clause: on any loss over $500,000, the franchisor can require additional coverage or bonds. Those requirements are not padding. They trace directly to the fact that a Paul Davis franchisee finishes the job as a builder, not just a dryer. Meeting the agreement is the floor. Building a program that carries the reconstruction risk is the point.

The franchisor entity is Paul Davis Restoration, Inc. — "PDRI" in the FDD — a Florida corporation with its principal office at 7251 Salisbury Road, Suite 6, Jacksonville, FL 32256. That legal name belongs on every certificate of insurance. The FDD requires each policy to name PDRI and its designees as additional named insureds. An additional insured is a person or company added to your policy so it also protects them. The standard construction is: Paul Davis Restoration, Inc., its parents, subsidiaries, affiliates, successors, and assigns.

The 2026 FDD (Item 8) sets the following required coverages. A certificate must be furnished before operations begin and renewed before each policy expires. Failure to maintain the required insurance is a material breach of the franchise agreement.

Workers Compensation for the owner and all employees, notwithstanding the statutory requirements of the state where you operate — meaning it is required even where a state would let you opt out. Workers' compensation (WC) pays an injured employee's medical bills and lost wages.

Employers Liability with limits of not less than $500,000 each occurrence and aggregate. Employers liability is the sister coverage on a WC policy; it answers lawsuits an injured worker brings outside the workers' compensation system.

Commercial General Liability, including products liability and broad-form contractual liability, at not less than $1,000,000 per occurrence and $2,000,000 aggregate. General liability (GL) covers bodily injury and property damage your work causes a third party. Broad-form contractual liability matters here because reconstruction franchisees sign subcontractor and vendor agreements.

Contractor's Pollution Liability (CPL) at not less than $1,000,000 per occurrence and aggregate. CPL covers bodily injury, property damage, and cleanup costs from pollutants released by your work — mold, sewage, chemicals, lead, and asbestos — which a standard GL excludes.

Business Automobile Liability, including non-ownership liability, at not less than $1,000,000 combined single limit per occurrence.

Umbrella or Excess Liability at not less than $4,000,000 each occurrence and aggregate. An umbrella adds a layer of limit on top of your GL, auto, and employers liability for a claim that exceeds the primary limits.

Bailee Insurance for personal property in your care, custody, or control at not less than $250,000 per occurrence and aggregate. A bailee is someone holding another person's property for a purpose — your crew during a pack-out.

Cyber Insurance, including technology errors and omissions and network security and privacy coverage, at not less than $1,000,000 per occurrence and $2,000,000 aggregate, with up to $100,000 in wage-and-hour defense cost coverage. Cyber covers a data breach or a fraudulent transfer.

General Casualty / Property insurance — fire, extended coverage, vandalism, theft, and burglary for the replacement value of the franchised business and its contents.

Every policy must be primary over PDRI's coverage, insure your contractual liability, and carry 30 days' written notice before cancellation. The FDD adds a Complex Loss provision: on any loss exceeding $500,000, PDRI may require additional coverage limits or bond requirements.

This is the Paul Davis exposure that pure mitigation brands do not carry. When your crew finishes a reconstruction — new framing, drywall, flooring, finishes you have done general contractor work. And general contractor work comes with a long tail. 

Construction defects do not show up on the day you hand over the keys. They surface months or years later, when a rebuilt wall leaks, a floor fails, or a finish separates.

This is completed operations exposure — claims arising from work after it is finished and you have left the site. A standard general liability policy includes a "your work" exclusion that can strip coverage for damage to the work you performed. The products and completed operations portion of the GL is what responds to a defect in finished work but only if it was bought correctly, kept in force, and not undercut by exclusions that target subcontracted construction. On a reconstruction job, the work is often partly subcontracted, which makes the "your work" and subcontractor language on the policy decisive.

Paul Davis franchisees need a GL built for a general contractor, not just a water-extraction crew. The FDD's requirement for products liability and broad-form contractual liability on the GL points at exactly this. The reconstruction tail is the reason the Paul Davis program looks more like a builder's program than a restoration program.

Before the rebuild comes the remediation, and that is where the pollution exposure sits. You extract the water, set the drying equipment, and remove damaged material. Weeks later, mold appears in a wall cavity the drying missed — or a category-three sewage loss leaves biological contamination the crew handled. The homeowner names your business.

A standard general liability policy treats mold, sewage, and biological contamination as pollutants and excludes them all. That is true even when the water came from a clean residential supply line. So the GL most franchisees lean on is the policy that denies the mold claim.

Paul Davis requires Contractors Pollution Liability at $1,000,000 — the policy written for exactly this. CPL covers bodily injury, property damage, and cleanup from pollutants released by your work, including after the job is done. For a brand that both remediates and rebuilds, the pollution exposure spans the whole job: contamination during tear-out, mold from a missed moisture pocket, and chemical residue from antimicrobial treatment. The CPL is the policy that answers the claim the GL excludes. 

Confirm the CPL form affirmatively covers mold and does not quietly carve it back out — and that it includes incidental lead and asbestos, which reconstruction tear-outs in older structures routinely disturb.

A reconstruction job almost always involves a pack-out. To rebuild a room, the contents have to come out — furniture, electronics, documents, appliances, and valuables. On a reconstruction that runs weeks, those belongings may sit in your warehouse the entire time. The moment they leave the customer's control and enter yours, you are a bailee, with a legal duty to return the property 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 is exactly where pack-out losses fall, and a reconstruction job widens it, because the property is in your custody longer.

Paul Davis requires bailee coverage at $250,000 per occurrence. For a small loss that is generous; for a full household pack-out held through a multi-week rebuild, it may be the starting point. The right limit is the value of the largest contents inventory your crew could realistically be holding at one time — and on a reconstruction, that figure runs higher than on a dry-and-leave job, because everything came out so the structure could be rebuilt.

No other restoration brand in this system requires a $4,000,000 umbrella as a standing minimum. Paul Davis does, and the reason is the reconstruction scope. An umbrella — also called excess liability — adds a layer of limit on top of your GL, auto, and employers liability for a claim that blows through the primary limits. Whether one is necessary, and how large, depends entirely on the worst realistic loss for the actual work.

For a dry-and-leave mitigation crew, the worst case is usually a water or mold claim that sits inside a $1M/$2M primary stack. For a Paul Davis franchisee, the worst case is bigger. A reconstruction job means the franchisee is responsible for a rebuilt structure — fire, gas, electrical, and structural work performed or subcontracted. A failure in any of those can cause severe property damage or serious bodily injury well past the primary GL limit. Add the commercial buildings, multi-unit residential, and large losses that the brand's insurance-restoration model attracts, and the severity climbs.

The FDD's $4,000,000 umbrella requirement is the franchisor reasoning from that severity, not from a checklist. And the Complex Loss clause — additional coverage or bonds on any loss over $500,000 — is the same logic applied to a single large job. For a Paul Davis franchisee, the umbrella is not optional dressing. It is the layer that keeps one reconstruction failure or one large commercial loss from exceeding the primary stack. Operators taking larger commercial reconstruction work should treat $4,000,000 as the floor the FDD sets, not the ceiling their exposure justifies.

Paul Davis carries the reconstruction exposure of a general contractor on top of restoration, and the premium reflects both. 

The two largest lines — general liability and workers' compensation — are both auditable, which means the premium you pay at the start is an estimate that gets trued up at year-end.

How general liability premium is built. For a restoration-and-reconstruction contractor, GL is rated on gross receipts — a rate per $1,000 of revenue — and frequently picks up subcontractor cost in the exposure base as well. The carrier estimates your annual revenue at policy start and bills 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. Reconstruction adds a wrinkle: payments to subcontractors who cannot produce their own certificate of insurance get added to your exposure base, the same as your own payroll.

A realistic Paul Davis example. You pay $90,000 to a trade subcontractor crew during a busy reconstruction stretch and cannot produce their certificates at audit. That $90,000 is added to your exposure base, and GL premium is charged on it as if it were your own payroll. On top of that, if your estimated revenue of $500,000 came in at $620,000, the audit adds premium on the $120,000 difference as well.

How workers compensation premium is built. WC is 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. Reconstruction payroll spans several class codes — restoration, carpentry, and drywall among them — and each carries a different rate. If rebuild payroll is coded under a lower-rated restoration class, the carrier corrects it at the year-end payroll audit. That correction is a premium bill, never a claim denial. Misclassification is an audit exposure, not a coverage event.

The cost range. A full Paul Davis program — GL, CPL, auto, WC, the $4M umbrella, bailee, cyber, and property — for an established reconstruction-capable territory commonly runs $20,000 to $40,000 or more per year. The reconstruction scope and the $4M umbrella push Paul Davis above pure-mitigation brands. The FDD's own Item 7 estimate of $20,500 to $63,500 is the most candid in the restoration cluster precisely because the brand knows reconstruction costs more to insure.

The cash-management point. Estimate revenue, payroll, and subcontractor cost close to reality at policy inception. If a big reconstruction project or a storm-driven surge pushes any of those up mid-year, ask your carrier for a mid-term premium adjustment so the increase spreads across your remaining installments instead of arriving as one lump-sum audit bill months later.

The Paul Davis FDD already asks for more than most restoration brands, because reconstruction demands it. The work for an experienced operator is to make sure each policy is actually built for general-contractor reconstruction — and to scale limits to the commercial work the brand attracts. The recommendations below are Rikor baselines for a newer franchisee, calibrated to revenue, payroll, subcontractor cost, and reconstruction volume. They scale up as you grow.

Professional liability for the judgments behind the rebuild. Reconstruction starts with assessment — moisture readings, scope of remediation, and decisions about what to tear out and rebuild. A wrong call is a professional error, not an accident, and a standard GL does not cover it. Professional liability (also called errors and omissions, or E&O) responds to a claim that you got the professional judgment wrong. Rikor's restoration benchmark is $1,000,000 per claim and aggregate, written with no mold exclusion. The Paul Davis FDD does not require it; the reconstruction scope makes it a real exposure.

GL form review — confirm products and completed operations and no subcontractor exclusion. Reconstruction work has a multi-year completed-operations tail, and the work is partly subcontracted. Confirm the products and completed operations aggregate is in force, that the policy carries no subcontractor exclusion, and that broad-form contractual liability and independent contractors liability are both endorsed. This is the single most important form review for a Paul Davis franchisee.

CPL form review — confirm mold, lead, and asbestos. The FDD requires CPL at $1,000,000. Confirm the form affirmatively covers mold (not just dispersal events) and includes incidental lead and asbestos — both routinely disturbed during reconstruction tear-out in older structures. A pollution policy with a mold or asbestos carve-out is not fit for this work.

Bailee sized to the full pack-out. The FDD requires $250,000. A full household pack-out held through a multi-week reconstruction can exceed that. Size the limit to the largest combined contents inventory you could be holding at once.

Umbrella at or above the $4M floor for commercial reconstruction. The FDD requires $4,000,000 — already high. Operators taking larger commercial reconstruction, multi-unit residential, or institutional work should treat $4M as a floor. 

Commercial accounts and property managers often require certificates above it, and the reconstruction severity can justify more. And remember the Complex Loss clause: a single loss over $500,000 can trigger a franchisor demand for additional coverage or bonds, so the umbrella and your bonding capacity both need headroom.

EPLI and third-party crime. The FDD does not require employment practices liability or commercial crime, but the exposures are real. EPLI covers employee claims — wrongful termination, discrimination, harassment; Rikor's restoration benchmark is $250,000 for a startup, scaling with headcount. A third-party commercial crime policy covers theft of a customer's property by your employees during the days or weeks crews are inside a home for reconstruction — Rikor's benchmark is $250,000 on a Loss Discovered form, which covers a theft found during the current policy period regardless of when it occurred. General liability excludes employee theft, so without crime coverage the loss is uninsured.

Inland marine equipment floater. Air movers, dehumidifiers, scrubbers, and reconstruction tools live at job sites and in vehicles. Standard business property covers equipment only at a fixed location. An inland marine floater covers it in transit and on site — size it to the replacement value of your fleet and tools. Any 1099 trade sub without a current certificate at audit becomes your payroll exposure as well. See how subcontractor compliance works →