SERVICEMASTER RESTORE

ServiceMaster Restore runs more than 1,000 locations and has delivered disaster restoration for over 65 years. Franchisees train at the Memphis Academy and handle water extraction, fire and smoke cleanup, mold remediation, and structural restoration at residential and commercial properties.

The 2025 ServiceMaster Restore franchise disclosure document is the most tier-driven insurance program in the restoration cluster. Almost every required line — general liability, pollution, umbrella, cyber — scales with Gross Service Sales, the franchise's total revenue. And an entire second set of higher requirements applies to "SRM Franchises," the brand's large commercial and national-account program: $2,000,000 occurrence general liability, $2,000,000 pollution, a $5,000,000 umbrella, and $2,000,000 professional liability. A franchisee who grows or opts into SRM has to rebuild the stack at higher limits. Meeting the agreement at your current tier is the floor. Knowing which tier you are in — and what the next one demands — is what protects the business as it grows.

The franchisor entity is ServiceMaster Clean/Restore SPE LLC, a Delaware limited liability company with its principal office at One Glenlake Parkway, 14th Floor, Atlanta, Georgia 30328. It is a subsidiary of ServiceMaster Systems LLC, with ServiceMaster OpCo Holdings LLC as the indirect manager. That legal name belongs on your certificate of insurance, and the FDD requires you to name the franchisor and its affiliates as additional insureds. An additional insured is a person or company added to your policy so it also protects them. The standard construction is: ServiceMaster Clean/Restore SPE LLC, its parents, subsidiaries, affiliates, successors, and assigns.

The 2025 FDD (Item 8) sets the following required coverages. All coverage must be on an occurrence basis except employment practices liability, which is claims-made. All policies must be primary and non-contributory — meaning your policy pays first without asking the franchisor's policy to contribute — and carriers must be rated A or higher by A.M. Best. Where the requirement differs for SRM Franchises, both figures are shown.

Commercial General Liability at $1,000,000 per occurrence, $1,000,000 personal and advertising injury, and $2,000,000 aggregate — or $2,000,000 per occurrence for SRM Franchises. The policy must carry a waiver of subrogation and must not exclude workmanship or work performed by subcontractors. 

General liability (GL) covers bodily injury and property damage your work causes a third party.

Crime Policy at a recommended $25,000 limit, with coverage for theft of a client's property. Crime covers employee theft, which a standard GL excludes.

Business Automobile Liability at $1,000,000 for owned, hired, and non-owned vehicles, or any-auto coverage.

Pollution Liability at $1,000,000 — or $2,000,000 for SRM Franchises — including mold, asbestos, silica, and biohazards as covered perils. This is Contractors Pollution Liability (CPL), the policy that covers what a standard GL excludes.

Construction Services Liability at $3,000,000 per occurrence and $4,000,000 aggregate — required only if you provide construction services (reconstruction).

Umbrella Liability at $1,000,000 for $0 to $3 million in Gross Service Sales, and $2,000,000 at $3 million or more. For SRM Franchises, a $5,000,000 limit applies for $0 to $10 million in Gross Service Sales, plus an additional $1,000,000 for each additional $5 million. An umbrella adds a layer of limit on top of your GL, auto, and employers liability.

Workers Compensation and Employers Liability with a $500,000 minimum for employers liability, plus stop-gap coverage if you or your employees are in Ohio, North Dakota, Washington, or Wyoming — the monopolistic states where standard employers liability is not included. Workers compensation (WC) pays an injured employee's medical bills and lost wages; employers liability answers lawsuits an injured worker brings outside the WC system. A waiver of subrogation is required.

Cybersecurity / Privacy Policy scaling with Gross Service Sales: $125,000 per occurrence / $250,000 aggregate under $1 million in sales; $250,000 / $500,000 from $1 million to $5 million; $500,000 / $1,000,000 from $5 million to $10 million; and $1,000,000 / $1,000,000 at $10 million and above.

Errors and Omissions / Professional Liability at $2,000,000 per occurrence — required only for SRM Franchises.

This is the ServiceMaster Restore question with no equivalent in a flat-rate FDD. Because the brand scales requirements to revenue and adds an entire SRM tier for large commercial and national-account work, a franchisee can be fully compliant at the standard tier and still unable to accept the job that would move them up. The certificate carries a status, and commercial accounts read it.

A standard franchisee carries $1,000,000 occurrence GL, $1,000,000 pollution, and a $1,000,000 or $2,000,000 umbrella. An SRM franchise — or any commercial account, property manager, or national vendor program — frequently requires $2,000,000 occurrence GL, $2,000,000 pollution, a $5,000,000 umbrella, and $2,000,000 professional liability. Those are not small bumps. They mean re-underwriting the program, often through the specialty market, before the certificate can be produced. A franchisee who waits until the referral arrives to start that process loses the job to a franchisee whose certificate already showed the higher limits.

A ServiceMaster Restore franchisee operating at the standard tier was invited into a regional property management company's preferred-vendor program — a steady stream of water and fire mitigation across a portfolio of commercial buildings, worth a projected $250,000 a year in revenue. The program's vendor agreement required $2,000,000 occurrence general liability, $2,000,000 pollution liability, a $5,000,000 umbrella, and $2,000,000 professional liability — effectively the SRM tier. The franchisee carried the standard-tier limits: $1,000,000 GL, $1,000,000 pollution, a $2,000,000 umbrella, and no professional liability. 

Producing the higher certificate meant re-underwriting four lines through the specialty market, which could not be done inside the vendor's onboarding window. The account moved on to a franchisee already carrying SRM-level coverage. The lost revenue was not a claim — it was the contract the franchisee could not take. Prevention: if commercial and national-account work is the growth path, build to the SRM tier before the referral arrives, not after.

This is also where subcontractor compliance enters. ServiceMaster Restore's GL specifically must not exclude work performed by subcontractors, and commercial accounts hold the franchisee responsible for sub-tier coverage. Any subcontractor without a current certificate of insurance becomes both a coverage gap and added premium at the year-end audit.

ServiceMaster Restore franchisees can stop at mitigation — dry the structure and hand it off — or go further into construction services, rebuilding what was damaged. The FDD treats those as two different risk profiles, and it requires a separate, much larger policy the moment you cross into reconstruction: Construction Services Liability at $3,000,000 per occurrence and $4,000,000 aggregate.

The reason is the long tail that construction work carries. A reconstruction defect does not show up the day you finish. It surfaces 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, and reconstruction is often partly subcontracted, which makes the policy's subcontractor language decisive.

The FDD's separate $3M/$4M Construction Services Liability requirement is the franchisor recognizing that a mitigation policy was never built to carry a builder's exposure. If you provide construction services, confirm that policy is in force, that products and completed operations is included, and that no subcontractor exclusion guts coverage for the trade subs you hire. If you do not provide construction services, you do not need it — but confirm your operations actually stay inside mitigation, because the line gets crossed quietly.

Restoration work runs through materials a standard general liability policy treats as pollutants and excludes. Mold and fungus are excluded. Sewage and bacteria from a category-three water loss are excluded. Asbestos and lead disturbed during tear-out in older structures are excluded. Silica dust from cutting and demolition is excluded. The policy most franchisees lean on is the one that denies the loss.

The ServiceMaster Restore FDD requires Pollution Liability at $1,000,000 — $2,000,000 for SRM Franchises — and names the perils precisely: mold, asbestos, silica, and biohazards. That silica callout is unusual and useful, because demolition and concrete cutting generate respirable silica that standard pollution forms sometimes miss. Contractors Pollution Liability is the policy that responds to all of it: bodily injury, property damage, and cleanup from pollutants released by your work, including after the job is done.

The franchisee's job is to confirm the form delivers every named peril. Some pollution forms cover "pollution" broadly but exclude asbestos, restrict mold to a sudden dispersal event, or leave silica out entirely. The FDD names mold, asbestos, silica, and biohazards because a certificate that merely says "pollution liability" is not enough. Read the form against the four named perils, not just the certificate.

When a 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.

Here the ServiceMaster Restore FDD differs from the higher-requirement brands in the cluster: it places bailee's coverage in the recommended column, not the required one, at a $150,000 minimum — and adds a separate recommended $50,000 for property of others in transit. Because it is recommended rather than required, the franchisee has to choose to carry it, and choose the right limit. The FDD's own guidance is sound: do not exclude damage caused by your work on a job site. Rikor's restoration benchmark treats bailee as a core line, not an option, and sizes it to the largest realistic inventory of customer property your crew could hold at one time — anchored near $250,000 and adjusted up for full pack-outs and commercial jobs.

ServiceMaster Restore's tier structure means your premium moves with your revenue twice over: once because the policies themselves are auditable, and again because your required limits step up as Gross Service Sales cross each band. Both of the two biggest lines — general liability and workers' compensation — are trued up at year-end.

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. For ServiceMaster Restore there is a second effect: as your Gross Service Sales cross a band, your required umbrella and cyber limits step up, which raises premium independently of the audit.

A realistic ServiceMaster Restore example. You estimate $900,000 in revenue at policy inception and finish the year at $1,100,000 — crossing the $1 million Gross Service Sales band. The audit adds GL premium on the $200,000 difference (at roughly $8 per $1,000, about $1,600), and separately your required cyber limit jumps from the under-$1M band to the $1M–$5M band, adding premium at renewal. The two effects compound, so revenue growth costs more in insurance than the audit alone suggests.

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. In Ohio, North Dakota, Washington, and Wyoming — the monopolistic states — the state fund handles WC, which is why the FDD requires stop-gap coverage to add the employers liability those state funds leave out. The carrier runs the same year-end payroll audit as GL. Undisclosed or misclassified payroll is corrected at audit — a premium bill, never a claim denial. Misclassification is an audit exposure, not a coverage event.

The cost range. A full ServiceMaster Restore program — GL, pollution, auto, WC, umbrella, cyber, crime, and (at the SRM tier) professional liability and a $5M umbrella — for an established territory commonly runs $16,000 to $32,000 per year, with SRM-tier operations at the top of that range and beyond. The FDD's Item 7 estimate of $8,800 to $19,350 reflects a startup at the standard tier; SRM and higher-revenue operators carry materially more.

The cash-management point. Estimate your revenue and payroll close to reality at policy inception, and watch the Gross Service Sales bands — crossing one mid-year can trigger both an audit and a required limit increase. If growth pushes you toward a band, ask your carrier for a mid-term adjustment so the increase spreads across your remaining installments instead of landing as one lump sum after the year closes.

ServiceMaster Restore's FDD is detailed and tier-aware, but it leaves real gaps at the standard tier — bailee and EPLI are only recommended, the crime limit is low, and professional liability is required only for SRM. The work for an experienced operator is to close those gaps before growth forces the issue, and to build toward the SRM tier if commercial work is the path. These are Rikor baselines for a newer franchisee, calibrated to revenue, payroll, and work mix. They scale up as you grow.

Professional liability before SRM requires it. The FDD requires E&O only for SRM Franchises, at $2,000,000. But the professional-judgment exposure — moisture assessment, remediation scope, drying decisions — exists for every restoration franchisee from the first job. A standard franchisee with no professional liability is uninsured for a misread-moisture claim. Rikor's restoration benchmark is $1,000,000 per claim and aggregate with no mold exclusion, claims-made with a two-year tail. Carry it before SRM status makes it mandatory.

Bailee and transit coverage as core lines, not options. The FDD recommends bailee at $150,000 and transit at $50,000. Rikor's benchmark treats both as core. Size bailee to the largest combined pack-out inventory you could hold at one time — a full household or commercial job can exceed $150,000 on a single loss.

Crime well above the FDD's $25,000. The FDD's recommended $25,000 crime limit is thin for restoration crews who access displaced homes for days at a time. General liability excludes employee theft because dishonesty is not an accident. 

A third-party commercial crime policy covers theft of a customer's property by your employees, and 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, the right form for a crew that cycles through many jobs before a missing item is noticed.

EPLI sized to headcount. The FDD recommends a stand-alone EPLI policy of $250,000 to $1,000,000 by employee count, with third-party and wage-and-hour coverage. Rikor's restoration benchmark agrees: $250,000 for a startup, $500,000 at five to fifteen employees, and $1,000,000 above that.

Umbrella sized to your tier and your certificates. The FDD scales the umbrella from $1M to $2M on Gross Service Sales, and to $5M+ for SRM. An umbrella adds a layer on top of GL, auto, and employers liability. Reason from your worst realistic loss: restoration crews work inside occupied commercial buildings where a single water or fire event can run into the high six figures, and SRM and commercial accounts require $5,000,000 certificates. For a standard residential operator, the FDD's $1M–$2M scale is reasonable; the moment commercial and national-account work is in play, $5M is the practical threshold the FDD itself points to.

Inland marine equipment floater. Air movers, dehumidifiers, scrubbers, extraction units, and thermal cameras live at job sites and in vehicles. The FDD recommends property coverage for off-premises equipment; Rikor's benchmark makes it a dedicated inland marine floater sized to fleet replacement value, typically $50,000 to $150,000 and up, because standard business property covers equipment only at a fixed location.

Independent contractors liability on GL. The FDD already bars excluding subcontractor work on the GL. Confirm an independent contractors liability endorsement is in place so subcontractor work is covered if it causes a loss — and remember that any 1099 worker without a current certificate at audit becomes your payroll exposure. See how subcontractor compliance works →