Bumble Roofing

The Bumble Roofing franchise agreement requires general liability insurance at $1,000,000 per occurrence and $2,000,000 in the aggregate, auto liability at $1,000,000 each accident with hired and non-owned coverage, an umbrella of at least $1,000,000 (the FDD recommends $2,000,000), workers' compensation at $1,000,000, business personal property of at least $10,000 per location, and business interruption coverage for twelve months.

The named insured on your certificate is your own legal business entity. The agreement then requires you to name two additional insureds: Bumble Roofing Franchisor, LLC and its parent, Outdoor Living Brands Holdco, LLC. Your coverage must be primary and non-contributory, and it must waive subrogation in their favor.

That satisfies your franchisor. Here is where the requirement ends and your real exposure as a roofing operator begins.

The franchisor entity is Bumble Roofing Franchisor, LLC, a Delaware company at 2426 Old Brick Road, Glen Allen, Virginia. The 2026 franchise agreement (Item 8 and Section 12) sets the coverage you must carry before you open and keep in force the whole time you operate.

Two endorsement terms control how that coverage is structured. Primary and non-contributory means your policy pays first and does not ask the franchisor's insurer to chip in. A waiver of subrogation is your insurer's promise not to chase the franchisor for money after it pays a claim.

What the agreement requires you to carry:

General Liability at $1,000,000 per occurrence and $2,000,000 aggregate. General liability, or GL, covers bodily injury and property damage your work causes to other people.

Auto Liability at $1,000,000 each accident, plus hired and non-owned auto liability at $1,000,000. Hired and non-owned auto covers vehicles you rent or your team's personal vehicles used for the business.

Umbrella Liability of at least $1,000,000, with $2,000,000 recommended. An umbrella adds a layer of limit on top of your other liability policies for a claim that exceeds them.

Workers Compensation at $1,000,000 for bodily injury by accident and $1,000,000 by disease. Workers' compensation, or WC, pays medical bills and lost wages when a worker is hurt on the job.

Business Personal Property of at least $10,000 per location, and Business Interruption coverage for twelve months equal to your financial obligations.

You must also name both Bumble Roofing Franchisor, LLC and Outdoor Living Brands Holdco, LLC as additional insureds, keep the coverage primary and non-contributory, and waive subrogation. The agreement requires 30 days' notice of cancellation or material change.

This is the claim that defines roofing insurance. A fall from a roof is the most common serious injury and the most common death in the trade, and it drives two different policies at once. Workers' compensation pays the injured worker's medical bills and lost wages. Employers liability — the sister coverage on the same workers' compensation policy — responds if the worker, or the worker's family, sues you on top of the WC claim.

Most franchisees assume "I have workers' comp" answers the whole question. It does not. A catastrophic fall — a spinal injury, a brain injury, a death — generates medical and indemnity costs that run into hundreds of thousands of dollars, and it often generates a lawsuit that workers' compensation alone does not cover. Employers liability is the layer that defends that suit, and a serious one can exceed the $1,000,000 the FDD sets. That is exactly where an umbrella earns its keep.

Every roof replacement starts with a tear-off — stripping old shingles, flashing, and underlayment and dropping them to the ground. Material comes off the roof at speed, and the property next door is often a few feet away. Tear-off debris that hits a neighbor's car, fence, garden, or window is one of the most routine property-damage claims a roofing crew creates. This is general liability territory, and a standard policy generally responds.

The trouble is severity and frequency stacking up. A single dropped bundle that cracks a windshield is a small claim. But debris that damages a neighbor's roof, a luxury vehicle, an HVAC condenser, or a swimming pool can run well into five figures — and in a dense neighborhood, one bad tear-off can damage more than one property at once. Add a slip-and-fall on debris left in a walkway, and a single job can produce several claims. Confirm your general liability has no exclusion for debris or falling-object damage, and that your limit fits a job where more than one neighbor's property is in the drop zone. A short pre-job site check — tarps, plywood shields, and a marked drop zone — costs almost nothing and prevents most of these losses.

This is the exposure that separates roofing from almost every other trade. The damage does not happen while you are on the job. It happens weeks or months later, when the first hard rain finds a flashing detail that was sealed wrong, or a valley that was nailed short, and water runs into the house. By then you are long gone, and the claim arrives as a completed-operations claim — a claim for damage from work you already finished.

Two things decide whether you are protected. First, your general liability must include products and completed-operations coverage, and it must still be active when the leak surfaces. This is why an occurrence-form policy matters for roofers: it responds based on when the damage happened, not when the claim is reported. Second is the "your work" exclusion. Standard GL will not pay to redo the roof itself — that is the cost of your own faulty work. But it can respond to the *resulting* damage: the soaked drywall, the ruined hardwood floors, the insulation, the personal property below. Water that reaches a finished basement or a custom kitchen turns a small flashing error into a large loss, and a slow leak can grow mold before anyone notices.

Bumble Roofing markets storm remediation and works with homeowners whose roofs were damaged in a storm. That work looks like ordinary roofing, but it runs through a different process: the homeowner files a claim with their own property insurer, an insurance adjuster sets a scope and a price, and you do the work to that scope. That process creates an exposure most franchisees never see coming — a dispute over scope and quality that lands on you.

Here is the chain. The adjuster approves a scope that, in your judgment, is too thin to fix the roof correctly. You either do the limited scope and the roof underperforms, or you do more and fight to get paid. Either way, if the repair later fails or the homeowner is unhappy with the outcome, the homeowner can come after you — not the adjuster, not their insurer. The allegation is professional: that you assessed the damage wrong, recommended the wrong scope, or signed off on a repair that did not hold. Standard general liability is built for accidents, not for disputes over your professional judgment and your scope of work. 

That gap is what contractors errors and omissions coverage, or E&O, is built to fill — and most roofing policies do not include it unless you ask. On storm work, where your scope and your assessment are the product, that gap is not theoretical.

The honest answer is that your premium depends on details specific to your operation — your state, your payroll, your revenue, and your claims history. What you can understand is how the number is built, and the part that catches roofing franchisees hardest at year-end.

Workers' compensation is the biggest line you will pay, and it is bigger for roofing than for any other trade in home services. The formula is simple: your payroll divided by 100, multiplied by your state's rate for the roofing classification, multiplied by your experience modification. The roofing class code in most states is NCCI 5551, and the rate runs from roughly $9.90 to over $15 per $100 of payroll — and in Florida it can approach $35 per $100. Compare that to a plumber near $4.50, and you see why roofing WC is the cost franchisees most often underestimate. The rate is set by your state's rating bureau, not the carrier — the insurance company applies the state's number.

Both workers' compensation and general liability are auditable. An audit is the carrier's year-end review that compares the payroll and revenue you estimated when the policy started against what you actually did, and adjusts the premium up or down. For a roofer, the GL is usually rated on either gross receipts or payroll, and payments to subcontractors who cannot show their own coverage get added to the base.

A realistic roofing example on the WC payroll basis. Say you estimate $300,000 in crew payroll when the policy starts, then a busy storm season pushes you to $450,000 in actual payroll — a $150,000 difference. At a roofing rate near $12 per $100 of payroll, the audit adds about $18,000 (1,500 × $12). On the most expensive WC trade there is, an underestimate that size lands as one large lump-sum bill months after the policy year ends.

PROSE:

That math is why roofing is the highest-cost insurance trade in this entire database. A complete franchise program for a roofing territory with one or two crews commonly runs from $20,000 to $40,000 or more per year, with workers' compensation driving most of it. Treat any insurance figure in the FDD's Item 7 as a floor, not a real estimate — a roofing Item 7 built on standard market rates will understate your true workers' compensation cost.

The cash-flow point matters most here. Estimate your payroll and revenue close to reality, and if a storm season grows your crew fast, call your carrier mid-year for a mid-term adjustment — a re-rate during the policy term. Spreading the increase across your remaining installments keeps an $18,000 audit from landing as a single bill. An audit is reconciliation, not a penalty; if you overestimated, the audit refunds you. Subcontractor certificates are the other variable that moves an audit, because a 1099 roofer who cannot show coverage becomes your payroll at year-end. Rikor's subcontractor compliance monitoring tool tracks those certificates in real time, so a lapse surfaces before the audit, not after. See how subcontractor compliance works →

Bumble Roofing's FDD gets the core right — $1,000,000 general liability, real auto limits, statutory workers' compensation, and an umbrella requirement. But it sets that umbrella floor low for the most severe trade in home services, and it is silent on a few coverages a roofer genuinely needs. These recommendations are Rikor's baselines, calibrated to a newer franchisee's actual operation, and they scale up as your revenue, payroll, and job size grow.

Raise the umbrella to at least $2,000,000 — the FDD already recommends it. Reason from the worst realistic loss. A catastrophic fall-from-height injury or a whole-house water-intrusion loss can run past your $1,000,000 employers liability or general liability limit. The umbrella must follow form over your workers' compensation, general liability, and auto so it actually responds to a fall or a major water loss. Take commercial roofing accounts and the certificates will demand more — $2,000,000, $5,000,000, sometimes higher — so an umbrella sized to your real severity is the difference between bidding that work and losing it. The $1,000,000 floor satisfies the agreement; it does not match a roofing claim.

Confirm general liability on an occurrence form with completed-operations coverage. The FDD does not name a GL form, but roofing's signature claim — water intrusion months after the job — is a completed-operations claim. Carry an occurrence policy and keep products and completed-operations coverage in force, including after a job ends.

Carry contractors errors and omissions (E&O). The FDD does not require it. On storm restoration work, your scope and your assessment are the product, and a dispute over them is a professional claim that standard general liability does not answer. Rikor recommends $1,000,000 each claim and aggregate, exposure-gated to how much storm and commercial work you do.

Carry cyber at $250,000. The FDD does not require it. Bumble uses satellite imaging technology and online booking, and you store customer payment information — which creates a breach and a funds-transfer-fraud exposure. Rikor recommends $250,000 for a newer operator, scaling above $750,000 in revenue.

Size inland marine to your actual equipment value. The FDD requires $10,000 of business personal property per location, but that covers property at a fixed spot not the ladders, harnesses, compressors, and tools that travel to job sites. Inland marine, also called an equipment floater, follows your gear to the roof and back. Size the limit to what your equipment is actually worth, on an actual-cash-value basis; there is no universal number.

EPLI and crime are exposure-driven here, not automatic. As you add W-2 crew, employment-practices liability (EPLI) becomes relevant — Rikor's baseline is $250,000, scaling at 10-plus employees. Commercial crime is a lighter exposure for exterior roofing work, since crews are not trusted alone inside occupied homes for long periods; carry it if you handle customer funds, at a $250,000 baseline with a loss-discovered form.

Reconsider 12-month business interruption. The FDD requires it, and you must carry it to comply. But a roofing operation works from trucks and job sites, not a fixed showroom, so a full 12-month period is more than most carriers will even write for a mobile contractor. Carry what the FDD requires, and ask your agent whether the structure fits a vehicle-based roofing business.