What happens if a subcontractor’s certificate of insurance lapses mid-job
The certificate you collected when a subcontractor started the job is a snapshot, not a guarantee. It proved their coverage was current on the day it was issued. It says nothing about the day their policy actually renews, which might land in the middle of a job that started months after the certificate did.
If the policy lapses while the work is still underway, the certificate sitting in the file is the only thing that said otherwise — and by the time anyone goes looking at it, it’s already out of date and nobody was watching for the moment it stopped being true.
Collecting it without creating them an account
A subcontractor doesn’t need a login just to send you a document, and most won’t want one for a single file. An upload link solves that: you choose how long it stays valid — one week, two weeks, 30 or 60 days — and send it. They upload the certificate with no account of their own to create or remember.
The submission queues for your review rather than applying itself to anything automatically, so a file that doesn’t actually match the sub, or a photo of the wrong page, never silently becomes the record of truth.
Treat it like any other tracked record
Once it’s in, add it as a license tied to that subcontractor in your people directory and set its own reminders, the same lead time and the same schedule as a license or policy you hold yourself. The subcontractor doesn’t need to be a user in your workspace for this to work — the directory exists specifically so people outside your team can still have a tracked record and still get reminded.
That’s what turns “we have a certificate on file somewhere” into “we’ll hear about it before it lapses,” without you having to remember to go check a folder every few months.
When to collect a fresh one
- At the start of every new job, even for a subcontractor you’ve worked with before — a certificate from last year’s job doesn’t cover this one.
- Whenever a reminder shows their coverage is coming up for renewal mid-job, send the upload link again before it lapses, not after.
- If a job runs long enough to cross a renewal date, build that follow-up into the job itself rather than relying on remembering it separately.
Why this is worth the small amount of process
None of this is complicated, but it’s the kind of thing that only happens if it’s built into how a job starts, not left to whoever happens to remember. A sub’s insurance lapsing mid-job is rarely caught by anyone noticing in the moment — it’s caught, if it’s caught at all, by a reminder that was set up when the certificate first came in.
Who should actually own this
On a larger team, deciding who owns each subcontractor’s insurance record — the project manager who brought them on, or whoever handles compliance generally — avoids the gap where everyone assumes someone else collected it. Assigning it explicitly, the same way a license gets assigned to an owner, closes that gap the same way it closes it for your own licenses.