Do Georgia contractors need inland marine if they already have general liability?

Usually yes. General liability and inland marine cover fundamentally different losses, so having one does not replace the need for the other in most cases. General liability insurance responds when a contractor's work or presence causes injury or property damage to someone else - a customer trips over a cord, a subcontractor's ladder cracks a client's window. It does not pay to repair or replace the contractor's own tools, equipment, or materials.

Inland marine insurance covers the other side of that exposure: loss of the contractor's own property. That includes tools and equipment at a job site, equipment in transit between sites, and equipment stored at a shop or warehouse when a standard commercial property policy's off-premises coverage falls short.

Example: a Georgia plumbing contractor carrying a general liability policy drops a wrench during a service call and cracks a homeowner's tile floor. General liability pays for the tile repair because the damage was to someone else's property. The same week, a set of pipe threaders worth several thousand dollars is stolen from the contractor's locked van overnight. General liability does not respond to that loss at all, because nothing about it involves injury or damage to a third party. Only a policy covering the contractor's own equipment, such as an inland marine floater, would address the stolen threaders.

The two coverages are commonly sold as separate line items within the same overall commercial insurance program, sometimes bundled with property coverage in a business owners policy and sometimes written as a standalone floater. What inland marine adds on top of general liability is protection for equipment loss, which liability coverage was never designed to address. More on what the coverage protects specifically is in what does inland marine insurance cover in Georgia, despite the name.

Georgia does not require either general liability or inland marine by statute for most contractors; see does Georgia require contractors to carry inland marine insurance. Whether a specific contractor's current general liability and property program actually reaches equipment losses is a question addressed during a coverage review, which compares existing policy language against the equipment a business actually owns and moves. Typical cost ranges for adding inland marine coverage are covered in what does inland marine insurance cost for a Georgia contractor.