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Your workplace is somebody else’s living room. Care is delivered alone, unsupervised, in houses you don’t control, by caregivers driving their own cars between clients — and paid under some of the most litigated wage rules in the country. Group Coverage, Inc. builds home care programs that cover all of it.
A home care program starts with professional and general liability written together — the client injury and the care decision are the same claim — plus New York’s mandatory workers’ comp, DBL, and Paid Family Leave. It’s completed by the in-home layer: hired and non-owned auto, because your caregivers drive; abuse and molestation coverage with a real limit; theft-of-client-property coverage, because the allegation is inevitable; and cyber for the records you carry. Then there’s the exposure that isn’t insurance at all — wage-and-hour compliance — which in New York has closed agencies that were otherwise well run.
Non-medical support: bathing, dressing, meals, transfers, companionship. No clinical judgment, but the highest hours per client, the closest physical contact, and the deepest exposure to allegations of neglect, injury during transfer, and missing property.
Nursing, wound care, infusion, medication administration, and therapy delivered under a plan of care. Real clinical exposure — medication errors, failure to assess, delayed escalation — with professional liability rated on visit volume and discipline mix.
Placing caregivers rather than employing them changes who is liable, who carries comp, and whether the agency is a co-employer when a plaintiff or a regulator looks closely. The insurance has to match the model as it actually operates, not as the contracts describe it.
Many agencies run more than one line, and the boundary blurs when a companion aide is asked to help with medications. The program has to cover what caregivers actually do in the home, which is why scope-of-service drift — services delivered beyond the care plan and beyond the policy’s assumptions — is this industry’s most common coverage gap.
Care happens where no one is watching. There is no charge nurse down the hall. Every visit is a one-caregiver, one-client encounter in a private home, which means the incident record is whatever the caregiver documents and the defense is whatever the agency’s supervision, training, and visit verification can prove afterward.
Professional and general liability are one claim. A client falls during a transfer: negligent assistance, or a failure to follow the care plan? Plaintiffs plead both. The coverage should be written together, with defense that doesn’t depend on which theory the complaint happens to lead with.
Allegations of abuse and theft come with the territory. Caregivers work alone among a client’s medications, jewelry, and cash, often with family members who weren’t there. Even unfounded allegations require investigation and defense — so affirmative abuse and molestation coverage and theft-of-client-property coverage are core purchases, not add-ons.
Your fleet is every caregiver’s personal car. Aides drive between clients, run errands, and sometimes transport clients to appointments. Almost none of it happens in a vehicle you own, which makes hired & non-owned auto the single most under-bought policy in home care — and motor vehicle record checks the most overlooked control.
The workforce gets hurt in other people’s houses. Lifting and transfer injuries, stairs, icy walkways, dogs, and car accidents between visits — all compensable, all occurring somewhere the agency can’t inspect. Comp frequency is high and the mod is managed with training, equipment, and a real return-to-work program.
Wage-and-hour is the existential exposure. Travel time between clients, overtime, and — in New York — the rules governing live-in and 24-hour cases and the downstate wage parity requirements have produced class litigation that dwarfs most agencies’ liability claims. EPLI with a wage-and-hour defense sublimit helps with defense; only compliance review prevents the claim.
You hold records without holding a building. Client health information, caregiver files, and scheduling data live in software accessed from phones in the field. A breach triggers notification duties and payer scrutiny, and an outage stops the visit schedule — which is to say, it stops care.
PL/GL on one form with shared defense — rated on revenue, visits, or caregiver count, and written to cover care delivered in the client’s home rather than at a premises you occupy.
The policy home care agencies most often lack. Covers the agency’s liability when a caregiver’s personal vehicle is used for agency business — between clients, on errands, or transporting a client.
Workers’ compensation priced around transfer and travel injuries, with safe-handling training and return-to-work managing the mod — plus New York’s DBL and Paid Family Leave.
Modest by industry standards, but the scheduling and records operation still needs coverage — and business income that reflects what a shutdown costs an agency billing by the visit.
Its own limit and its own defense provision, covering allegations against caregivers working unsupervised — with screening and supervision protocols as the underwriting file.
Coverage for the missing-jewelry allegation that every agency eventually faces — sometimes written as a care-custody or client-property endorsement, sometimes within a fidelity form.
For theft from the agency itself — payroll fraud, billing manipulation, diverted payments — in a business that runs on distributed staff and thin back-office oversight.
Coverage for licensure proceedings and payer investigations, including billing-error defense for agencies drawing on public funding.
The industry’s most expensive litigation category: travel time, overtime, live-in and 24-hour pay, and misclassification. The wage-and-hour defense sublimit is the endorsement that matters most here.
Client health information and scheduling systems accessed from the field — cyber coverage with breach response, notification, and business-interruption terms sized to your record count.
Management liability and, where applicable, D&O for agency ownership and nonprofit boards facing regulatory and governance exposure.
An auto accident on agency business or a serious in-home injury can outrun a $1M primary quickly; the umbrella is what keeps a single event from ending the agency.
Liability is rated on the volume of care — revenue, visit counts, or hours — with skilled nursing hours carrying more weight than companion hours. The mix declared should match the mix delivered; audits reconcile the difference.
Companion care, personal care, skilled nursing, infusion, and therapy each rate differently. Adding a clinical service without repapering the program is how agencies end up uninsured for their newest line.
W-2 employees, 1099 contractors, or a registry placement model changes comp, liability, and co-employment exposure. Underwriters price the model they can verify, and misclassification is a rating and a legal problem at once.
How many caregivers drive, how far, whether clients are transported, and whether motor vehicle records are pulled and reviewed. A written driving policy with documented MVR checks is one of the cheapest premium levers available.
Comp premium follows payroll and the experience mod; EPLI pricing follows turnover and whether anyone has reviewed travel-time, overtime, and live-in pay practices against current rules.
Background checks, competency validation, supervisory visits, electronic visit verification, and incident reporting. In an industry where care happens unwitnessed, documentation is the entire defense — and underwriters price it that way.
Directionally: a companion-care agency’s liability program often sits in the four figures against modest revenue, skilled agencies scale up with clinical hours, and the comp and auto lines frequently cost more than the liability that gets all the attention — but employment model, driving exposure, and wage-practice history swing every number, which is why home care is quoted on the operation, never on the category.
The two claims that define this industry: the caregiver’s car accident on the way between clients — where the agency is named, the personal auto limits are small, and the question is whether hired and non-owned auto was ever purchased — and the wage-and-hour class action, which arrives on behalf of every aide who ever worked a 24-hour case or drove between assignments unpaid, and which standard EPLI forms cover thinly without a deliberate wage-and-hour defense sublimit. One is solved by a policy that costs a fraction of the exposure; the other by a compliance review that costs less than a week of defense. Neither is solved after the fact.
A Long Island perspective: Nassau and Suffolk support a large and growing home care sector — an aging population that intends to age at home, hospital systems discharging earlier, and families coordinating care across the Island. That places agencies squarely inside New York’s most demanding employment rules: downstate home care wage parity requirements, the litigation history around 24-hour and live-in cases, and licensure oversight for agencies operating under state authority. It also means long drives between clients on congested roads, which is an auto exposure whether or not the agency owns a vehicle. Local carriers understand these agencies; so do we.
Why home care agencies work with GCI: home care appetite varies sharply by service mix, employment model, and state — carriers that write companion care may decline skilled nursing, and a registry model prices differently than a W-2 agency. As an independent brokerage, Group Coverage, Inc. presents your agency to the home care markets with the screening, supervision, and driving controls underwriters reward, makes sure the auto and abuse exposures are actually covered rather than assumed, and coordinates New York’s employer stack — and because benefits are our founding practice, the same review can address the health plan that helps you keep aides in a market where everyone is hiring.
For the regulatory side, see the New York State Department of Health on home care agencies, the U.S. Department of Labor on home care wage and hour rules, OSHA on home healthcare worker safety, and the Insurance Information Institute on business coverage basics.
If the answer is yes and hired and non-owned auto isn’t on the policy, that’s the gap to close first. Group Coverage, Inc. builds home care programs around how your agency actually delivers care — the services, the employment model, the driving, the wage practices — then places them across the home care markets, with New York’s employer stack quoted alongside.
This page is for general educational purposes and is not legal or employment advice. Coverage availability, forms, sublimits, and pricing factors vary by carrier, service model, and jurisdiction, and licensing, wage-and-hour, and payer requirements vary by state and change over time. Consult qualified employment counsel regarding pay practices, and review your specific policy documents or speak with a licensed advisor to understand how these concepts apply to your agency.
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