Cyber Liability Insurance for General Contractors
You hold banking details for every sub you pay and pricing for every bid you assemble. Cyber Insurance Group has agents dedicated to cyber liability, comparing general contractor coverage across 12+ A-rated carriers.
Compare your construction business across 12+ A-rated carriers in about 4 minutes. Free, no obligation, and no need to know your limits in advance. We are an independent agency, so the recommendation is based on what covers your risk, not on one carrier’s product sheet.
Get My QuoteYou Are the Hub Everyone Else Connects Through
A specialty trade holds its own information. A general contractor holds the information of every party on every project.
Sub banking details
Tax forms, insurance certificates and ACH information for every subcontractor on every job, usually kept indefinitely and rarely segregated.
Draws on a schedule
Progress payments move on known dates in known amounts, which makes a redirected payment easy to disguise as routine.
Bid files before award
Pricing and sub quotes are competitively fatal in the wrong hands, and losing them triggers no notification duty and produces no visible signal.
Shared project platforms
Owners, architects, subs and inspectors all touch the same project management system, so your perimeter includes everyone on the job.
The Diverted Draw and the Leaked Bid
Neither is physical damage, so neither is answered by the policies most contractors already carry.
The diverted draw
Someone with access to your email or accounting changes a subcontractor’s banking details before a scheduled payment. The money leaves on a normal day, against a normal invoice, to an account that looks plausible. The sub still expects to be paid, so you have both a loss and a relationship problem.
Why builder’s risk and general liability do not reach it
Builder’s risk responds to physical loss or damage to the work. General liability responds to bodily injury and property damage. A fraudulent payment instruction is neither of those things. Where it is covered at all it sits in funds transfer fraud or social engineering cover, and those are commonly sublimited at a fraction of the policy limit, often well below the size of a single progress payment. Ask for that number first.
The leaked bid
This is the loss with no paperwork. Pre-award pricing in a competitor’s hands costs you the job, and because no personal information was involved there is usually no notification obligation, no investigation and no way to prove what happened. It is the clearest argument for treating bid files as sensitive rather than as working documents.
What you still hold after the job closes
- General contractors still hold subcontractor banking details, bid files and the full project record for every job you ran.
- Fire, alarm and security installers still hold credentials, codes and coverage maps for the systems protecting your customers’ buildings.
- Low-voltage and network installers still hold as-built documentation and often working access to the network everything else in the building runs on.
- Utility and infrastructure contractors still hold work product inside a system your customer is federally obligated to protect.
Why it changes the policy conversation
For a GC the two numbers that matter are the funds transfer fraud sublimit and the social engineering sublimit, measured against your largest routine payment rather than against your revenue. Our data breach response guide walks through what happens once an incident starts.
Built Around the Money, Not the Building
Fraudulent instructions
Funds transfer fraud and social engineering coverage respond to payments made on substituted banking details, within their sublimits.
Subcontractor data
Breach response and third-party liability respond when the personal and financial information you hold for subs is exposed.
The job keeps moving
Business interruption and extra expense respond when project management, estimating or accounting systems are unusable against a schedule.
Extortion
Cyber extortion coverage responds where project records or bid files are held for ransom rather than simply encrypted.
Before You Decide
The objections we actually hear from business owners, answered straight.
What makes a general contractor’s exposure different from a trade’s?
You are a hub rather than a participant. A GC holds banking and tax details for every subcontractor it pays, pricing from every bid it has assembled, and the complete project record for every owner it has worked for. A specialty trade holds its own data. You hold everyone’s.
Why are subcontractor payment details such a target?
Because changing one number redirects a real payment. An attacker inside your email or your accounting system does not need to steal anything dramatic, only to update a sub’s banking information before the next draw. The request looks ordinary because it is the kind of request your office handles every week.
What happens if our bid file leaks before award?
It is one of the few data losses with no notification obligation and an immediate commercial cost. Pre-award pricing, subcontractor quotes and your margin assumptions in a competitor’s hands can decide a job without anyone ever knowing why you lost it. Unlike a personal information breach there is no regulator, no letter and no public signal.
Are owners starting to require cyber coverage from GCs?
Increasingly, especially on institutional, healthcare and public work. The requirement arrives the same way other insurance requirements do, in the contract, and it flows down to your subs through yours. For many contractors the first encounter with cyber insurance is a line item in an owner’s agreement rather than a decision they made.
Does our builder’s risk or general liability policy cover a diverted payment?
No. Builder’s risk responds to physical loss or damage to the work, and general liability to bodily injury and property damage. A payment sent on fraudulent instruction is neither. It is answered, if at all, by funds transfer fraud or social engineering cover inside a cyber or crime policy, and both are commonly sublimited well below the size of a progress payment.
What does cyber liability insurance not cover for a general contractor?
It does not pay for defective work, delay damages or liquidated damages under the prime contract. It does not replace a lost bid or the profit on a job you did not win. It covers the incident response, the liability to others, and the interruption to your own operations.
What Would Cyber Liability Insurance Cost Your Construction Business?
Pricing follows revenue, how many subcontractors you pay, how payment changes are verified, and the controls you can evidence. See the breakdown in our cost guide, or get a number for your company.
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