Your crew drives their own trucks to the job. Here's the gap.

The honest answer is that when your crew leader rear-ends a minivan on I-225 driving his own F-250 to a job in Aurora, the first policy in line is his, not yours, and his may be the thinnest policy on the road. That’s the gap. Your commercial auto policy covers the trucks you own. It says nothing about the pickup your employee drives unless somebody added hired and non-owned auto to it. Most lawn and irrigation crews run this way for years without a claim, which is why the line gets skipped. Here’s how the claim actually stacks up, what hired and non-owned auto does about it, and what it doesn’t.

Two words, two vehicles

Non-owned is the employee’s own truck used for your business. Driving to the job, running to the supply house for a valve box, towing your trailer with the Yanmar mini skid steer on it. Under most standard forms, a non-owned auto is one your business doesn’t own, lease, hire, or borrow, which in practice means the crew’s personal vehicles.

Hired is a vehicle you rent or borrow. The lowboy from the rental yard for a week, the dump truck you lease for a big install, a neighbor’s flatbed you borrowed for a Saturday.

Hired and non-owned auto (people say HNOA) is a liability coverage for both. Injury and property damage to other people, arising from the use of those vehicles for your business. It rides on your commercial auto policy as a symbol and a line, or as an endorsement on a GL or business owners policy when there are no owned trucks.

How the claim stacks

Take the I-225 scenario. The employee’s F-250 is his. His personal auto policy is written to cover him, and under most standard forms it responds first to a claim from a vehicle it insures. Your hired and non-owned coverage, under most forms, is excess over whatever insurance covers the vehicle. So the order is: his policy, then yours.

That order is where the gap lives, for three reasons.

His limits are his. Colorado sets a floor, and a lot of personal policies sit right on it.

If the minivan has two people in it with real injuries, the per-person and per-accident numbers on a minimum-limits policy are gone in the first week. Everything above that comes to the next policy in line. If there’s no HNOA on your side, the next policy in line is your bank account and the lawsuit names your business, because he was on your clock.

His policy may not respond at all. Personal auto policies commonly exclude or restrict business use, and a pickup pulling a commercial trailer to a paying job is a hard case to argue as personal. Some personal carriers cover commuting and incidental business use; some walk away the moment there’s a business trailer on the hitch. The policy language on his policy controls, and you’ve probably never read it. If it declines, your HNOA is the first policy that does respond, at your limit.

The trailer is yours. Liability for a trailer typically follows the power unit, so the personal policy is still first for the trailer’s role in the crash. But physical damage to the trailer, and to the machine on it, is not a liability question. The trailer needs to be scheduled on your auto policy for physical damage, and the mini skid steer belongs on your equipment schedule. Neither is what HNOA does.

What HNOA doesn’t do

Say it plainly, because the name suggests more than the form delivers.

• It doesn’t cover damage to the employee’s truck. That’s his collision coverage, or his problem.
• It doesn’t cover damage to the rented lowboy. That’s hired physical damage, a separate coverage you buy or a loss-damage waiver from the rental yard, and the rental agreement makes you responsible either way.
• It doesn’t cover the employee’s own injuries. That’s workers’ comp when he’s on the clock.
• It doesn’t turn a personal pickup into a scheduled truck. If the same employee drives the same F-250 every day for your business, some carriers will call that a regularly furnished vehicle and want it on the policy.

Every one of those gaps has a coverage that closes it. None of them is HNOA.

Why lawn and irrigation crews get this wrong

The pattern in this trade is a couple of owned trucks on a commercial auto policy, three or four crew members, and a habit of letting the crew lead take the trailer home. It’s efficient. He lives closer to the Tuesday route than the yard does. The business never owns the vehicle, so nobody thinks about insuring it, and the commercial auto policy was written for the trucks with the logos.

Then it’s March, the first mow of the season on the Front Range, and the pickup pulling a 16-foot trailer through a freeze-thaw pothole on Havana Street loses the trailer into oncoming traffic. Under most forms, HNOA is the coverage that makes that your carrier’s claim instead of your own. The lawn care page covers the rest of the stack for that crew, and the landscaping hub covers the trades around it.

The snow plowing version of this problem is worse, because the personal pickup has a blade on it and a paying contract behind it.

What to check on the dec page

The umbrella article explains that last row. An umbrella sitting over an auto policy with no HNOA has nothing to sit on for the employee’s truck.

The other fixes

HNOA is the usual answer. It’s not the only one.

Put the truck on the policy. If one employee’s pickup is really your third truck, the cleanest fix is to schedule it on the commercial auto policy with his permission, or to have the business buy it. Costs more. Closes the gap completely, including physical damage.

Require limits and check them. Some outfits require anyone who drives for the business to carry liability above the state minimum and to show a certificate at hire and renewal. It doesn’t replace HNOA, because his policy can still exclude business use. It does thicken the first layer.

Stop letting the trailer go home. The trailer stays at the yard, the crew rides in owned trucks. Simple, and the reason a lot of crews won’t do it is that the yard is in Denver and the route is in Parker.

What to do this week

Ask two questions. Who drives their own vehicle for the business, even sometimes? And does the auto dec page show hired and non-owned symbols next to the liability limit? If the first list has names on it and the second answer is no, that’s the gap, and it’s one of the least expensive lines in the whole stack to close.

Where to go from here

The fastest way to know is to send the auto dec page through a policy review and let us look for the symbols. If you’re building a policy from scratch for a crew that runs this way, Get Insured starts with the vehicle list and who drives what. Crews working across Aurora and the east metro will find the commercial auto page covers the owned-truck side of the same conversation.

Serving businesses located in Colorado. Coverage is determined by the policy language and the carrier.