The Subcontractor Indemnity Agreement Guide for General Contractors

What Is a Subcontractor Indemnity Agreement?

A subcontractor indemnity agreement is the part of a construction subcontract where the subcontractor agrees to cover — or "indemnify" — the general contractor for certain losses, claims, or lawsuits that come out of the subcontractor's work. In plain terms: if a subcontractor's crew causes an injury, property damage, or a defect claim, the indemnity clause is what determines who actually pays for it, and how much of it gets pushed back down to the sub instead of landing entirely on the GC.

Every GC who hires subcontractors is already relying on indemnity language, whether they wrote it carefully or copied it from an old template. The problem is that most GCs treat it as boilerplate — a paragraph their attorney drafted once, years ago, that gets pasted into every subcontract without much thought about whether it still fits the job, the state, or the sub's actual insurance program.

That last part is the piece almost nobody talks about: an indemnity clause is only as good as the insurance behind it. A subcontractor can sign the most aggressive indemnity language in the world, but if their general liability policy doesn't name the GC as an additional insured, if their certificate of insurance is six months expired, or if there's no waiver of subrogation in place, that promise on paper may never turn into an actual payout when something goes wrong. This site exists to walk through that whole picture — the contract language and the coverage that has to back it up — in language built for a contractor running a business, not for another attorney.

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