ACORD 855 Form: What the NY Construction Addendum Shows
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Last updated August 2026.
The ACORD 855 is the New York Construction Certificate of Liability Insurance Addendum, a companion page attached to an ACORD 25. It asks the insured's broker to disclose what a certificate cannot show: which operations are excluded, whether coverage stops above a certain building height or below grade, which additional insured endorsement form is attached, and whether key coverage grants have been stripped out of the policy.
A certificate of insurance has no field for exclusions. That is the whole problem it was designed around. An ACORD 25 will tell you a contractor carries $2 million in general liability, and it will look identical whether that policy is clean or has been carved down to almost nothing by endorsement. New York construction losses kept turning on restrictions that no certificate could reveal, so ACORD published a form that asks the broker to state them in writing.
What is the ACORD 855 form?
It is a two-page addendum, published in 2013 and released in the ACORD 855 NY (2014/05) edition, that attaches to an ACORD 25 certificate for New York construction work. The header reads "New York Construction Certificate of Liability Insurance Addendum." Its disclaimer mirrors the certificate: it summarizes some of the policy provisions, is issued as a matter of information only, and does not affirmatively or negatively amend, extend or alter the coverage afforded by the policies.
What makes it useful is the structure. Instead of free text, it is a series of lettered questions with checkboxes, and several of them offer only two honest answers: yes, this coverage has been restricted, or no changes made. A broker who checks the boxes has made a specific, dated, signed statement about a specific policy. That is a very different document from a certificate someone typed a form number into.
What does the ACORD 855 ask?
The addendum runs from section A through section M. Each one targets a gap that a standard certificate leaves open.
| Section | What the broker must disclose | Why it matters to you |
|---|---|---|
| A. Insurer | Whether the carrier is admitted and authorized in New York, or excess line / free trade zone. | A non-admitted carrier is not backed by the state guaranty fund. If it becomes insolvent, there is no safety net behind the policy. |
| B. General liability policy form | Whether the policy is written on the ISO form or an ISO modified form. | A proprietary or heavily modified form means the standard analysis you apply to every other certificate may not hold. |
| C. Specific operations excluded or restricted | Restrictions by location, type of construction, building height, classification and designated work. | This is the headline section. A roofer whose policy stops above three stories is uninsured on your fourth floor, and nothing on the ACORD 25 says so. |
| D. Additional insured endorsement | Which form is attached, by number: CG 20 10, CG 20 26, CG 20 32, CG 20 33, CG 20 37 or CG 20 38, or another form identified by number and title. | Forces the broker to name the actual form instead of writing "additional insured as required by written contract" in the remarks box. |
| E. Primary and noncontributory | Whether the additional insured has primary and noncontributory coverage under the policy terms. | Without it, your own carrier can end up sharing a loss your contract said the vendor would carry alone. |
| F. Notice of cancellation | Whether the additional insured gets advance notice if the insurer cancels. | Tells you whether you will find out about a lapse from the carrier or from a claim. |
| G. Blanket contractual liability | Whether paragraph f of the insured contract definition (Section V, item 9) has been removed or restricted. | That paragraph is what insures the indemnity clause in your subcontract. Strip it and the indemnity you negotiated may be uninsured. |
| H. Employers liability exception | Whether the insured contract exception to the employers liability exclusion has been removed or modified. | Directly affects whether the policy responds when an injured worker sues you and the contractor owes you indemnity. |
| I. Injury to employees of the named insured or subcontractors | Whether the policy excludes the additional insured for claims involving injury to those workers. | In New York this is the claim. An action-over exclusion here can make additional insured status worthless on a Labor Law case. |
| J. Earth movement, excavation, explosion, collapse, underground damage | Whether these are excluded or restricted. | The classic XCU restrictions. Critical for excavation, foundation, shoring and utility work. |
| K. Insured vs insured suits | Whether cross liability claims are excluded or restricted, beyond named insured against named insured. | Can block the additional insured from making a claim against the very policy it was added to. |
| L. Damage to work performed by subcontractors | Whether the subcontractor exception to the damage-to-your-work exclusion has been removed. | This is the CG 22 94 and CG 22 95 question. Removing it deletes most construction defect coverage. |
| M. Excess / umbrella | Whether the umbrella is primary and noncontributory for additional insureds, by policy provision or by endorsement. | A follow-form assumption is often wrong. The umbrella can behave differently from the underlying policy. |
Read that list next to a certificate and the contrast is obvious. The ACORD 25 reports limits and dates. The 855 reports what was taken away. Sections G, I and L in particular map onto restrictive endorsements we cover in detail: our reference table of certificate of insurance endorsements names the ISO forms behind them, and the section L question is precisely what CG 22 94 and CG 22 95 do.
Who fills out the ACORD 855?
The insured's designated representative, which in practice means the insurance broker or agent who placed the policy, completes it and an authorized representative signs and dates it. The contractor cannot fill it out themselves, and neither can you. That is the point: it moves the statement from the party with the incentive to the party with the policy file in front of them.
This is also why the requirement has to live in the contract. A broker will not volunteer an 855, and a subcontractor will not ask for one unless their agreement says they must. The clean way to handle it is to name the addendum in the insurance article of the subcontract itself, alongside the certificate and endorsement requirements, so it goes out with every subcontract rather than becoming a separate chase after the fact.
Is the ACORD 855 required in New York?
It is not a statutory requirement that applies to all New York construction. It is a contractual one, and it became widespread because major owners started demanding it. New York State's Office of General Services has required the addendum on its construction contracts since October 2016, and private owners, developers and general contractors have adopted the same language. So whether you must produce one depends entirely on the contract in front of you, and increasingly the answer is yes.
Why did New York need its own form?
Because of Labor Law sections 240 and 241, the scaffold law provisions that impose absolute liability on owners and general contractors for certain gravity-related worker injuries. It is a deep and still-moving body of case law, and worth searching by the legal question itself if you want to see how courts have applied it to a fact pattern like yours. When liability attaches to you regardless of fault, the only real protection is the contractor's insurance actually responding. New York carriers responded to that exposure with restrictions: action-over exclusions, height limitations, classification limits, contractual liability carve-backs. All of them are invisible on an ACORD 25. The 855 was built to make them visible before the accident, not after.
What is the difference between an ACORD 25 and an ACORD 855?
The ACORD 25 tells you what coverage exists. The ACORD 855 tells you what has been removed from it. The certificate lists carriers, policy numbers, dates and limits in a fixed grid. The addendum asks thirteen targeted questions about restrictions, exclusions and endorsement forms, and requires a signature. Neither one amends the policy, and neither is a substitute for the endorsements themselves, but the 855 is the only one of the two that was designed to surface bad news.
They are also not interchangeable. The 855 is an addendum, printed with the instruction to attach it to an ACORD 25. If a contractor sends you an 855 with no certificate, you are missing the coverage summary. If they send a certificate with no 855 on a contract that required one, the submission is incomplete.
Does the ACORD 855 change the coverage?
No. The disclaimer at the top of the form is explicit that it does not affirmatively or negatively amend, extend or alter the coverage afforded by the policies, and that all terms, exclusions and conditions in the actual policy should be consulted for a more detailed analysis. Like a certificate, it is a summary made by an intermediary. Its value is evidentiary and practical rather than contractual: it puts a broker's signed statement on the record, and it tells you exactly which endorsements to request copies of.
Can you use the ACORD 855 outside New York?
Yes, and it is underused. Nothing in the form limits its logic to New York except the section A question about admitted status and the header. Height restrictions, action-over exclusions, XCU limitations and stripped contractual liability show up on construction policies in every state. A risk manager in Texas or Florida who attaches the 855 to their standard insurance requirements gets the same disclosure, and most brokers will complete it because it is a recognized industry form rather than a homemade questionnaire.
The practical caveat is that a broker outside New York may not have seen it before, so expect a phone call the first few times. That is a reasonable trade for finding out about an action-over exclusion during onboarding instead of during litigation.
How to actually use it
Treat it as a screening tool, not a filing requirement. The value is entirely in reading the answers.
- Require it in the subcontract, not in an email. Name the ACORD 855 in the insurance article alongside the certificate, the endorsement forms and the limits. A requirement that lives in a reminder email gets ignored.
- Read sections C, I and L first. Height and classification limits, action-over exclusions and the subcontractor work exclusion are the three that most often turn a compliant-looking contractor into an uninsured one on your project.
- Use section D as a shopping list. Once the broker names the additional insured form by number, request a copy of that endorsement. The form number on the 855 is a claim; the endorsement itself is the proof.
- Escalate the "no other option is available with this insurer" answers. That checkbox is the broker telling you the restriction is not negotiable with this carrier. It is a decision point about whether that contractor is acceptable, not a box to file.
- Keep it with the certificate. The addendum is only meaningful against the policy period it describes, so it renews when the certificate renews.
Where this fits in certificate review
Collecting an 855 does not make the review easier by itself. It adds a second document per contractor, with thirteen answers that someone has to read, compare against the subcontract, and re-read at every renewal. Across a few hundred subcontractors that is the same volume problem that makes manual certificate tracking fall over, which is why the addendum tends to get filed rather than analyzed.
That is document work a machine handles well: identify the form, extract the answers as data, flag the restrictions that conflict with your requirements, and surface only the contractors who need a human decision. Our guide to the full ACORD forms family covers which documents actually confer rights, how to read a certificate of insurance walks the ACORD 25 box by box, and subcontractor COI tracking is where this workload usually concentrates. If you want the underlying extraction, COI verification software checks limits, dates and endorsements on every certificate automatically.
The short version
The ACORD 855 exists because an ACORD 25 cannot tell you what a policy excludes, and in construction the exclusions are where the money is. It costs a broker ten minutes, it is a recognized industry form, and it converts "the contractor has $2 million in general liability" into a signed statement about whether that $2 million will actually be there when a worker falls. If your subcontracts do not ask for it, the cheapest risk management change available to you this quarter is adding one paragraph that does.
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