CG 20 10 Edition Dates: 11 85 vs 10 01 vs 04 13 vs 12 19

Last updated August 2026.

The four digits printed after CG 20 10 are the edition date, and they change what the endorsement actually does. The 11 85 edition covered the additional insured for both ongoing and completed operations. Every edition from 10 01 onward covers ongoing operations only, which is why CG 20 37 has to be added separately. The 04 13 edition added two limitations that most contract administrators miss: coverage applies only to the extent permitted by law, and it can never be broader than what your contract required.

Nobody reads the edition date. It sits in the top right corner of the endorsement in a smaller font than the form number, and a compliance review that confirms "CG 20 10 attached" and moves on has skipped the part that decides whether the coverage reaches the claim. Two vendors can both hand you a CG 20 10 and be carrying materially different protection for you.

What do the numbers after CG 20 10 mean?

They are a month and year. CG 20 10 04 13 means the April 2013 edition of form CG 20 10. ISO revises its forms periodically, and each revision gets a new edition date while the form number stays the same. The endorsement your vendor's carrier attached is whichever edition that carrier has filed and is using, and it is not necessarily the one your contract asked for.

Read it in the top right corner of the endorsement page, on the same line as the words COMMERCIAL GENERAL LIABILITY, and again in the footer next to the ISO copyright notice. Both places will show the same thing.

CG 20 10 edition dates compared

CG 20 10 11 85: why contracts still demand an edition nobody issues

The November 1985 edition granted additional insured status for liability "arising out of your work" for that party. "Your work" is a defined term in the commercial general liability form and it includes work that has been completed. So a single endorsement covered the owner or general contractor during the job and after it was finished, and it did so without asking who caused the loss.

That breadth is exactly why it disappeared. It is also why the phrase "CG 20 10 11 85 or its equivalent" is still copied into subcontracts and lease riders written this year. Demanding it usually accomplishes nothing. Most carriers cannot issue a form they no longer file, so the requirement either gets ignored, gets papered over with a manuscript endorsement of unknown breadth, or holds up the vendor's start date while everyone argues.

If you find that clause in your template, the useful replacement is to require the current scheduled pair, CG 20 10 plus CG 20 37, or their blanket equivalents. That gets you ongoing and completed operations under forms a carrier will actually attach.

CG 20 10 10 01: where completed operations went

In October 2001 ISO narrowed the grant to liability arising out of "your ongoing operations" for the additional insured, and published CG 20 37 10 01 at the same time to carry completed operations separately. That single edit is the reason additional insured coverage now takes two forms instead of one.

The practical failure it creates shows up years later. A subcontractor finishes a build-out, the certificate showed a CG 20 10, everyone filed it, and a defect claim arrives eighteen months after the work was accepted. Under a 10 01 or later edition of CG 20 10 alone, the additional insured has no coverage for that claim, because the operations are no longer ongoing. That gap is the single most common additional insured failure, and it is invisible on the certificate.

The 10 01 edition did have one advantage over what followed. It contained no causation language, so it was not limited to losses the named insured helped cause. That advantage lasted three years.

CG 20 10 07 04: the causation test arrives

The July 2004 edition inserted the phrase that now defines the form: coverage applies to liability "caused, in whole or in part, by" the named insured's acts or omissions, or the acts or omissions of those acting on the named insured's behalf. Before this edit, an additional insured could argue coverage for a loss merely connected to the vendor's operations. After it, the vendor's conduct has to be at least part of the cause.

The "in whole or in part" wording still helps you. Partial fault by the vendor is enough to trigger the coverage, so a shared-fault loss is not automatically excluded.

CG 20 10 04 13: the two limitations most reviewers miss

The April 2013 edition is the one on most of the endorsements you will receive, and it added restrictions that quietly move risk back to you. Reading from the form itself:

• "The insurance afforded to such additional insured only applies to the extent permitted by law." This is aimed at state anti-indemnity statutes. Where a state limits or voids agreements that transfer a party's own negligence, the endorsement now follows that limit rather than fighting it.
• "If coverage provided to the additional insured is required by a contract or agreement, the insurance afforded to such additional insured will not be broader than that which you are required by the contract or agreement to provide." Your contract language is now the ceiling on your own coverage. A thin or sloppy insurance clause produces thin coverage even under a generous policy.
• A limits cap. Section C adds that where a contract requires the coverage, the most the insurer will pay for the additional insured is the amount required by the contract, or the amount available under the policy limits, whichever is less.

Read those together and the consequence is direct: from the 04 13 edition forward, the insurance requirements clause in your own contract is doing as much work as the endorsement. If your template asks for $1 million and the vendor carries $5 million, you have $1 million. This is the strongest argument for keeping contract insurance requirements current rather than inheriting them from a decade-old template. When the requirement sits in a lease rather than a construction agreement, the limits and the required forms are usually buried in the insurance article, which is one of the terms worth pulling out when you abstract the lease into a structured summary instead of leaving it in the PDF.

CG 20 10 12 19: what the 2019 edition changed

The December 2019 edition left the grant of coverage alone. What it changed is the limits provision: ISO removed the phrase "shown in the Declarations" and replaced it with a statement that the endorsement shall not increase the applicable limits of insurance. The effect is that the additional insured's limits are read against the limits actually applicable under the policy, including any other provision that modifies them, rather than being anchored to the declarations page figure.

The same 2019 revision also introduced two new automatic status forms for completed operations, CG 20 39 and CG 20 40. CG 20 39 requires a written agreement directly between the named insured and the additional insured. CG 20 40 extends automatic status to other parties required to be named under a written construction agreement, without that direct privity. Both exclude professional architectural, engineering and surveying services, which the older CG 20 37 does not.

CG 20 37 edition dates

CG 20 37, Additional Insured, Owners, Lessees or Contractors, Completed Operations, tracks the same revision cycle. The 10 01 edition arrived with the split described above. The 07 04 edition picked up the same causation test. The 04 13 edition added the same "to the extent permitted by law" and not-broader-than-contract limitations, and the 12 19 edition carried the same limits wording change.

Because the two forms move together, an edition mismatch is worth a second look. A CG 20 10 04 13 paired with a CG 20 37 10 01 is not wrong, but it usually means the endorsements were attached at different times, which is a reason to check that the completed operations form is still on the current policy term and not left over from an expired one.

Which CG 20 10 edition should you require?

Ask for the current edition of both forms rather than naming an edition date at all. A clause that requires "additional insured status for ongoing and completed operations on ISO forms CG 20 10 and CG 20 37, or equivalent blanket forms, current editions" is enforceable, gets you what you need, and does not break when ISO revises the forms again.

Two things are worth adding to that clause. State a required limit deliberately, since under 04 13 and later editions that number caps your recovery. And require the endorsements themselves, not a certificate that mentions them, because the certificate confers nothing and the ADDL INSD checkbox proves only that somebody ticked a box.

If your vendors are on blanket forms instead of scheduled ones, the equivalent pair is CG 20 33 or CG 20 38 for ongoing operations, and the completed operations coverage has to come from somewhere else. That gap is worked through in the comparison of CG 20 33 and CG 20 38 blanket additional insured forms.

Where is the edition date on the endorsement?

Top right of the first page, immediately under the words COMMERCIAL GENERAL LIABILITY, in the format CG 20 10 04 13. It repeats in the bottom footer beside the ISO copyright line. On a certificate of insurance you will usually not see it at all, because the ACORD 25 has no field for it. If the edition date matters to your contract, it has to be requested along with the endorsement copy, or written into the Description of Operations box or an attached ACORD 101.

Does the edition date change whether the endorsement is primary?

No. None of the CG 20 10 editions make the coverage primary and non-contributory on their own. Primary and non-contributory status comes from a separate endorsement, typically CG 20 01, or from the policy's other insurance condition. A contract that requires additional insured status but forgets primary wording can leave your own policy contributing to a loss your vendor caused. That is covered in more detail in the explanation of the primary and non-contributory endorsement.

How do you check editions across every vendor you track?

Reading one endorsement is easy. Reading them across four hundred vendors, at renewal, every year, is where it breaks down, which is why edition drift usually goes unnoticed until a claim. Additional insured endorsement tracking works by extracting the form number and edition date from the endorsement page itself, comparing them against the requirement recorded for that contract, and flagging the vendor whose carrier quietly moved from one edition to another at renewal.

That is what COI verification software is for. Upload the certificate and the endorsement pages together, and the form numbers, edition dates and expiration dates come back as data you can filter, rather than a PDF somebody has to open.

For the underlying question of which of the two scheduled forms you need in the first place, see CG 20 10 vs CG 20 37. For the full list of ISO endorsement forms that turn up on a certificate, see the certificate of insurance endorsements reference.