What is a CG 20 01 endorsement?

The practical answer

CG 20 01 is the ISO form titled Primary and Noncontributory: Other Insurance Condition. It changes the other insurance condition in a commercial general liability policy so that the policy pays first and does not ask your policy to contribute, where a written contract signed before the loss requires exactly that.

It answers a question that only becomes urgent on the day of a claim: two policies could respond, so whose pays, and in what order. Without it, both insurers can point at each other's other insurance clauses and share the loss, which puts a claim caused by your vendor onto your own loss history.

What primary and noncontributory actually means

Primary means the policy responds from the first dollar rather than sitting excess over anything else that might apply. Noncontributory means the insurer will not demand that another insurer share the loss proportionally.

Standard unendorsed general liability wording does the opposite. It typically makes coverage excess where the insured is an additional insured on somebody else's policy, and pro rata where two policies both apply on a primary basis. The endorsement overrides that, and only in the circumstances it describes.

The conditions inside the form

• The additional insured has to be an additional insured on the policy in the first place. CG 20 01 changes priority, it does not grant status. It has to sit alongside a CG 20 10, CG 20 37, CG 20 26 or equivalent.
• There has to be a written contract requiring the insurance to be primary and noncontributory.
• The contract has to have been executed before the loss. A requirement agreed after the incident does not reach back.
• It applies to coverage under the policy it is attached to. It does not by itself put an umbrella or excess layer on the same footing, which is a separate question about the excess policy's own other insurance wording.

Why the certificate is not evidence

The single most common way this requirement fails is a sentence in the DESCRIPTION OF OPERATIONS box reading something like coverage is primary and non-contributory as required by written contract. That is free text typed by someone at the agency. The ACORD 25 says on its face that it confers no rights and does not amend the policy, which means the sentence has no effect on the contract of insurance.

Verification means the endorsement. Either CG 20 01, or carrier proprietary wording, or the primary and noncontributory language embedded inside a broad-form additional insured endorsement, which some carriers do include. Any of those is fine. The sentence in the box is not.

How to verify it

• Collect the endorsement pages behind the certificate, not the certificate alone.
• Look for CG 20 01 by number, or read the additional insured endorsement to see whether it already contains primary and noncontributory wording.
• Check the edition date. The 04 13 and 12 19 editions are the ones in common circulation.
• Match the policy number and effective dates to the certificate face.
• Confirm the additional insured endorsement exists too. Priority wording with no additional insured status behind it changes nothing.
• If your contract expects the umbrella to follow, ask for the excess policy's other insurance provision or a follow-form endorsement. The primary policy's CG 20 01 does not answer that.

Writing the requirement so it can be met

Requirements that name only the phrase produce certificates with the phrase typed in the box. Requirements that name the evidence produce endorsements. A workable clause asks for additional insured status on ongoing and completed operations, on a primary and non-contributory basis, evidenced by endorsement, with copies of the endorsements provided with the certificate.

Then record it as its own line in your review, separate from the additional insured check. Two requirements collapsed into one field is how a missing CG 20 01 gets approved for three renewals in a row.