An employee, not a guest
A housekeeper, nanny, groundskeeper, or other household employee creates a fundamentally different liability category than a visitor to your home. Depending on how the employment is structured, a homeowner can carry exposure for workplace injury, wage and hour claims, and general liability tied to the employee’s work, exposures a standard homeowners policy generally wasn’t built to address at all.
Where this commonly goes wrong
- Misclassifying staff as independent contractors when the working relationship actually meets the legal test for employment, which affects what coverage is actually required
- Assuming homeowners liability covers workplace injury, when a domestic workers’ compensation policy is often the appropriate coverage instead
- Overlooking staff who work for the household but aren’t full-time, seasonal groundskeepers, part-time housekeepers, who still create real exposure
Talk to a specialist
Have a question about how this applies to your specific property? A quick conversation is faster than reading the rest of this guide.
What proper coverage looks like
Depending on the specifics, this can mean a domestic workers’ compensation policy, employment practices liability coverage, and an umbrella limit that accounts for staff-related exposure on top of everything else. The right combination depends on how many staff, what they do, and how they’re classified, which is exactly why this gets reviewed individually rather than assumed.
The household staff that make a large home function are also the most overlooked liability exposure most high-net-worth homeowners carry.
Where this fits
We identify staff-related exposure specifically during the full asset review, since it’s easy to miss if nobody asks the question directly.