How Your Workers' Comp EMR Threshold Changes by Owner

Updated September 15, 2026

You cleared a GC’s prequalification at 1.05 last month. This month a different GC on a similar job won’t touch you above 1.0. Nothing about your mod changed. The owner did.

There is no single national threshold

The threshold your GC sets isn’t a law or an industry standard. It’s a number an owner, a GC, or an agency decided on, usually to give their own reviewers a fast, defensible cutoff. That means the number that matters on any given job depends on who’s buying, not on a rule you can look up once and apply everywhere. Here’s the pattern across the four kinds of buyers you’re most likely to run into.

Private general contractors

A private GC’s threshold is whatever their risk management or legal team decided protects them, and it’s rarely published anywhere you can search for it. Most cluster around 1.0, because it’s the cleanest story to tell an owner or an insurer: every sub on this job has a claims history that looks average or better. Some private GCs will still consider a sub slightly above 1.0 if the rest of the package is strong and someone is willing to make an exception. Others won’t. You often can’t tell which kind you’re dealing with until you ask, or until you’re already off the list. Your surety agent, who reviews prequalification requirements for bonding purposes anyway, often has a read on which GCs in your market fall into which camp, even without a published number to point to.

Public agencies

Public agencies more often write the threshold directly into the bid specification, because a public bid process has to be defensible to anyone who didn’t win. When a ceiling is written into the spec, it isn’t a guideline. Meet it, or your bid isn’t read, full stop, regardless of how strong the rest of your package is. The number an agency chooses, and whether it’s 1.0 or something else, is set by that agency’s own policy, and it can vary by trade, by contract size, or by hazard class within the same agency. Where an agency publishes a specific ceiling, that’s the number to cite for that job. This article doesn’t cite one because doing so accurately means pulling the current spec for the job in front of you, not repeating a number that may already be out of date.

Institutional owners

Universities, hospital systems, and large private developers who self-perform owner’s representative work tend to land somewhere between the other two. Some publish a standard in their contractor handbook or standing prequalification form. Others leave it to the construction manager’s judgment on a job-by-job basis. Institutional owners are also the group most likely to set a tighter threshold, sometimes below 1.0, on higher-hazard scopes like structural steel, demolition, or roofing, because their own insurance program is more exposed on those trades.

Federal work

Federal contracting runs through its own prequalification and responsibility-determination process, and workers’ comp experience rating isn’t always a bright-line cutoff the way it is on a private or public bid. A contracting officer’s responsibility determination looks at safety record as one factor among several, and a mod above 1.0 is more likely to prompt a question than an automatic disqualification, though a pattern of claims combined with other red flags can still sink a bid. Federal small business and safety requirements vary by agency and by contract vehicle, and the specific rules for the solicitation in front of you are worth reading directly rather than assumed from a general pattern.

Why the pattern holds even without a published number

Even where an owner doesn’t publish a threshold, the underlying logic is consistent across all four groups. Whoever is screening bids wants a defensible, low-effort way to show that every sub on the job meets some baseline, and a single number on a form is the cheapest way to demonstrate that to whoever they answer to, whether that’s an owner, the public, or an agency’s own compliance office. That’s why 1.0 shows up so often as the default even when nothing requires it specifically. It’s not a standard. It’s the number that’s easiest to defend.

That also means the threshold can move without warning. A GC that considered exceptions last year can tighten its policy after a bad experience with a sub whose mod looked fine on paper. A public agency can revise its bid template. Treating any number you’ve seen once as permanent is the mistake worth avoiding, on top of not assuming one buyer’s threshold applies to the next.

What this means when you’re bidding

Because the number varies by buyer, the useful habit isn’t memorizing a threshold. It’s checking the actual bid document or prequalification form for this job, every time, instead of assuming last job’s cutoff applies again. If the spec states a number, that’s the number. If it doesn’t, ask before you assume you’re in or out.

What doesn’t vary by buyer is whether your number is accurate. A mod that’s wrong because of a stale reserve or a misclassified payroll figure costs you the same way in front of every kind of owner. The free EMR Cost & Bid Check calculator shows what your current mod is costing you against common thresholds. A full verification compares your worksheet against your actual loss runs and payroll and tells you exactly what to send your agent or carrier if something’s wrong. It’s a flat fee, no contingency, and the savings are yours. Get on the waitlist to be first in line.