Why 1.0 Is the Line for Your Contractor EMR

Updated September 12, 2026

You submitted the prequalification package. Insurance certificates, safety record, references, bonding capacity, and one line asking for your workers’ comp experience mod. A week later you hear you’re not on the bid list. Nobody explained why. It was the number.

The threshold is easy to check and hard to argue with

Your EMR (experience modification rate), covered in full in what an EMR is, is a single figure that’s easy to put on a form and easy to compare across bidders. A GC evaluating forty subcontractors for a job doesn’t have time to read anyone’s loss runs. They have time to check a box: mod under 1.0, or not.

That’s why 1.0 shows up so often. It isn’t a legal requirement in most cases. It’s the threshold your GC sets, and it’s popular because it has a clean story: 1.0 means your claims history looks average for a contractor doing your kind of work. Below 1.0, better than average. Above, worse. A GC can point to that number and tell an owner, a bonding company, or their own insurer that every sub on the job meets a baseline.

Public agencies often go further and write a mod ceiling directly into the bid specification. Meet it, or your bid isn’t read. Some large owners and construction managers use a different number entirely, sometimes 1.1 or 1.2, sometimes lower than 1.0 on higher-hazard scopes. There’s no single national standard. The number that matters on any given job is whatever that GC, owner, or agency wrote into their prequalification requirements, not a rule you can look up once and rely on everywhere.

What changes as you cross the line

Below 1.0, you’re generally on the list. The prequalification software or the reviewer’s checklist clears you, and the rest of your package, safety record, references, capacity, is what actually gets read.

Between roughly 1.0 and 1.2, treatment varies a lot by GC. Some will still consider you if the rest of your package is strong, sometimes with extra questions about what happened and what you’ve done since. Others cut off cleanly at 1.0 with no exceptions, regardless of the story behind the number. You often can’t tell which kind of GC you’re dealing with until you ask, or until you’re already excluded.

Above that range, most GCs stop making exceptions. The mod alone removes you from consideration before anyone looks at your safety program, your references, or how the claim actually happened. This is the part that frustrates contractors most. A mod driven by one bad year, one large but well-managed claim, or a data error looks identical on the form to a genuine pattern of poor safety. The number doesn’t carry context. It’s just a number, and a stale or wrong one costs exactly as much as an accurate one.

The same number shows up in more than one place

Bid prequalification isn’t the only conversation where this comes up. Your surety, the company that issues your bonds, looks at your mod as part of deciding your bonding capacity, and a rising mod can shrink the size of job you’re able to bond even before any GC sees the number. Your own insurance renewal is shaped by it too, since the mod is a direct multiplier on your premium, separate from whether anyone is using it to screen bids at all.

That means a mod problem isn’t only a bid-eligibility problem. It can cost you jobs you never got to bid on, room on your bonding line, and money on every renewal, all from the same underlying number. Fixing what’s wrong with it pays off in more than one of these places at once, which is worth knowing before you decide whether it’s worth the effort.

The number a GC sees today may already be wrong

The three-year window and one-year lag behind the calculation mean a mod above the threshold today can reflect a claim from years ago that’s already closed, or a payroll or class code error nobody’s looked at since it was filed. None of that shows up on the bid form. The GC sees 1.09. They don’t see that it’s 1.09 because of a reserve that should have dropped, or a claim coded to the wrong entity after an ownership change. The number is the number, until someone checks what’s behind it.

What you can do about it

You can’t negotiate the threshold. That’s the GC’s or owner’s call, and it’s usually not up for discussion mid-bid. What you can do is make sure the number reflects reality.

That means getting your current experience rating worksheet (the bureau’s document showing the calculation) and your loss runs (the carrier’s list of your claims and their current values), and checking them against each other, line by line, before the number you’re quoting on a bid form is the number you’re stuck defending.

If you’re at 1.04 because of a claim that should have closed two years ago, that’s fixable. Not instantly, and not by pulling a lever, but by getting the correct information in front of your carrier before the next reporting date. If you’re at 1.04 because your claims really do run high, that’s a different conversation, and worth having honestly rather than hoping nobody checks.

Either way, the first step is knowing which one you’re dealing with. The free EMR Cost & Bid Check calculator gives you a starting read on what your mod is costing you in lost bid eligibility. 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.