General liability will not pay to rip out and redo defective wiring you installed — the standard policy treats fixing your own faulty work as a cost of doing business, not a covered third-party claim. What the same policy does answer is the damage that failed wiring does to someone else’s property.
The short version: the standard general liability policy is third-party coverage. It is built to pay when your electrical work injures someone or damages other people’s property — not to guarantee that the panel, circuit, or connection you installed came out right. This post draws the single line owners get wrong most often: the redo of your own work that the policy declines, versus the third-party damage it covers. Its mirror image is the sibling post on the electrical fire that damages other property — the covered side of the same line. The general liability page owns the full coverage architecture; this post is about the one distinction that surprises electrical contractors at claim time.
What ‘your work’ means on a general liability policy
‘Your work’ is a defined term in the policy, and for an electrical contractor it is broad: the wiring, panels, and connections you install, the materials and equipment you furnish in connection with that work, and the representations you make about how it turned out. General liability is third-party insurance. It exists to pay when your operations cause bodily injury or property damage to other people and their property — not to warrant that the electrical you performed holds up.
That framing is the whole key. Because the electrical system you install is ‘your work,’ the policy draws a hard boundary around it: the harm your work does to others sits inside coverage, but restoring the work itself when it turns out to be defective sits outside it. Once you see that the wiring you installed is treated as your product rather than as someone else’s property, the exclusion below reads exactly the way it is meant to.
Why general liability will not redo your defective wiring
When an electrical contractor’s finished work fails, the standard commercial general liability form — typically the occurrence version known as CG 00 01 — does not pay to tear it out and put it right. The form carries an exclusion for property damage to your own completed work: once the job is finished and in service, damage to the work itself, arising out of that work, is carved out. In plain terms, the panel you set, the circuit you ran, or the termination you made is your work, and re-doing it because it was done wrong is not what this policy funds.
That is deliberate, not an oversight. Re-doing your own defective work is a business risk you control through your workmanship, your crews, your testing, and any warranty you extend — it is not a fortuitous third-party loss, and general liability is not designed to absorb it. The exclusion is described here in concept; the exact wording, the edition, and how it interacts with the rest of the form vary by carrier, so the honest instruction is to read what is actually attached to your policy rather than assume the standard result.
The other side of the line: the fire that damages other property
Here is where electrical contractors most often go wrong, because the exclusion and the coverage live in the same policy and arrive from the same failed connection. The exclusion declines to fund the redo of your own work. It does not decline the damage that failed work does to other property — and for electrical, that damage is frequently a fire.
A loose termination that overheats months after final inspection, an overloaded circuit that finally ignites, a bad splice in a junction box that arcs behind a finished wall — when that failure damages a building that is not yours, its contents, or a tenant’s equipment, the resulting third-party damage is the classic completed-operations claim general liability is built to answer. The policy will not buy the client a new panel because the old one was wired wrong, but it can respond to the fire and smoke damage that panel caused to everything around it.
What makes this bite for electrical specifically is the length of the tail. A panel, circuit, or connection you install keeps carrying load long after final payment — it heats and cools, works behind a finished wall, and can fail weeks, months, or years after the crew is gone. That is a longer completed-operations window than most trades carry, and it is exactly the window in which the worst claim tends to surface. For a contractor who runs fire-alarm or life-safety circuits, the same tail includes a life-safety system that does not do its job when a real fire finally tests it — a distinct third-party exposure the policy answers, entirely separate from the cost of correcting the wiring that failed.
That covered side is the entire subject of the sibling post on whether general liability covers an electrical fire after the job. The two posts are mirror images: this one explains why the policy will not redo your defective wiring, and that one explains why it will answer the third-party fire your wiring starts. Read together, they draw the full boundary — your work is excluded, the harm your work does to others is not.
Real-World Scenario: An electrical contractor wires a commercial tenant build-out, passes final inspection, energizes the system, and moves on. Months later a connection in the panel overheats behind a finished wall and starts a fire. Two repair bills follow: one to rip out and re-run the defective panel and circuit, and one to restore the fire-damaged space and replace the tenant’s ruined equipment. General liability declines the first — that is the contractor’s own defective work, carved out as ‘your work’ — and can respond to the second, the third-party fire damage the failure caused. Same event, two bills, opposite answers, split exactly along the line the exclusion draws.
When a subcontractor did the wiring
There is one built-in relief worth knowing, because it can shift the result. The standard your-work exclusion generally does not apply where the damaged work, or the work the damage arises out of, was performed on your behalf by a subcontractor. For an electrical contractor who hires out portions of a job — a low-voltage sub, a trenching crew, a helper firm on a large build — that carve-back can pull some completed-operations damage back into coverage that would otherwise be excluded as your own work.
It is also a provision a policy can quietly narrow. An endorsement can restrict or remove that subcontractor relief, and a policy written that way behaves very differently on a sub-driven claim than one that keeps the carve-back intact. Because its presence and breadth are not guaranteed, this is exactly the kind of language worth confirming on your own policy rather than assuming it reads the standard way.
General liability is not a warranty on your workmanship
The cleanest way to hold all of this is the framing the whole topic rests on: general liability is not a warranty, and it is not a performance bond on your own work. It protects others from your electrical work; it does not guarantee your electrical work to you. A warranty is the promise you make your client about your workmanship, and a performance bond is a surety instrument that answers if you fail to perform — both are yours to carry, and neither is what a liability policy replaces.
That is why the redo of your own defective work stays with you while the third-party damage it causes runs to the policy. It is also why general liability should never be sold or bought as a substitute for doing the work correctly the first time. The way to keep the exclusion from surprising you is to know, before a loss, which side of the line any given failure falls on — the same distinction that sits underneath the additional-insured endorsements a general contractor demands, covered in the post on additional insured for electricians, which extend the covered side to the GC, not the excluded redo of your work.
Know which side of the line before the loss
The takeaway is clean once the line is clear: general liability will not pay to rip out and redo defective wiring you installed, because the standard form treats that as a business cost through its exclusion for damage to your own completed work — but the same policy can answer the third-party fire and property damage that failure causes. Confirm whether your policy still carries the subcontractor relief, read the actual exclusion language rather than a label, and know which side of the line a given failure falls on before it happens. The distinction bites hardest on the commercial and industrial electrical work where completed-operations tails run long. When you are ready, start a quote, read the full general liability page for how the covered completed-operations side actually works, or browse the coverage overview to see where each line sits.