Do I Have To Get Insurance For A Courier Driver?

When you haven't shipped many things with courier companies before, one of the most confusing elements of this new service can be the insurance requirements. If you're sending something with a New York courier service, they are undoubtedly going to mention insurance to you, but if they quite often are going to assume that you know how courier insurance works and aren't going to give you any additional information, which could leave you with some questions about how it works. So, are you required to buy additional insurance in order to cover the driver that you are going to be hiring from the courier company?

Courier companies are going to be trying to protect their own interests as much as you are going to be trying to protect yours, and this means that generally speaking they are going to have more than enough insurance without you having to worry about taking out any additional policies. In fact, most courier companies actually have two different types of insurance. They have specialized courier insurance which protects the value of the goods that they are shipping in case of accidents that can damage them like weather, traffic collisions, and theft. Then, there will be regular driver insurance which will cover the driver and the vehicles in the case of accidents. The types of insurance available for driver coverage are different from state to state, but a good courier company will usually take out the maximum variety of insurance.

The short version of all this is that any good courier company is going to have insurance; otherwise they would not be able to operate legally. However, there is one specialized situation where you might want to take out additional insurance, but this isn't going to be for the driver but for the actual value of your goods. There are some companies that ship very expensive goods, either high value small packages through a courier company, or extremely large shipments of lesser valued cargo which are worth a high value as a combined load. In these cases, the courier insurance may not represent a high enough protection value to cover your goods. In that situation, you would want to contact your insurance provider and look into what kind of extra protection policies you could take out on the shipment while it is in transit. That way you know that you won't be facing a loss on your goods should something happen to them.