General Liability Loss Runs

What a GL loss run contains

• Claim number and date of loss — the carrier's reference and when the incident occurred.
• Date reported — when the carrier learned of it. On GL the gap between loss and report can be substantial.
• Claimant — often redacted or initialised on the copy released to an agent.
• Cause or type of loss — slip and fall, products, completed operations, personal and advertising injury, and so on. This is the column that tells the risk story.
• Status — open, closed, or closed without payment.
• Indemnity paid — money that reached the claimant.
• Expense paid — defence costs, investigation, adjusting.
• Outstanding reserves — the carrier's estimate of what remains to be paid on open claims.
• Total incurred — paid plus reserves. The number underwriters price from.

Indemnity and expense are not interchangeable

GL loss runs split the two for a reason, and reading only the total hides the shape of the book.

A claim that closed with zero indemnity but $40,000 of defence expense is not a nothing-happened claim. It means the carrier spent real money defending an allegation. A book full of these tells an underwriter the insured attracts claims, even if few of them pay — and attracting claims is what the next policy period will do too.

Conversely, an account with a handful of clean indemnity settlements and low expense often reads better than its total incurred suggests.

Occurrence vs. claims-made changes how you read it

	Occurrence	Claims-made
Claims map to	The policy year the loss happened in	The policy year the claim was reported in
Late-reported claims	Attach to the original year, changing it after the fact	Attach to the current year
Reading the trend	Older years keep developing upward	Years are more settled once past the report window

If the account switched between the two during the period you are looking at, the year-by-year comparison is not apples to apples and should be called out in the submission rather than left for the underwriter to discover.

What underwriters look for

• Frequency by cause — five slip-and-falls at one location is a premises problem with a fix. Five unrelated causes is a management problem without one.
• Severity outliers — one large loss in five years reads very differently from a rising pattern.
• Open reserves on old years — unresolved exposure the carrier still expects to pay.
• Expense ratio — heavy defence spend relative to indemnity suggests contested claims and a litigious posture.
• Closed without payment counts — incident frequency that hasn't cost anything yet.
• Products and completed operations — long tails; underwriters weight these more heavily than premises claims of the same size.

How many years, and valued when

Five years is the standard ask. Ten is not unusual where products, completed operations or construction defect exposure is in play, because those claims surface years after the work was done.

Separately from the number of years, the submission will require the loss runs to be currently valued — typically within 90 days, tighter on loss-sensitive accounts. The two requirements are independent and both have to be met.

Requesting GL loss runs

Requests go to the carrier's claims department or agent portal. Name the policy, the years, and the valuation window explicitly. If the account has changed carriers inside the five-year window, each prior carrier needs its own request.

Find the carrier in our directory for contact routes and accepted formats, or read the full how-to guide.

Getting the data out

Every carrier lays a GL loss run out differently — different column headers, different ordering, different levels of claimant detail. Getting those claims into a spreadsheet or a submission package means reading each one and typing it out again.

LossRunGuru is built to read carrier loss run PDFs and return the claims as structured data. See how it works →

Related: what a loss run report is, an annotated example, and workers' comp loss runs.