General Aggregate vs. Products-Completed Operations Aggregate

A typical Commercial General Liability (CGL) policy does not have one pool of money; it has two separate annual aggregate limits that erode independently. The general aggregate is the most the insurer will pay in a policy year for the sum of premises/operations bodily injury and property damage, plus personal and advertising injury and medical payments. The products-completed operations aggregate is a distinct annual cap that applies only to claims arising out of your product after it leaves your control or your work after it is finished. Because they are separate, a string of slip-and-fall claims at your premises can exhaust the general aggregate while your products-completed operations aggregate remains fully intact — and vice versa. Both sit above the shared per-occurrence limit, which caps any single claim before it feeds into the applicable annual aggregate limit.

This split matters most to small-business buyers whose real exposure lives in products-completed operations — contractors, manufacturers, food producers, and installers. A general contractor might finish a dozen jobs a year; a defect that surfaces months later (faulty framing, a leaking install) is a completed-operations claim charged to that second bucket, not the general aggregate. If a policy is written with a low or, in the worst case, a shared products-completed operations aggregate, a couple of construction-defect suits can wipe out coverage for every project the business ever completed. That is why certificate reviewers and upstream contractors scrutinize the products-completed operations aggregate line as closely as the general aggregate — it is the limit that actually responds to defective-work litigation years down the road.

A practical nuance: the general aggregate normally applies per policy, not per job, so a busy contractor can inadvertently share one limit across every project. A per-project aggregate endorsement reinstates a fresh general aggregate for each job site, but note it does not touch the products-completed operations aggregate — completed-work claims still draw from the single shared products bucket. Do not confuse the products-completed operations aggregate with your CGL occurrence limit; the occurrence limit caps one event, while the aggregate caps the full year. When comparing quotes, always read all four numbers on the declarations page (each-occurrence, general aggregate, products-completed operations aggregate, and personal/advertising injury) rather than assuming a single headline limit governs everything.