Editorial & Sourcing Methodology

Industry-primary sourcing

Every premium range, percentage, settlement figure, sample size, or other quantified claim on Get Business Coverage is led by a published industry source. We use the following hierarchy:

1. Third-party industry research — Insurance Information Institute (III), National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC), US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), National Council on Compensation Insurance (NCCI), International Risk Management Institute (IRMI), Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA), National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), ACORD, US Department of Treasury Federal Insurance Office.
2. Industry trade associations — National Restaurant Association (NRA), National Association of Landscape Professionals (NALP), American Car Rental Association (ACRA), Professional Beauty Association (PBA), National Limousine Association (NLA), and others per vertical.
3. Published carrier rate sources — industry source, industry source, industry source, Logrock, ERGO NEXT, The Hartford, Travelers, industry source, Progressive, Liberty Mutual — public quote tools and published rate ranges.
4. State Departments of Insurance + state regulator filings — for state-specific minimums, TNC requirements, Workers Compensation monopolistic-state rules, and dram-shop statutes.

Filed-rate sourcing (SERFF)

The filed loss costs and rate figures on our class-code (/wc), cost (/cost), and rate-tracker (/rates) pages are drawn from public state-Department-of-Insurance rate filings retrieved through SERFF — the System for Electronic Rate and Form Filing, the National Association of Insurance Commissioners' filing platform that state regulators use to publish carrier and rating-bureau rate filings. Where a state runs an independent bureau (e.g. California's WCIRB, North Carolina's NCRB), we cite that bureau's public filing instead.

Every filed figure we publish is cited to its SERFF tracking number (or the bureau's filing reference), with its state and effective date, so any reader can trace it back to the original government-held record. Workers' Compensation loss costs are shown per $100 of payroll — the regulator-approved baseline before a carrier's loss-cost multiplier and your experience modifier; we do not reproduce proprietary NCCI/ISO manual content, only figures states have published.

These are filed rates — what carriers and bureaus have submitted to regulators — not quote estimates or a sample of who bought from us. Each source URL is liveness-verified before deploy (see Citation discipline below).

Our own quote-form data is corroborating only — never primary

Get Business Coverage operates a commercial-insurance quote-comparison platform. Visitors complete a 14-step quote form; we record the inputs they submit (NAICS, state, revenue band, employees, requested coverages, etc.). That data is not:

• A representative sample of US small businesses
• An actuarial dataset of bound premiums
• A market benchmark for what any small business "should" pay
• Validated against an independent control population

It is a self-selected, paid-traffic, marketing-funnel sample with the standard biases of all such samples (advertising channel, intent skew, geographic concentration, NAIC-code accuracy varies with form-fill behavior). Where N is small (typically n < 30 per cell of NAIC × state), the variance dominates the signal.

Because of these limitations, we cite our quote-form data only as a corroborating signal alongside industry-primary sources, never as a standalone fact. When we do cite it, we disclose the sample size, the date range, and a small-sample caveat. We never describe it as "proprietary" or as a benchmark.

Licensed editorial review

Every coverage guide on Get Business Coverage is reviewed by Jason Wootton, licensed Property & Casualty Insurance Agent (NPN 7694718, verifiable via the National Producer Number (NPN) lookup), before publication.

Of our 6-person team, only Jason Wootton is a licensed insurance agent. Operations, customer service, finance, and technology team members are clearly marked as non-licensed and never make coverage recommendations.

Content is provided for general educational purposes only — not advice, not a solicitation, in any state. Insurance regulations vary by state; small-business owners should consult a licensed agent in their state before purchasing coverage.

Conflict-of-interest disclosure

Get Business Coverage is a licensed commercial insurance referral service. We may receive compensation when users click to carrier partners or complete a quote on our platform. We disclose this on every page with a CTA and in our footer.

Editorial content is independent of compensation arrangements. Research findings, recommendations, and comparisons may include carriers we don't have referral agreements with when they are the best fit for the reader.

Refresh cadence

Guides are reviewed every quarter for currency. We also refresh after every legislative session affecting Workers Compensation classification, Commercial Auto minimum requirements, TNC laws, or dram-shop statutes. The dateModified field in each page's structured data reflects the actual review date — not just a touch.

Citation discipline

Every URL we cite is verified live (HTTP 200 with title-not-404 content check) by an automated CI test before deploy. We document broken citations as they are discovered and replace them with verified equivalents. We do not cite paywalled-only sources, vendor blogs that lack named editorial review, or competitor lead-gen sites.

Quoted figures, settlement amounts, percentages, and rankings always carry the source name, publication year, and a hyperlink to the source page (or the parent URL when the deep page is gated).

Reporting an error

If you find a quantified claim on Get Business Coverage that you believe is unsourced, misattributed, or out of date, please reach out via the contact link in our footer. We treat sourcing corrections as P0 and aim to resolve them within 72 hours.