Insurance carriers provide workers compensation coverage for the voluntary insurance market. Most insurance carriers have a number of the associated smaller carriers they own to properly place an employer.

A workers’ compensation insurance carrier is responsible for handling the claims for their insureds, providing safety instruction, and reporting their losses to the respective rating bureaus such as NCCI or the WCIRB.

The insurance carriers provide policies that spell out what they are going to cover in detail in the parts of the policy – Declarations, Insuring Agreements, Conditions, Exclusions, and Endorsements.

The major workers’ comp insurance carriers are Liberty Mutual, Travelers, The Hartford, and others.

The major carriers may be under a different name than other subsidiary carriers that they own.

Insurance carrier administration and governance is supplied by the respective departments of insurance in each state where the carrier writes policies.

Some insurance carriers are Competitive State Funds such as the State Compensation Insurance Fund (SCIF) of California or The Montana State Fund.  Some states have monopolistic carriers where only one carrier, sponsored by the state government, is allowed to write workers comp coverage for employers.

Such states, for example, are Ohio and North Dakota.  Many monopolistic carriers have struggled in the past as there is no competitive market in the monopolistic states.

These companies are not the same as a Third Party Administrator who handles the claims for self-insureds.  The adjusters perform the same jobs in TPAs.