Your $1 Million Limit Might Be Worth $250,000: The Assault and Battery Trap in Commercial Real Estate Insurance

What is assault and battery coverage, and why is it disappearing?

Assault and battery coverage is what responds when someone is hurt or killed on your property as the result of a violent act: a fight in a bar, a shooting in a parking lot, an altercation in a hallway. It normally lives inside the general liability policy as an endorsement rather than as a separate policy you buy on its own. That detail is the whole story, because it means most operators assume it is simply there.

Over the last three or four years, that assumption has quietly stopped being safe. Carriers have started excluding assault and battery entirely, or sublimiting it: capping the coverage at a number that is a fraction of the headline limit. If you operate multifamily, hospitality, or retail real estate, you have probably watched your general liability renewals get more restrictive on exactly this point, with a supplement you did not have five years ago, or with A&B carved out altogether.

What happened in the Mainline case?

The clearest illustration came from a 2025 federal decision, Cincinnati Specialty Underwriters versus Mainline Private Security. Mainline is a security company that supplies guards to bars and venues, and it carried a commercial general liability policy with an assault and battery supplement capped at $250,000. Two lawsuits hit during the policy period: in one, a guard struck a patron over the head and the patron later died; in the other, a patron was thrown to the ground and fractured his skull. These are precisely the incidents a security company carries liability coverage for.

The carrier took the position that both incidents fell under the assault and battery supplement, and that the $250,000 sublimit had already been fully consumed by prior claims and defense costs from other cases during the same policy period. The court agreed across the board. Mainline got nothing: no defense, no payout, full exposure on both incidents.

That is the trap. The headline limit, the actual cost of the coverage, and what is left when you finally need it are three different numbers, and they are rarely the same.

Why does the same coverage cost so differently across states?

To see how far this has moved, the team pulled their own multifamily liability placement data in New York and Illinois, comparing the average rate online (the cost to buy $1,000 of coverage) for policies that explicitly include assault and battery against the rest of the peer set.

In New York, A&B-inclusive policies ran about 7% higher on average. In Illinois, they ran about 27% higher. Same coverage decision, same property type, but Illinois operators are paying close to four times the marginal cost for assault and battery that New York operators pay. An operator in Illinois could be quoted a number with no idea it is multiples of what the identical coverage costs elsewhere.

One plausible read, offered as a theory rather than a verdict: New York has priced liability as elevated for so long that assault and battery risk may already be baked into the base rate, which would make explicit A&B coverage more of a formality there and help explain the smaller delta. It could also reflect differences in carrier mix or how the A&B-inclusive policies are structured. Either way, the headline point holds: this coverage is priced very inconsistently from market to market.

The part buyers never see: who is actually behind your coverage?

The more surprising finding was not about price at all. It was about capacity. When you compare the carriers writing the broad multifamily book against the ones writing the A&B-inclusive slice, the names change.

In New York, the broad book is led by well-capitalized specialty and international markets with appetite for complex risk. Filter for policies that include assault and battery, and many of those names fall off the top, replaced by regional standard-market mutuals. In Illinois, where the broader market is already specialty-heavy, the shift is a rotation inside the specialty world rather than a handoff to standard markets, but it is the same underlying pattern: the conventional paper is not writing this risk consistently.

Two carriers can quote you the same price on assault and battery coverage and not be offering the same thing. Buyers see the premium and the declarations page. They almost never see whether the carrier behind their specific A&B coverage is a deep-pocketed specialty player or a smaller market filling a gap that the bigger carriers walked away from.

Does the new standalone product fix it?

In February, CRC launched a standalone assault and battery policy aimed squarely at housing, real estate, hospitality, and retail operators: $1 million per occurrence, $2 million aggregate, no sublimits and no state or city carve-outs, framed explicitly as a response to carriers retreating from the primary general liability market.

What makes it notable is structural. Insurance works in layers: the primary policy sits at the bottom, and umbrella or excess coverage stacks on top, kicking in once the primary limit is exhausted. The chronic problem with older standalone A&B products was that excess carriers refused to stack above them, because the limits did not line up cleanly with the primary, leaving a hole right in the middle of the tower. By matching the structure of a standard general liability policy, the CRC product gives excess carriers something they are comfortable sitting above, so the tower can work together. In a Mainline-type scenario, that means a $1 million dedicated A&B policy alongside the GL, rather than a $250,000 sublimit being eroded by defense costs.

So is it the answer? The honest verdict from the show was that it is necessary but not sufficient. The case for it is real: it fills a concrete gap for operators staring at a full exclusion or a $250,000 cap, and the matching structure finally lets excess attach. But the case against is just as real:

• The limits do not match the exposure.

  A $1 million per occurrence policy is barely a dent against the $31 million settlement out of DeKalb County, Georgia this year, or the $81 million verdict from a 2018 parking-lot shooting case. Nuclear verdicts, jury awards above $10 million, have been climbing for years.

• Excess still excludes A&B.

  Even a solid primary foundation has nothing above it if the excess and umbrella layers keep carving assault and battery out across the board.

• Adverse selection looms.

  When the only buyers lining up are the ones who most need the coverage, losses concentrate, premiums rise, fewer operators can afford it, and the pool gets riskier. The product is too new to know, but a severe first year would likely mean a sharp price move in year two.

• More products mean less transparency.

  A buyer now has to evaluate whether the GL excludes A&B, whether the standalone is structured correctly, whether defense costs erode the limit the way they did in Mainline, and whether the excess drops down properly. That is more places for a coverage gap to hide, not fewer.

So what actually fixes this?

Insurance alone probably does not. The underlying driver is nuclear verdicts and social inflation, and the most durable lever is tort reform at the source. A handful of states have begun raising the bar for negligent-security lawsuits and shifting more responsibility to the actual criminal actors, which reduces exposure rather than just repricing it. The fuller fix is a combination: expanded excess capacity, sustained tort reform, property-level underwriting that rewards good security, and policy language clear enough for a buyer to actually understand. Until those move together, new products will keep arriving, and most will solve part of the problem rather than the whole thing.

This is the thread the show keeps returning to. The headline number on the declarations page is not the coverage. The coverage is everything underneath it: the endorsement, the sublimit, the exclusions, how defense costs are treated, and how the excess tower attaches. Most buyers never see any of that until something goes wrong.

Four questions every operator should ask at renewal

The practical close came down to four questions worth bringing to your next renewal conversation:

1. Do I actually have assault and battery coverage?

   Is it excluded, sublimited, or written at the full limit? The declarations page will not tell you. You have to dig in and confirm.

2. If it is sublimited, do defense costs erode the limit?

   This is the Mainline trap. If defense costs eat into the supplement, your real coverage is whatever is left, which can be nothing.

3. How does my excess respond?

   Does the excess tower drop down to meet the assault and battery supplement, or only to the headline general liability occurrence limit?

4. If I am buying a standalone product,

   ask the same two questions of it: how do defense costs respond to claims, and does the excess tower drop down to the standalone policy or only to the underlying coverage?

Those questions matter far more than the headline limit on the page.