A wrap-up insurance program — OCIP or CCIP — is a single master insurance policy that covers every contractor and subcontractor working on a specific construction project, rather than each company carrying its own separate coverage for that job. One policy wraps the whole site. Hence the name.
OCIP stands for Owner-Controlled Insurance Program: the project owner buys and controls the wrap-up. CCIP stands for Contractor-Controlled Insurance Program: the general contractor buys and controls it. The mechanics are nearly identical — the difference is who holds the policy, pays the premium, and runs the compliance desk that every sub on the job has to answer to. Both typically bundle general liability, workers' compensation, and excess/umbrella coverage; many also fold in builder's risk and, increasingly, professional or pollution liability.
Wrap-ups appear on large projects — usually a construction value north of roughly $50–100 million, though thresholds vary by owner and carrier. Stadiums, hospitals, data centers, airports, transit, large mixed-use developments, university and municipal campuses. If you are a commercial installation contractor — roofing, security and fire, AV and low-voltage, electrical, HVAC, solar — bidding work on a project of that size, there is a meaningful chance the job is wrapped, and that changes how you bid it and how you report on it.
Why the owner or GC wants a wrap-up
On a project with dozens of contractors, the conventional model has every company carrying its own GL and workers' comp, each with different carriers, different limits, different deductibles, and different loss histories. When something goes wrong, the litigation turns into a circular firing squad — every insurer pointing at every other insurer, the owner caught in the middle, the schedule bleeding while coverage gets argued.
A wrap-up collapses that into one policy with one carrier, consistent limits across the whole site, and a single point of coordination for safety and claims. The party that controls it — owner in an OCIP, GC in a CCIP — buys volume coverage at a better rate than the sum of everyone's individual policies, controls the limits so there are no thin spots, and gains direct leverage over site safety because the loss experience is now theirs to manage. A clean safety record on a wrap-up is money in the controlling party's pocket; a bad one costs them directly. That alignment is the entire point.
For the controlling party it is genuinely the right structure on a big, multi-trade job — and it is worth saying plainly that wrap-ups are not a scheme run against subcontractors. They reduce total insurance cost on the project and they reduce coverage gaps. The friction lands on the subs not because the structure is hostile but because it changes the sub's bidding and reporting mechanics, and most subs' back-office tooling was never built for the change.
What a wrap-up does to a subcontractor's bid
Here is the part that trips up every operator the first time. When a project is wrapped, you do not carry your own GL and workers' comp for that job — the wrap-up does. So you have to strip the cost of that coverage out of your bid. If you leave your normal insurance burden baked into your labor rates, you are double-charging the owner for insurance they are already providing, and a sharp GC reviewing bids will catch it and mark you down for it.
This is called a deduct, or insurance deduct. The controlling party gives bidders a rate — often a percentage of payroll, sometimes a per-trade or per-classification figure — that you subtract from your bid to remove the GL and workers' comp you would otherwise carry. Getting the deduct right is real money. Strip too little and you look padded and lose the bid; strip too much and you have given away margin you needed. The deduct is computed off labor, which means your labor accounting has to be clean enough to apply it accurately in the first place.
The subtle trap is that the deduct is a labor-cost calculation, not a flat line item. Different work classifications carry different workers' comp class codes and therefore different rates. A bid that treats insurance as one blended number across a multi-classification crew will be wrong in both directions at once — over on the low-risk classifications, under on the high-risk ones. The deduct has to follow the same classification logic that the rest of the job's labor accounting follows.
The reporting burden after the bid
Winning the bid is where the real work starts. Once you are on a wrapped project, the controlling party's compliance desk needs continuous proof of who is on site, what classification they worked, how many hours they logged, and what workers' comp class code applies to each. That data feeds the wrap-up's own payroll-based premium audit — wrap-up premiums are typically trued up against actual payroll at the end of the job, so the controlling party cares intensely about the accuracy of every contractor's reported labor.
Workers' comp class codes have to be tracked per technician, not per company. The same low-voltage tech pulling cable on Monday and running a lift on Tuesday may sit in two different class codes, and the wrap-up audit wants to see that distinction. Enrollment paperwork has to be filed before crews go to work. On-site labor reports get requested on the controlling party's cadence, not yours. And none of this replaces certified payroll — on a public or prevailing-wage job, you are filing Davis-Bacon WH-347 forms and feeding the wrap-up compliance desk simultaneously, from labor data that has to agree with itself across both.
That is the structural pain. Most contractors run day-to-day labor through ADP, Gusto, or QuickBooks Payroll, which were built for company-level payroll rather than project-level wrap-up reporting and per-classification class-code breakouts on a GC's demand. So a bookkeeper exports hours, re-classifies by hand, builds the wrap-up labor report in a spreadsheet, files the certified payroll separately, and reconciles the two by eye. On a contractor running several wrapped projects at once, that is not a task — it is a recurring part-time job hidden inside the back office.
OCIP vs CCIP — the difference that matters to you
From a back-office standpoint the two programs demand the same thing: enrollment, class-code tracking, classification-level labor reporting, and a deduct applied correctly at bid time. What changes is who you answer to and how the incentives sit.
In an OCIP, the owner controls the policy. The owner's risk manager or a third-party wrap-up administrator runs compliance, and the GC is just another enrolled party alongside you. In a CCIP, the GC controls the policy, which means the entity managing your schedule, your change orders, and your payment is also the entity auditing your insurance reporting. That concentration tends to make CCIP compliance feel tighter and faster-moving, because the party asking for your labor reports is the same one signing your pay applications.
Either way, the operator's job is identical: bid with the right deduct, enroll on time, and report labor by classification cleanly enough to survive a premium audit. The structure is the controlling party's to choose. The data discipline is yours to carry — and it is exactly the kind of discipline that disappears into a weekend when the tooling cannot do it for you.
How Forge handles wrap-up labor
Forge is the operating system for commercial installation contractors — one AI-native platform that replaces the disconnected estimating, scheduling, CRM, documents, payroll, and field-ops tools most operators duct-tape together. Treasury, the payroll drawer of that system, is where wrap-up reporting belongs, because wrap-up reporting is fundamentally a labor-data problem, and the labor data already sits in the chest.
Treasury today runs certified payroll, prevailing wage, and Davis-Bacon WH-347 generation off labor captured at the work-classification level. That is the same ledger a wrap-up's classification-level breakout draws on — which is exactly why wrap-up reporting is the kind of problem Forge is architected to solve rather than a separate spreadsheet bolted on. The deeper OCIP/CCIP-specific tooling — workers' comp class codes tagged per technician, OCIP-eligible labor separated from non-OCIP labor in the same cycle, and wrap-up labor reports broken out by classification on demand — is on the Treasury roadmap, built on top of that existing certified-payroll engine so the wrap-up report and the WH-347 filing draw from one source of truth instead of a bookkeeper's late-night reconciliation. Charter members on the heaviest wrap-up trades shape how it lands.
The honest framing: Forge does not make a wrap-up simpler — the program is the controlling party's design and the law is the law. What Forge is built to remove is the manual labor of feeding it. The deduct still has to be bid correctly, the enrollment still has to be filed, the audit still has to be survived. But the data those steps depend on is captured once, in the field, and reused everywhere it is needed — that is what 'federation' means here: the modules share one architecture and one ledger, not a pile of integrations stitched together after the fact.
Forge is shipping today for roofing, security and fire, AV and low-voltage, solar, HVAC, and electrical contractors. Public pricing is a la carte: Forge Core $499/mo flat (unlimited users, no per-seat) plus modules (Hyperion $399, Atlas $149, Torch $99, Treasury $99 + $8/employee, Sigil $49, Calliope $149/function, Mentor $79/rep, Herald $59/rep), packaged as Starter $299, the Working Stack about $900 (Core + Hyperion + Sigil), and Full Platform about $1,999. Charter is a founder program by application: $27,000 prepaid for 36 months (~$750/mo equivalent), locked forever, ten seats. If wrap-up reporting is eating your back office, the certified-payroll ledger it would run on is live today, and the wrap-up-specific reporting layer is what Charter members are first in line to shape.