Products liability coverage protects your roofing business against claims arising from products you manufacture, sell, distribute, or install. While most roofing contractors do not manufacture products, they install materials that become part of the finished structure. If a roofing system you installed fails and causes injury or property damage, the products liability portion of your CGL policy can respond to the claim alongside or instead of your completed operations coverage.
The distinction between products and completed operations matters in specific scenarios. If you sell roofing materials directly to a homeowner who installs them and the materials are defective, that is a products liability claim. If you install those same materials and they fail due to installation error, that falls under completed operations. In practice, many roofing claims involve both product and workmanship issues, and the CGL policy addresses them together under the products-completed operations aggregate.
Roofing contractors should pay attention to products liability when they are the named distributor or retailer of specific roofing systems, when they fabricate custom sheet metal components in-house, or when they apply proprietary coatings. In these cases, you are the product supplier, and a failure in the product itself triggers products liability. Ensure your policy does not contain exclusions that carve out products you regularly handle, and maintain product installation records to defend against claims that allege product defect rather than installation error.