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A RocketLevel piece for restoration owners and ops and safety leads, backed by decades of experience in the trade. About a 6-minute read.
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Reviewed October 2026. Experience rating rules change, and they vary by state and rating bureau. Use this page to know what to ask, then confirm with your agent or your state's rating bureau before you rely on it.
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Plenty of restoration owners can recite their gross margin, their average job size, and their reconstruction-to-mitigation split. Fewer can tell you their experience modification rate (EMR). That is a problem, because in commercial and government work the EMR is often the first thing a facility owner or general contractor looks at, and it can disqualify you before anyone ever talks about price, scope, or quality.
The EMR, also called the "mod" or "ex-mod," is a single number that compares your workers'-compensation claims history against what is statistically expected for a company of your class code and payroll size. The industry average is set at exactly 1.0. Score below 1.0 and you are seen as safer than average; score above 1.0 and you are seen as riskier than average, with a higher modifier applied to your premiums.
Plenty of owners first see their number when a prequalification form asks for it, and by then it is too late to change it for that bid.
Your EMR is generated by a rating bureau using a roughly three-year window of claims data, and which bureau depends on your state. NCCI, the National Council on Compensation Insurance, rates most of the country. Eleven states run their own independent bureaus: California, Delaware, Indiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin (state rules as of October 2026). The monopolistic state-fund states work differently again.
Everything below describes NCCI's mechanics. In an independent-bureau state the shape of the idea holds and the specific numbers do not, so pull the experience period, the split point, and the eligibility threshold from your own bureau before you argue any of them with an agent.
North Carolina is worth naming twice. Its mod comes from the North Carolina Rate Bureau, and a mod of 1.5 or above turns on a written safety and health program duty under 13 NCAC 07A .0600 through .0606, so there the number gates more than a bid form.
NCCI publishes the mechanics free in ABCs of Experience Rating, which is worth reading once before you argue a number with your agent. NCCI includes a policy in the experience period when its effective date falls between 21 and 57 months before the rating effective date, which is why the number you carry today reflects losses from roughly one to four years ago and not the incident that happened last month. The current policy is excluded because the mod is calculated 60 to 90 days before it takes effect.
First, find out whether you even have one. Experience rating is not automatic. NCCI applies a state-specific premium eligibility threshold, met either by premium in the most recent 24 months or averaged across the experience period, and the thresholds differ state to state. A shop below its state's threshold is not experience rated at all and has no mod. That matters on a prequalification form: if you are unrated, write "not experience rated, below the state eligibility threshold" and attach the carrier's confirmation. Do not write 1.0. A 1.0 you cannot document reads as a fabricated number when the decision maker verifies it, and decision makers do verify it.
A few mechanics that surprise owners: