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A RocketLevel guide, backed by decades of experience in the trade. About a 13-minute read. Facility managers, general contractors, and risk managers screen credentials before a bid is ever considered, and on most commercial accounts a system screens you before a person does. Three separate gates go by the name prequalification, which one you face depends on who owns the risk register, and on the real estate side you cannot enroll until the property manager invites you. Below is the stack to have ready, and which gate will ask for it.
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Reviewed October 2026. OSHA, EPA and state rules change, and they vary by state. Use this page to know what to ask, then confirm with your state agency or a construction attorney before you rely on it.
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The principle: commercial decision makers manage their own risk by gating contractors. Your job is to be easy to approve: the complete, correct package, ready to attach the moment it is asked for.
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Scrutiny keeps rising. In Deloitte's 2025 Global Chief Procurement Officer Survey, 74 percent of procurement leaders named maintaining alternative supply sources as their most effective risk strategy, 64 percent pointed to greater supply chain visibility, and 61 percent to better supplier information sharing. That survey covers procurement in general and does not single out restoration contractors. What it tells you is that procurement teams in general are asking suppliers for more information and managing supplier risk more actively, and vendor gating in property management follows the same pattern. Expect the proof to be requested earlier and read more closely than it used to be.
Insurance, shown on certificates of insurance (COIs), at commercial limits, with additional-insured, waiver of subrogation, and primary-and-noncontributory wording.
OSHA 10 for field workers and OSHA 30 for supervisors. Neither card is a federal legal requirement on its own; OSHA calls the program voluntary (OSHA Outreach FAQ). They are contract requirements, and some states and cities write them into law. Nevada requires an OSHA-10 card for construction workers and an OSHA-30 card for supervisors within 15 days of hire (NRS 618.983). New York requires the 10-hour course on public work contracts of $250,000 or more (Labor Law 220-h). New York City's Local Law 196 requires 40 hours of site safety training on sites that need a construction superintendent, site safety coordinator or site safety manager (NYC Buildings). Look up your own state and city. Many general contractors and facilities require the 30-hour for anyone leading work.
Lead and asbestos competence, and be precise about which rule applies, because decision makers ask and the two rules have different reach:
Infection control for healthcare and occupied-facility work, named precisely, because there is no single legal source called an infection control risk assessment (ICRA). What a healthcare facility actually enforces is The Joint Commission's EC.02.06.05, which requires the organization to have a pre-construction risk assessment process in place, ready to apply to any planned or unplanned demolition, construction or renovation. The Joint Commission does not use the term ICRA and does not prescribe a particular risk assessment or implementation process. It points organizations to the Facility Guidelines Institute (FGI) Guidelines for Design and Construction and to CDC recommendations. The matrix a facility hands you is usually the Infection Control Risk Assessment 2.0 from the American Society for Health Care Engineering (ASHE), a trade association tool rather than a regulation. So the honest answer on a prequalification form is that your crews work to the facility's own pre-construction risk assessment and to the containment class it assigns, and that you have run ICRA 2.0 matrices before. Ask the facility which form it uses rather than promising a format.
A clean experience modification rate (EMR). Know what 1.00 actually means before you say it in a room, because reps say it backwards. Per the ABCs of Experience Rating from the National Council on Compensation Insurance (NCCI), the mod is your actual losses divided by the losses expected for your classifications and payroll, so a 1.00 means your losses matched what is expected for an employer of your classifications and size. NCCI frames the mod as your own experience measured against the industry average for your class: below 1.00 is a credit, above it is a debit.
NCCI produces the mod under its Experience Rating Plan in the jurisdictions that adopted it. The Plan does not apply in California, Delaware, Michigan, New Jersey, New York or Pennsylvania, nor in the monopolistic states of North Dakota, Ohio, Washington and Wyoming, and in Indiana, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina and Wisconsin independent rating organizations produce their own intrastate mods. Ask who rated yours before you quote it across state lines. A common gate is an experience modification rate at or below 1.00, sometimes measured on a three-year average, and that gate is set by each hiring client rather than by the platform. Two clients screening through the same portal can grade the same shop differently, and a very small employer may not be experience-rated at all, which is an answer to give plainly rather than a field to leave blank.
Six numbers belong in your rep's head and not in a folder: current EMR, three-year average EMR, total recordable incident rate (TRIR), days away, restricted or transferred rate (DART), OSHA recordables by year for the last 3 years, and the name of your designated safety officer. If a rep can't answer "what's your EMR" out loud in a facilities meeting, the company usually drops out of the running in that room, and a follow-up email rarely wins it back.
Bonding capacity, wherever public or institutional work is in reach. On a federal construction contract the Miller Act requires performance and payment bonds, and FAR 28.102-1 draws the line at contracts exceeding $150,000, with alternative payment protections between $35,000 and $150,000. Most states run their own version at their own threshold, so look up yours rather than assuming the federal number travels. A bond is underwritten against the balance sheet, which means no salesperson can commit one. Surety capacity is a conversation with your owner and your agent before you chase the work. The trap specific to this trade is selling the mitigation, which usually carries no bond, and then finding a bond requirement attached to the reconstruction award, which is the part with the money in it.
Prevailing wage, wherever public money is in the job. The Davis-Bacon Act covers federal contracts over $2,000 for the construction, alteration or repair of public buildings and public works, and a long list of Related Acts extends it to federally assisted work, which is how jobs funded by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) get caught. States have their own versions covering state and local work at their own thresholds. One correction worth carrying, because reps get told the opposite: Davis-Bacon does not apply to FEMA Public Assistance. FEMA's own FY24 Contract Provisions Guide, FI-207-21-0001 Version 2, effective 1 October 2024 names the FEMA programs it does reach and states that the Davis-Bacon clause is not federally required for procurements under the Public Assistance Program. Storm work funded through PA is not automatically prevailing wage work. Ask the qualifying question before you price the labor: "Is any part of this funded federally or by the state, and if so, under what program?"
Institute of Inspection, Cleaning and Restoration Certification (IICRC) Certified Firm status, with the firm number. This is the line many contractors miss, because they read the question as being about technicians. Prequalification forms ask whether the firm is an IICRC Certified Firm and for its firm number, not for a stack of technician cards. IICRC's published bar for that status is at least one active certified technician, current liability insurance, a $25 application fee and $199 a year. That is a box to have ticked rather than a differentiator, so tick it and move on, and get the firm number into your vendor profile before a form asks for it.
IICRC technician certifications appropriate to the work: Water Damage Restoration Technician (WRT), Applied Structural Drying (ASD), Applied Microbial Remediation Technician (AMRT), and Fire and Smoke Restoration Technician (FSRT), and work performed to ANSI/IICRC S500 for water and ANSI/IICRC S520 for mold. What counts is conformance to the standard. Name the edition when you write this on a prequalification form: S500 is the Fifth Edition, 2021, and S520 is the Fourth Edition, 2024. A bare "we work to S500" tells a risk manager nothing about whether you are current, and the ones who know the standards will notice the missing edition.
The Certified Restorer (CR) designation from the Restoration Industry Association (RIA) where you have it, and say which program you earned it under. As of October 2026, RIA positions CR as a master certification applied for after its four advanced pillar designations: Fire Loss Specialist, Water Loss Specialist, Contents Loss Specialist and Environmental Risk Specialist. A CR earned on the older path and one earned now came through different programs, so describe yours rather than letting a decision maker assume.
The ranges below are what we see asked across the accounts we work. Where a real published schedule is quoted, it is named and linked.