Hired and non-owned auto liability

Two related coverages sit under the label hired and non-owned auto (HNOA), and neither one insures a vehicle the association owns. Hired auto liability responds when the association rents, leases, or borrows a vehicle, for example a truck rented to haul landscaping debris or a van hired for a community event. Non-owned auto liability responds when someone drives their own personal vehicle on association business, and that is the exposure that actually shows up in most communities: a board member driving to the bank to make the assessment deposit, an on-site manager running to the hardware store, or a volunteer delivering meeting notices. The association carries no business auto policy, and the commercial general liability policy that covers the common elements almost always excludes bodily injury and property damage arising out of the use of an auto. That exclusion is the gap. When a director or volunteer causes an accident while running an errand for the association, the injured party's attorney names the association as a defendant on the theory that the driver was acting on its behalf, and there is no auto liability coverage behind that claim unless a hired and non-owned auto endorsement or policy is in place. The driver's own personal auto policy is primary, but it can be thin, exhausted by the same accident, or denied outright where the personal insurer treats the trip as business use, which many personal auto forms limit or exclude. This is a coverage-availability question rather than a legal mandate; no statute requires an association to carry it, so the case for it is the concrete exposure, not a citation.

The moment a board asks volunteers or staff to drive on association business, and nearly every board does, it has created an exposure the master general liability policy does not cover. The risk is not the driver's own vehicle damage, which their personal auto policy is meant to handle; it is the claim against the association itself as the entity that directed the errand. Confirm the program carries hired and non-owned auto liability, either as an endorsement on the general liability policy or as a symbol on a business auto policy, and that its limit matches the general liability limit rather than sitting at a token amount. Two practical points recur. First, this coverage protects the association, not the individual driver, so it does not relieve board members and volunteers of the need to carry adequate personal auto limits, and a board can reasonably ask anyone who regularly drives on its behalf to confirm they do. Second, make sure the umbrella lists hired and non-owned auto among its underlying policies, because an umbrella only follows form over coverage that is actually scheduled beneath it. The exposure is easy to overlook precisely because it is intermittent, a deposit run, a supply pickup, a drive to the management office, but a single serious accident on one of those trips becomes a liability claim with no primary auto coverage behind it if the endorsement is missing.

Hired and non-owned auto is inexpensive to add relative to the exposure, and the specialty community-association markets commonly include it by endorsement on the association general liability policy or offer it as a low-cost business auto placement; the gap almost always reflects an oversight or a generalist package that dropped it, not a pricing decision. Two items are worth confirming rather than assuming: that the limit is written to match the general liability limit rather than a nominal sublimit, and that hired and non-owned auto appears on the umbrella's schedule of underlying coverage so the excess layer follows form over it. Citation basis: no controlling statute; this is a qualitative coverage-gap issue, and general community-association risk-management guidance such as that from the Community Associations Institute (CAI) treats hired and non-owned auto as a standard part of a complete volunteer-board program. Honest lint note: no primary statute or Selling Guide section applies to this clause by design.