Two policies, one condo. The master policy stops where the unit owner's HO-6 has to pick up.

The master policy and the unit owner's HO-6 policy are designed to be complementary, not duplicative. The master policy covers the building structure and common areas up to the valuation basis the declaration specifies, plus the association's liability, fidelity, and directors and officers exposure. HO-6 covers everything the master policy's valuation basis leaves to the owner: interior finishes and betterments not reached by the master policy, personal property, liability arising inside the unit, loss of use during repairs, and, critically, loss-assessment coverage.

Loss-assessment coverage is the part most owners never check. After a shared-cause loss, the association's master-policy deductible gets allocated across units by special assessment, and a base HO-6 loss-assessment limit that looked fine on paper can fall well short of a large deductible on a coastal or high-value building. The fix is comparing the owner's HO-6 limits against the association's actual current deductible, not against a generic HO-6 template.

Where the line falls: the walls-in gap the HO-6 fills

The master policy insures the building, but the declaration decides how much of the building. Under a bare-walls basis, the association's policy stops at the unfinished structure, the studs, subfloor, and original drywall, and everything installed after that becomes the unit owner's problem. Under a single-entity or all-in basis, the master policy reaches further into the finished interior. The HO-6 is the policy that closes whatever gap the master policy's valuation basis leaves open, which is why the two are meant to meet without overlap and without a hole between them.

In practice the HO-6 does four jobs the master policy was never designed to do. It insures interior finishes and owner betterments that fall outside the master policy's valuation basis. It covers personal property, which no master policy touches. It provides personal liability for something that happens inside the unit, a slip in the kitchen, a bathtub that overflows into the unit below, sitting behind the association's general liability rather than on top of it. And it pays loss of use while the unit is uninhabitable during repairs. None of those four are optional in the sense that the master policy backstops them, because it does not.

Loss assessment: the HO-6 line that closes the deductible gap

When a shared-cause loss hits the common elements, a roof torn off in a windstorm, a burst riser that floods multiple stacks, the master policy pays the repair but the association still owes its deductible. Boards recover that deductible by levying a special assessment across the units, and the HO-6's loss-assessment coverage is what reimburses an owner for their pass-through share. A loss-assessment limit in the $50,000 to $100,000 range covers a typical special assessment, which is why owners assume they are protected.

The trap is a sublimit inside that coverage. The unedited ISO HO 04 35 loss-assessment endorsement caps the portion of an assessment that traces to the master policy's deductible at $1,000 for any one loss, regardless of the overall loss-assessment limit shown on the declarations page. So an owner can carry a $50,000 loss-assessment limit and still be exposed for the difference between $1,000 and their real share of, say, a percentage wind deductible that runs into six figures on a coastal building. The deductible-assessment cap is a feature of the standard form, not a market-wide hard limit; several unit-owner markets will raise it on request, sometimes to match the full loss-assessment limit, for little or no added premium. The board's job is to publish the master-policy deductible in dollars so owners know how far above $1,000 they actually need to buy.

The master policy's valuation basis sets how much HO-6 an owner needs

There is no universal right amount of HO-6. The correct dwelling limit on the unit-owner policy is a function of the master policy's valuation basis, and it moves in the opposite direction. A bare-walls master policy leaves the entire finished interior to the owner, so the HO-6 dwelling limit has to be large enough to rebuild floors, cabinets, fixtures, and drywall from the studs out. An all-in master policy already insures most of that interior, so the same unit needs a much smaller HO-6 dwelling limit, mostly for owner betterments the master policy excludes. Sizing an HO-6 without first reading the declaration's valuation-basis language is guesswork, and it usually guesses low.

Two more valuation details on the master side change the answer. If the master building policy is written on an actual cash value rather than replacement cost basis, depreciation on the structure passes through to owners as a larger assessment, so the loss-assessment side of the HO-6 has to carry more weight. And where the master policy uses a percentage-of-value wind or hurricane deductible instead of a flat dollar amount, the per-unit share after a named storm can dwarf a base loss-assessment limit. The only reliable way to size an HO-6 is to read the master policy first: its valuation basis, its valuation method, and its deductible structure, then set the unit-owner limits against those specific numbers rather than a generic HO-6 template.