TL;DR
Comparison
Is a per location aggregate worth the extra premium?
Whose decision: Any operator with more than one building, and anyone about to open or acquire a second.
Last updated
| Factor | Shared aggregate | Per location aggregate |
|---|---|---|
| How the aggregate applies | One ceiling across the whole portfolio | A separate ceiling for each location |
| Effect of a bad year at one building | Can exhaust the limits protecting all the others | Contained to that building |
| Endorsement needed | None; this is the default | Designated location general aggregate endorsement |
| Typical lease and lender requirement | Rarely accepted | Commonly required |
| Premium | Lower | Higher; the insurer total exposure increases |
| Relevance on a single campus | Same as per location, since the campus is one location | No benefit on a single campus |
The recommendation
Decide it from your own claim frequency by building over five years rather than from the premium difference. If any single building has ever produced enough claims in one year to make a real dent in the aggregate, the shared structure is exposing every other building to that building performance.
Before deciding, read your lease and loan documents. Landlords frequently require a per location aggregate so that claims at a building they do not own cannot strip the coverage protecting the one they do. If your lease says per location and your policy carries a shared aggregate, you have been in breach since the term began.
One caveat: on a single multi-level campus, the endorsement does nothing, because the campus is one location. There the answer is to size the aggregate against total campus frequency across all levels of care.
Follow-up questions
Not from the declarations page, which usually shows one aggregate figure. Look in the endorsement schedule for a designated location general aggregate endorsement, and check that its schedule of locations matches your current building list.
Check the endorsement schedule specifically. An operator who acquires a building mid-term frequently ends up with an endorsement listing the original locations and silently omitting the new one.
Go deeper
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