What is the difference between a shared aggregate and a per location aggregate?

The per-occurrence limit is the most a policy pays for any one claim. The annual aggregate is the most it pays for all claims in the policy year combined. Once the aggregate is exhausted, the policy is finished for that year regardless of what happens next.

For a single-building operator the distinction is academic. For anyone running more than one facility it is one of the most consequential structural terms in the program, because it decides whether your buildings are insured together or separately.

Consider an operator with four buildings, one shared aggregate, and a difficult year at one of them: a cluster of falls, a pressure injury claim, and a regulatory matter that generates litigation. Those are separate occurrences drawing on one aggregate.

If that aggregate is consumed by mid-year, the other three buildings are operating without effective liability coverage for the remainder of the term, and nothing at those buildings caused it. The operator finds out when the fifth claim arrives.

This is not a remote scenario in senior care, because the underlying causes of claim frequency, principally staffing, tend to be facility-specific and persistent. A building with a staffing problem produces multiple claims from the same root cause in the same year.

A designated location general aggregate endorsement makes the aggregate apply separately to each location. Each building carries its own annual ceiling, so a bad year at one does not consume the protection at the others.

Landlords are frequently the party who insist on this, and their reasoning is worth understanding because it is the same as yours. A REIT or private landlord leasing you one building does not want claims at a building it does not own to strip the coverage protecting the building it does. If your lease requires a per location aggregate and your policy carries a shared one, you are in breach of the lease from day one of the term, usually without knowing it.

The declarations page usually shows one aggregate figure and does not, on its own, tell you the basis. The answer is in the endorsement schedule: look for a designated location general aggregate endorsement, and confirm it is actually attached rather than merely referenced in a quote or a proposal.

Then check the schedule of locations on that endorsement against your current building list. An operator who has acquired or opened a building mid-term can have an endorsement that covers the original locations and silently omits the new one.

A per location aggregate increases the insurer total exposure, so it is priced. That price is real, and for a small portfolio the trade may be genuinely arguable.

The way to make the decision is to look at your own claim frequency by building over the last five years rather than at the premium difference alone. If any single building has ever produced enough claims in one year to make a meaningful dent in the aggregate, the shared structure is exposing every other building to that building performance, and the per location endorsement is buying back something you actually need.