The whole insurance program. Built around your largest exposure.
Vesta Risk is a commercial insurance brokerage for California home health agencies. We place every line you carry — and we go further on workers compensation than the broker you have now, because in this industry payroll is the premium.
Working with agencies from ten caregivers to several hundred, across California.
- Payroll, three-year experience period
- $3,400,000
- Expected losses E
- $43,690
- Primary threshold
- $13,000
- Expected excess Ee
- $30,452
- Actual primary losses Ap
- $31,250
- Loss-free rating
- 70
This is the arithmetic behind a home care agency's largest insurance line. Most brokers never open it. We start here.
Every line your agency carries.
You should not need two brokers. We handle the full program and review it as one thing, because the exposures overlap — turnover drives comp claims, driving between clients drives auto, and lone caregivers in private homes drive three lines at once.
Workers compensation
Classification, payroll reporting and experience modification management.
Liability
Professional and general, abuse and molestation, umbrella and excess, management liability.
Your people
Employment practices and wage-and-hour, crime and employee dishonesty, employee benefits.
Operations & assets
Commercial and non-owned auto, cyber and HIPAA, property and business interruption, bonds.
Three businesses that look similar and rate very differently.
Home care agencies
Non-medical personal care and companionship. High headcount, high turnover, and the classification where clerical splits are most often missed.
Home health & skilled nursing
Licensed clinical care in the residence. Patient-handling injuries dominate, and needlestick and exposure claims carry a long tail.
Hospice
Clinical and volunteer staff, bereavement services, and a mileage exposure that most agencies never surface to their carrier.
We read the rating plan. Almost nobody does.
California workers compensation is governed by two published documents. They are public, detailed, and largely unread — including by a great many brokers. Reading them properly is only worth the effort if you do it for one industry, over and over.
Here is one thing that falls out of it. California's mod is a frequency formula, not a severity formula. Every claim counts only up to the primary threshold; above that line the dollars stop mattering. So the advice most operators are given — fight the big claim, drive the reserve down — often changes nothing at all.
Drag any claim and watch the mod refuse to move.
Claims A and B are both above the $13,000 primary threshold, so reducing either one changes nothing.
Model agency, 8827, $3.4M payroll. Runs the published WCIRB formula and Table I/II values. Illustrative — your own figures will differ.
The Mod Analysis
A diagnostic report telling you whether your mod is calculated correctly, whether your payroll is classified and reported correctly, and what the gap is costing you.
Free, whether or not you ever move your policy. It takes about ten minutes to request, needs no contact with your current broker, and we walk you through it on a call. Plenty of agencies we produce one for stay exactly where they are — the report still tells them what to fix.
Classification review
Clerical split eligibility, the scheduler grey zone, and drift into 9096.
Payroll reporting
Overtime premium portion, caps, mileage and per-diem, 1099 handling.
Mod recalculation
Recomputed independently and audited against the WCIRB worksheet.
Claim-level review
Which claims sit near your threshold, and closure opportunities under Rule 8.
Frequency and cause
Including tenure at time of injury — the first-90-days pattern.
Three-year forecast
Do nothing, corrections applied, or corrections plus return-to-work.
Caregiver payroll absorbed the entire increase.
The approved pure premium rate for home care rose 8.7%. Clerical office payroll rose 1.9%. Clerical telecommuters went down. If your office staff are being reported under 8827 — and in most agencies they are — you paid the caregiver increase on payroll that never left a desk.
| Code | Classification | 9/1/25 | 9/1/26 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 8827 | Home care & nursing, private residences | 2.570 | 2.794 | +8.7% |
| 8810 | Clerical office employees | 0.210 | 0.214 | +1.9% |
| 8871 | Clerical telecommuters | 0.100 | 0.096 | −4.0% |
| 9096 | Residential cleaning services | 8.540 | 9.338 | +9.3% |
Pure premium rates are advisory. Carriers file their own, typically well above these — so the dollar impact on your policy is larger than the table suggests.
Resource Hub
Practical help for running an agency — hiring, retention, compliance, safety, and the rating rules. We are not home health operators and will not claim to be, but we will show our work and you can check it.
- Can you split clerical payroll out of 8827? Yes — and the manual says so plainly. But three conditions catch most agencies, and one of them is a genuine trap.
- California hospice Title 22: the new rules, and what they change about your risk Effective 22 June 2026. The 12:1 cap, two-hour response, ten-year records — and the insurance consequence of each.
- Clerical split checker How much of your office payroll can come out of 8827, and what it is worth. Runs in your browser.
Let's look at your program.
Most conversations start with a specific question — a classification you are unsure about, a mod that jumped, an audit bill that does not look right. Those are good calls to have.