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Painting Business Owners: How to Properly Classify Workers for Workers' Compensation.

Name: Painting Business Owners: How to Properly Classify Workers for Workers' Compensation.
Uploaded: 2025-01-08T14:15:02+00:00
Duration: 31 s
Channel: Daniel Honan
Description: In this brief discussion, the speakers explain that every occupation has an assigned workers' compensation class code, with painters typically classified…

8 Jan 2025 · 1 min

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In this brief discussion, the speakers explain that every occupation has an assigned workers' compensation class code, with painters typically classified under code 5474, which carries a moderate premium of $5‑$6 per $100 of payroll. They emphasize that other staff—such as salespeople, managers, and administrative personnel—have different, often lower, class rates. Consequently, business owners must accurately distinguish these employee categories in their payroll system to avoid paying the higher painter rate for lower‑risk roles. The key takeaway is to ensure payroll platforms correctly classify each worker so that only those performing high‑risk, on‑site painting work incur the higher premium.

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Every industry, every job has a class code assigned to it. Typically painters fall into the 5474 class code. Doesn't matter if they're interior, exterior, commercial. $5 to $6 is a pretty moderate workers' comp premium, but it's very likely that our clients may have some salespeople, managers, admins. Each of those roles have a different workers' comp rate, so it's important that you are distinguishing your employees on your payroll because you don't want to pay the painter's workers' comp rate for your admin employees.
A key point, making sure your payroll platform, whatever you're using for payroll, everyone's properly classified so you're not overpaying.
You only want to pay that higher premium for the guys or gals that are actually out on the job site doing the work that's kind of higher risk.