Aviation Insurance

What Is Hangarkeepers Liability Insurance?

August 25, 2026  ·  Tricrest Insurance

A line tech backs a tug into a customer’s Baron. The airplane is worth $900,000. It has been sitting in your hangar for six days waiting on a magneto.

Whose problem is that?

Yours.

Hangarkeepers liability insurance covers damage to aircraft that belong to someone else while those aircraft are in your care, custody, or control — stored in your hangar, parked on your ramp, or open on your shop floor. You need it because your commercial general liability policy specifically will not pay for that damage. The exclusion is not an oversight or a gap someone forgot to close. It is deliberate, it is printed in the form, and hangarkeepers coverage exists to fill it.

Why Your General Liability Policy Stops at the Hangar Door

Pull out your CGL form and read the Coverage A exclusions. You will find language excluding property damage to personal property in the care, custody or control of the insured.

That single clause does a lot of work. A general liability policy is built to respond when you damage the property of a stranger: a member of the public, a neighboring business, someone walking through your lobby. It is not built to insure the things customers hand you on purpose. Once a customer taxis their airplane into your building and walks away, that airplane stops being third-party property in the ordinary sense and becomes property in your care. The CGL steps back.

This catches people because the logic runs backwards from intuition. Most operators assume that the more responsibility they take for an aircraft, the more their liability policy is doing. The opposite is true. Taking custody is exactly what switches the CGL off.

Hangarkeepers is usually written as a separate coverage part on an aviation package policy, covering aircraft entrusted to you for storage, service, or repair. Same policy, different coverage, different limits.

The Two Limits That Decide Whether You Are Actually Covered

This is the part that gets people hurt, and it has almost nothing to do with whether you bought the coverage. It has to do with how you set the numbers.

Hangarkeepers limits are stated two ways at once:

• Each Aircraft. The most the policy pays for any one airplane in a single loss.
• Each Loss. The most the policy pays in total for that loss, no matter how many airplanes are involved.

Both apply. Not whichever is higher.

Work an example. Your policy reads $1,000,000 each loss and $250,000 each aircraft. A fire in the hangar damages four airplanes. The most you can collect in total is $1,000,000. The most you can collect for any single airplane is $250,000. If one of those four was that $900,000 Baron, you are short $650,000 on that airplane by itself, and you never got anywhere near the loss limit that made you feel covered when you bought the policy.

The per-aircraft figure is the one nobody checks and the one that actually decides the claim. Set it against the most valuable airplane you realistically expect to have in the building, not the average one. Averages are how you end up $650,000 short.

One Detail Worth Knowing About the Deductible

Hangarkeepers coverage normally carries a deductible. On the forms we see most often, it does not apply to losses caused by fire or explosion, or to aircraft being dismantled for transport. Small thing, and it never comes up until the day it matters. Check whether yours reads the same way.

Your Airport Has Probably Already Told You What to Buy

If you lease space on a public field, the required limits are likely written into the airport’s minimum standards, and they vary a great deal by what you actually do.

Fort Worth publishes a schedule for Spinks Airport that gives a good sense of the range: $5,000,000 for fixed base operators, $5,000,000 for turbine maintenance operators, $1,000,000 for piston maintenance, $1,000,000 for flight training and rental operators, $1,000,000 for aircraft storage, and $300,000 per occurrence for a non-commercial hangar lessee or a T-hangar.

Buried in the same document is the sentence that matters more than any of those numbers. Coverage per aircraft should be equivalent to the average aircraft value in your care at one time, and the occurrence limit should match the maximum total value you hold at once. Read that twice. The airport is telling you to size the limits to your actual exposure, which is a different exercise from meeting the minimum. Meeting the minimum keeps your lease. Sizing to exposure keeps your business.

Other airports write their standards differently, so use yours, not Fort Worth’s. The point is that the number is often not yours to pick, and the floor is rarely the right answer.

Where the Coverage Stops

Hangarkeepers is generally written on a legal liability basis. You pay when you are legally responsible for the damage, which in practice means negligence. If a hailstorm dents six airplanes on your ramp and you did nothing wrong, hangarkeepers is typically not the policy that responds. The owners’ own hull policies are. Some carriers will broaden this, and some will not, so it is a real question to ask rather than assume.

A few other boundaries worth confirming on your specific form:

• Aircraft parked outside in the open, as opposed to inside the hangar
• Aircraft being moved, towed, or taxied by your people
• Damage that happens during a maintenance test flight with your pilot aboard
• Whether coverage attaches only while work is in progress, or the whole time the aircraft is on your premises

That last one is the sleeper. An airplane that finished its annual on Tuesday and sits on your ramp until the owner collects it on Saturday is still in your care for four days, and some forms handle that period differently than they handle the work itself.

Common Mistakes

Buying the airport minimum and stopping there. The minimum is a lease requirement. It was not calculated from your hangar, your customers, or the value of what is sitting in your building tonight.

Never revisiting the per-aircraft limit. A shop that set $250,000 five years ago and has since moved upmarket into turbines is carrying a number that no longer describes anything real. Limits do not update themselves when your customer base changes.

Assuming a signed waiver ends the conversation. Hold-harmless language in your storage or work order agreements is worth having. It is not insurance, its enforceability varies by state, and it will not stop a customer’s hull insurer from subrogating against you after they pay their insured. Have both.

Forgetting that a busy hangar concentrates the loss. Hangarkeepers exposure is not the value of one airplane. It is the total value under your roof at the worst possible moment, which for most shops is a weeknight in winter with everything inside and the doors shut.

Who Needs This

• FBOs handling transient and based aircraft
• Repair stations and independent A&P shops
• Anyone subleasing hangar space or storing aircraft for others
• Flight schools holding leaseback aircraft they do not own
• Avionics shops, paint shops, and interior shops
• Aircraft dealers and brokers with consigned inventory on the field
• Flying clubs and partnerships where the entity holds aircraft belonging to members

If an airplane you do not own spends the night in a building you control, this is your coverage.

Get the Per-Aircraft Number Right

Hangarkeepers is not a complicated policy. Most operators who get hurt by it did buy it, and did meet their lease requirement, and still came up short because the per-aircraft limit was set once and never looked at again.

At Tricrest Insurance we are an independent aviation broker. We read the limit structure on every policy we place, we ask what actually sits in your hangar on a Friday night, and we will tell you plainly whether your numbers survive a bad night. If you hold other people’s aircraft, that is worth a short conversation before a tug finds a wingtip.

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This article is general information, not insurance advice or an offer of coverage. Policy forms, endorsements, and underwriting rules vary by carrier and by state, and only the policy you actually hold determines what is covered. Tricrest Insurance Agency LLC is a licensed independent insurance brokerage in Salina, Kansas.