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It’s the most confusing phone call a contractor receives. You send over your year-end financials. You feel good about them. The balance sheet is rock solid, cash flow is positive, and your debt is low. By every metric a banker would use, you are a safe bet. Then the surety underwriter comes back with a "pass." It feels personal, but it isn’t. It’s usually a misunderstanding of what the surety is actually looking for. While a bank looks at your numbers to see if you can pay ,

Most contractors assume surety underwriting is a numbers game. If the ratios look good, bonding should be straightforward. If bonding tightens, something must be wrong with the math. That makes sense on the surface. It is just not how underwriting actually works. In real life, underwriters are forming an opinion long before they start calculating ratios. By the time the math shows up, they usually already have a sense of how much risk they are comfortable taking on. That gap

Most contractors assume bonding problems begin at the surety’s desk. In reality, they almost never do. When a contractor hits a bonding limit, gets capped, or faces tighter terms, the root cause is usually inside the business. The surety is reacting to risk that already exists in the financial system. To understand why this happens, it helps to think of bonding as the final layer in a stack, not a standalone decision. How bonding really works A surety does not look at a contr

Why Clean Financials Still Slow Down Surety Reviews This is something many agents have seen, even if it is not always said out loud. A contractor submits clean financials. The CPA is reputable. The numbers look reasonable. And yet the surety hesitates, asks more questions, or quietly trims capacity. From the outside, it can look overly conservative. From the underwriting side, it usually is not. Sureties are reacting to confidence, not just accuracy Underwriters are not only