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ACORD 125 vs 126 vs 140
What each submission-side form covers, and which one carries the information you are missing.
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Stop Re-Keying ACORD 25 Certificates by Hand
An ACORD 25 packs about sixty fields onto one page, and someone downstream has to read, key and check every one. This free tool pulls them off a certificate you already have. Below: what it returns, and what every section of the form actually tells you.
- Reads the certificate as it actually is — no template to configure
- A confidence score on every field, and everything stays editable
- Free — no account, no card
Sample output98% confident
| Named insured | Northwind Contracting LLC |
| Producer | Harbor & Vale Insurance Services |
| Insurer A | Meridian Casualty Company · NAIC 12345 |
| Policy number | GL-4471982 |
| Effective / expiration | 01/01/2026 – 01/01/2027 |
| Each occurrence | $1,000,000 |
| General aggregate | $2,000,000 |
| Additional insured | Yes check endorsement |
| Waiver of subrogation | Yes check endorsement |
| Certificate holder | Pinecrest Property Group |
Illustrative values from a fictional certificate. Every field is editable before you export.
The Basics
What Is an ACORD 25?
An ACORD 25 is the standard Certificate of Liability Insurance form used across US property and casualty insurance. It summarizes a business's liability coverage — general liability, auto, umbrella, and workers' compensation — on a single page, and is issued by the insured's agent or broker to prove coverage to a third party such as a client, landlord, or general contractor.
The form is published and copyrighted by ACORD, the standards body for insurance data. That standardization is the point: a certificate from a broker in Tampa carries its fields in the same grid as one from a broker in Seattle, so the party receiving it knows where to look.
What the standard does not do is make the certificate easy to process at volume. The layout is fixed; the content inside each box is free text, typed by a person under time pressure at a different agency every time.
Why It Takes So Long
The Grid Is Standard. What's Inside It Isn't.
Anyone who has processed certificates in volume knows the gap between a standardized form and standardized data.
What actually arrives
- ✗ The same insurer, spelled three ways — abbreviated, expanded and misspelled, sometimes across certificates that landed the same morning.
- ✗ Dates in whatever format the agency system emitted. 01/01/2026, 1-1-26 and Jan 1 2026 all mean the same thing, and none of them sort.
- ✗ Description of Operations is free text — no structure, and frequently the most consequential box on the page.
- ✗ Certificates that are scans of prints of faxes.
What the tool does about it
- ✓ Reads the certificate as it actually is, not as a template says it should be — no per-agency configuration, no model training per sender.
- ✓ Normalizes carriers, dates and limits into one consistent shape, whatever the producer typed.
- ✓ Scores every field, so you review the handful that need judgement instead of all sixty.
- ✓ Keeps every value editable before you export. Nothing commits without you.
How It Works
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1
Upload the certificate
PDF, JPG or PNG — one at a time, up to 10 MB — plus the email address to send your results to. No account required.
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2
Answer four quick questions while we extract
Quick context about your work, asked once and never again.
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3
Review it live
The extraction opens in SortSpoke with a confidence score on every field. Correct anything the model got wrong — nothing is locked.
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4
Take the output
Your finished extraction opens in the browser and lands in the inbox you gave us. Export it, or come back to it in the email.
What the Extractor Returns
Every field on the certificate, grouped the way you would actually use them.
Parties
Producer name and contact, named insured and mailing address, and the certificate holder.
Carriers
Insurers A through F, each with its NAIC number, and the letter key tying each coverage row back to the insurer that wrote it.
Coverage rows
Coverage type, policy number, effective and expiration dates, and every limit on the row.
Indicators
Additional insured and waiver-of-subrogation flags, per coverage row.
Free text
The full Description of Operations block, including any ACORD 101 continuation.
Document metadata
Certificate number, revision number and issue date.
60+
Fields on a single ACORD 25
1
Certificate at a time — no batch, no queue
0
Cost. No account, no card, no trial clock
What's on an ACORD 25, Section by Section
| ✓ Section | What it contains | What to watch for | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Disclaimer band | The statement that the certificate is issued as a matter of information only and confers no rights on the holder | Not boilerplate to skim past — it is the legal character of the whole document | |
| Producer | The agency or brokerage that issued the certificate, with contact details | The producer is not the carrier. Certificate questions go here; policy questions go to the insurer | |
| Insured | Named insured and mailing address | Must match the entity you contracted with. A parent on the certificate and a subsidiary on the contract is a real gap, not a clerical one | |
| Insurers affording coverage | Up to six carriers, lettered A–F, each with an NAIC number | The letters are keys — each coverage row points back to one of them, and that is how you know who wrote what | |
| Certificate / revision number | Identifiers for this issuance | A revision above zero means an earlier version is in circulation somewhere | |
| Commercial General Liability | Occurrence or claims-made basis, plus each-occurrence, damage-to-rented-premises, medical expense, personal and advertising injury, general aggregate and products/completed-operations aggregate limits | Also carries how the general aggregate applies — per policy, per project or per location. Per-project matters enormously on construction work | |
| Automobile Liability | Scope (any auto, owned, hired, non-owned) and either a combined single limit or split bodily-injury and property-damage limits | Hired and non-owned is frequently the coverage a contract requires and the certificate quietly omits | |
| Umbrella / Excess Liability | Occurrence or claims-made, each-occurrence and aggregate limits, and the self-insured retention | Umbrella sits above scheduled underlying coverages — it does not automatically extend to everything below it | |
| Workers' Comp & Employers' Liability | Statutory coverage indicator plus employers' liability limits for each accident, disease per employee and disease policy limit | Includes whether an owner or officer is excluded — an exclusion here can defeat the reason the certificate was requested | |
| ADDL INSD / SUBR WVD | Checkboxes marking additional insured status and waiver of subrogation, per coverage row | Checkboxes, not grants — see the next section | |
| Policy number and dates | Per coverage row | The expiration dates are the reason certificates get tracked at all | |
| Description of Operations | Free text — additional-insured wording, project identifiers, job-site addresses, contract references | Least structured, often most consequential. Overflow continues onto an ACORD 101 additional-remarks schedule | |
| Certificate Holder | The party the certificate was issued to | Name and address should match the contract's notice provisions | |
| Cancellation | The notice provision | Weaker than most people assume — see the next section | |
| Authorized Representative | Signature of the issuing producer | An unsigned certificate is not a finished certificate |
That table describes the form's contents; it is not a copy of the form. ACORD publishes and copyrights the ACORD 25 and licenses it rather than selling it, so a blank certificate is not ours to hand out. If you need one to issue, it comes from ACORD or from your agency management system. The tool above is for the certificates you receive.
Four Things an ACORD 25 Does Not Prove
A certificate is evidence that coverage existed on the day it was issued. It is not the policy, and treating it as one is the most common mistake made with this document.
It confers no rights
The disclaimer at the top says so explicitly. The certificate does not amend, extend or alter the coverage in the underlying policies. If the policy and the certificate disagree, the policy wins.
A checked box is not an endorsement
ADDL INSD and SUBR WVD indicate that additional insured status or a waiver of subrogation is claimed. Whether either exists depends on an endorsement in the policy. If it matters, ask for the endorsement.
The limits shown may not be available
Aggregate limits erode as claims are paid against them. A certificate showing a two-million-dollar general aggregate tells you what the policy was written for, not what remains today.
The cancellation language is weak
The current form states that notice will be delivered in accordance with the policy provisions. It is not a promise of thirty days' notice to the holder. If you require notice, it belongs in your contract and in an endorsement.
Who This Is For
If You Read Certificates for a Living, You Are Not the One Filling Them Out
The people searching for an ACORD 25 split cleanly in two. On one side, agency staff issuing certificates — they need the blank form, and they get it from ACORD or their agency management system. On the other side, everyone who receives certificates: underwriters and MGA intake teams checking coverage on a submission, general contractors and property managers running compliance files, risk teams reconciling vendor requirements.
This tool is built for the second group. It assumes you already have the certificate, and the problem is getting the data off it.
That is the same problem SortSpoke solves at scale for insurance carriers, MGAs and BPOs — across ACORD forms generally, not just the 25. If you have a stack of certificates rather than one, that is a document processing problem, and it is what the platform behind this tool does for a living.
What We Do With the File You Upload
Your certificate is processed to produce your extraction and returned to you. It is not used to train models, it is not shared, and it is not reviewed by anyone outside the processing that produces your result.
SOC 2 Type 2
Certified — the report a security review asks for by name. See our <a href="/platform/data-security">security posture</a>.
Not training data
Your document is not used to train models for anyone else.
ACORD 25 Questions
It proves to a third party that a business carries liability insurance. Contracts routinely require one — a general contractor asks a subcontractor for it, a landlord asks a tenant, a client asks a vendor. The certificate summarizes coverage, limits and policy dates on one page so the requesting party can confirm the requirement is met without reading the policy.
The ACORD 25 is the Certificate of Liability Insurance — general liability, auto, umbrella and workers' compensation. The ACORD 28 is the Evidence of Commercial Property Insurance, covering buildings, contents and business income. Liability and property are different questions, so they travel on different certificates. A contract requiring both will ask for both.
From ACORD, which publishes and copyrights the forms, or from your agent or broker, whose agency management system issues them. ACORD forms are licensed rather than sold, so third parties — including us — cannot redistribute the blank form. If you are trying to issue a certificate, your producer is the right route; if you are trying to read one you have received, the tool on this page is.
Not by itself. A checked ADDL INSD box indicates additional insured status is claimed for that coverage row, but the status is created by an endorsement to the policy, not by the certificate. If additional insured status is contractually important, request the endorsement.
Yes. You enter it when you upload, and your results open in the browser and arrive in your inbox. We also ask four one-time questions about your work while the document is processing. The tool is free and there is no account or card — those answers are what we ask in return.
Yes. Upload a certificate, review the extraction and take the output. There is no payment step and no trial clock.
One Certificate Is a Tool. A Thousand Is a Workflow.
If certificates are arriving faster than your team can key them, the tool above is a demonstration, not a solution. SortSpoke extracts ACORD forms, loss runs, applications and policy documents into the systems your underwriters already work in — with a human review step, not blind automation. Bring one real certificate to the call and we will run it live.
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