Best surety bond companies for contractors

Most lists of the best surety bond companies mix two kinds of business. A surety is the insurance company that makes the promise: its name and its attorney-in-fact’s signature are on the bond, it pays a valid claim, and it then recovers that money from you under the indemnity agreement. Travelers, Liberty Mutual, CNA Surety, Chubb and Merchants Bonding are sureties.

A bond agency (an agent or broker, including the online bond shops) is a licensed producer that takes your application and places it with a surety it is appointed with. Every surety on this page points you to agents on its own site, through a find-an-agent search or an agent portal. So in practice you choose an agent, and the agent chooses among the sureties that will write you. The mechanics of the bond itself are in our guide to contractor surety bonds.

The obligee decides which surety it will take, not you and not a ranking. Two rules cover most contractors. For a license bond, the board names the test: California’s contractor bond of $25,000 must be written by a surety company licensed through the California Department of Insurance, and the business name and license number on it must match the CSLB record exactly. For federal work, FAR 28.202 requires a corporate surety that appears on the Treasury’s Circular 570, the list Treasury last reissued on 2026-08-01.

Circular 570 also prints each surety’s underwriting limitation. Treasury states the limit is per bond, and FAR 28.202 says the bond’s penal amount should not exceed it: above the limit, the excess has to be co-insured or reinsured. Treasury’s notes add that a surety must be licensed in the state where it provides the bond, and that its license data comes from the companies themselves, so the state insurance department is the place to confirm it.

Each of these five says on its own site that it writes both contract bonds and commercial bonds, the family license bonds belong to. Unlike a list of the top surety bond companies, they are in alphabetical order, not ranked: nobody publishes an audited approval rate, and the right one is whichever will write your file at your size. A surety group writes through more than one company, so the name to look up is the one printed on your bond.

• Chubb

  Chubb’s surety page lists performance, payment and maintenance bonds “for a wide range of contractors”, and license and permit bonds in a commercial line Chubb aims at highly rated companies. Small or infrequent commercial bonds go through Chubb Surety Marketplace, its online portal for agents. Chubb quotes an aggregate Treasury listing of $2,289,000,000 as of August 2026; that is a sum across its listed companies, not the per-bond limit of the one on your bond.

• CNA Surety (Western Surety Company)

  “CNA Surety” and “Western Surety” are CNA service marks, and Western Surety Company is on Circular 570 with a per-bond limit of $148,124,000. Its FAST-Track program is built for small contract bonds: the site states limits of $750,000 single and $750,000 aggregate based on credit only, and $1,000,000 single and $1,500,000 aggregate on FAST-Track Pro, which asks for more financial information. Applications come in through appointed agents.

• Liberty Mutual Surety

  Liberty Mutual describes itself as the world’s largest surety, and Liberty Mutual Insurance Company carries the largest per-bond limit of the writing companies named here, $2,720,709,000. Its contract bond page covers contractors from a first bond to programs of up to $750,000,000, with separate small-to-mid-size, hard-to-place and subdivision bond lines, and its commercial lines include license and permit bonds.

• Merchants Bonding Company

  Merchants calls itself a surety-only company with more than 90 years in the business, writing contract bonds and commercial bonds, license and permit bonds among them, through appointed agents its site helps you find by ZIP code. Merchants Bonding Company (Mutual) is on Circular 570 with a per-bond limit of $35,603,000, the smallest named here and still far above any license bond.

• Travelers

  Travelers lists bid, performance and payment bonds, license and permit bonds, release of lien and construction materials supply bonds on its surety page, sold through agents its site helps you find. Travelers Casualty and Surety Company of America is on Circular 570 with a per-bond limit of $237,089,000; it is one of several Travelers companies on the list.

The bond you need decides what “best” means. A license bond is small and fixed by statute, and its premium turns mostly on personal credit, so any surety licensed in your state will do and the agent’s speed and price are what you are comparing; our bond cost calculator shows the band before you ask.

Contract bonds are underwritten on the firm, not just the owner. A first bid or performance bond usually starts in a small-contract program: CNA Surety’s FAST-Track, for one, writes up to $750,000 on credit alone. Declined there, the SBA’s guarantee is the next door, covered in performance bond vs payment bond. As the jobs grow, the surety sets a single-job and an aggregate limit, and the writing company’s Treasury limit starts to matter on federal work.

Price the contract bond before you bid it with the performance bond cost calculator, using the rate schedule your agent quotes.

A bond from a surety the obligee will not accept comes back to you, and on a bid there may be no time to replace it. Five checks take a few minutes and cover the rules above.

This page is not insurance or legal advice. The bid documents, the board and a licensed agent decide what your bond needs.