Who's liable when you house a relocating employee

An employee's partner slips on the stairs of a company-arranged apartment and breaks a wrist. Or the employee's dog chews through $6,000 of hardwood. Or a guest is hurt at a gathering in the unit. In each case, the first call comes to HR, and the first question is the same: are we on the hook for this? Most teams have never thought it through until the moment they have to.

I've placed corporate housing in the Bay Area for 12 years. I'm not an attorney, and this isn't legal advice for your situation. But I've watched enough of these play out to know where the exposure actually sits, and the single factor that decides most of it is one that gets set at booking without much thought.

The factor that decides most of it: who signs the lease

When your company arranges housing, the lease is structured one of two ways, and it changes everything downstream.

In an employer-leased setup, the company is the tenant. You signed the lease (or your provider did on your behalf), and the company carries the obligations that come with being the tenant: liability for damage beyond the deposit, responsibility under the lease terms, and a more direct line of exposure if something happens in the unit.

In an employee-leased setup, the employee signs and the company reimburses. The employee is the tenant, holds the renters relationship, and carries the first layer of exposure. The company's role is financial, not contractual.

Neither is automatically right. Employer-leased gives you control, consistency, and clean billing, which is why most programs use it, but it concentrates the exposure on the company. Employee-leased pushes exposure to the individual but creates reimbursement friction and less control. The point is to choose deliberately and to insure for whichever one you're running, rather than discovering the structure only after a claim.

Injury and duty of care

If someone is injured in the unit, premises liability generally sits with the property owner or landlord, not the employer. A defective stair, a faulty railing, an unmarked step: that's the owner's exposure, and their insurance, which is one reason the quality and insurance of the housing provider matters.

The employer gets pulled in along two paths. First, if the company arranged and controlled the housing, a plaintiff may argue the company had a duty of care in choosing it, which is why vetting the provider isn't just a quality exercise. Second, and murkier, is workers' compensation. When an employee is on assignment and the housing is part of the package, an injury can sometimes be argued to fall within the course of employment, which pulls it into the comp system. That's a genuinely gray area and one to raise with your risk and legal teams, not to guess at.

Damage caused by the employee

This is the most common real-world claim, and it's where the lease structure bites. If the company is the master tenant and the employee (or their dog, or their guest) damages the unit beyond the deposit, the landlord looks to the company, because the company is the tenant. You then decide whether to absorb it or pass it through to the employee, and whether your relocation policy even allows a pass-through.

If the employee is the tenant, that claim lands on them and their renters policy, with the company a step removed. The cleanest programs decide this in advance and put it in writing, so a $6,000 floor isn't the moment everyone first learns who pays.

The coverage to require

The protection is layered, and a good program requires all of it. The housing provider should carry property and liability coverage and be willing to put it on a certificate of insurance; ask for the COI before move-in, not after an incident. The occupant should carry a renters policy, and in an employer-leased setup the company should consider being named as additional insured. The company's own general liability and umbrella coverage should be confirmed to extend to arranged housing. And the master lease or corporate housing agreement should carry an indemnification clause and clear limits of liability.

The accommodation type you choose affects this too. A professional corporate-housing provider or serviced apartment comes with a real insurance program and a COI you can collect. An Airbnb booked on a personal card for a relo often doesn't, which is one of the quieter reasons it's a weak fit for a program placement.

Pets, parties, and the edge cases

The recurring ones: pet damage (decide deposit and liability up front, since a large share of relos travel with pets), unauthorized occupants (a partner or family member who wasn't on the booking), and the gathering that gets out of hand. The master lease should address occupancy limits and house rules, and your relocation policy should say plainly what the company covers and what the employee owns. Most disputes I see trace back to something nobody wrote down.

What HR should do

If you run a relocation program of any size:

• Decide employer-leased vs. employee-leased deliberately, and insure for the one you run
• Collect a certificate of insurance from every housing provider before move-in
• Confirm with your broker that company GL and umbrella coverage extend to arranged housing
• Put indemnification, insurance requirements, and liability limits in your master lease or provider agreement
• Write the damage and pet pass-through rules into your relocation policy so they're settled before a claim, not during one
• Loop risk and legal in on the workers'-comp question, since assignment housing sits in a gray zone

The exposure is manageable, and for most programs it never becomes a problem. But the teams that get surprised are the ones who never mapped it, booked on whatever was easy, and found out the structure and the coverage only after something went wrong. Mapping it takes an afternoon with your provider and your broker. It's cheap insurance against the claim you hope never comes.

If you want help structuring Bay Area corporate housing so the liability and insurance pieces are handled before move-in, request a free consultation and I'll walk through how we set up leases, COIs, and agreements for relocation programs.

Sources

• Worldwide ERC Global Mobility Reports — Worldwide ERC
• California Department of Insurance — California Department of Insurance
• California Department of Industrial Relations — Workers' Compensation — California DIR
• Corporate Housing Providers Association — CHPA
• SHRM — Relocation and Mobility — Society for Human Resource Management
• California Civil Code: Landlord-Tenant — California Legislative Information