Nearly every coating company in the Chicago suburbs advertises a lifetime or limited lifetime warranty. Almost all of those warranties exclude the same handful of things, and almost nobody explains the exclusions before the sale.
A coating warranty covers the coating and how it was installed. In practice that means:
If any of those happen because of how the floor was prepped or installed, it is on the contractor to come back and fix it. That is the real promise, and it is a good one.
The concrete itself. This is the big one, and it catches more homeowners than anything else. A coating is a surface. If the slab under it cracks, settles, heaves or shifts because the ground moved, the coating cracks with it. No contractor can warranty the earth under your house, and anyone who implies they can is selling you something they cannot deliver.
Existing cracks reopening. We fill cracks before coating and the repair is strong. But a crack is evidence of movement, and if that slab keeps moving the crack comes back through. A filled crack is a cosmetic repair on an active joint, not a structural weld.
Moisture coming up through the slab where no vapor barrier was possible or where the customer declined the heavier build after a moisture test came back high.
Damage. Dragging a jack stand, dropping a hitch, a torch, a wheel-well full of road salt left sitting all winter, driveway sealer tracked in on tires, paint stripper, battery acid.
Wear in the apron and the exterior sections at the same rate as interior floor. More on that in our guide on why garage aprons wear first.
Discoloration from the sun on products that are not UV stable. A quality polyaspartic top coat should not yellow, and if a company is coating with epoxy only, ask directly.
Ten years, in writing, on workmanship: adhesion, peeling, delamination, bubbling and flaking caused by how we installed the floor. We hand you the exclusions at the estimate on purpose, because the exclusions are the part you need to make a decision, and reading them back to somebody out of the fine print after a problem is the worst conversation in this business.
Not automatically. Read what it excludes and who pays for labor. A 10-year warranty that covers labor and is honored promptly is worth more than a lifetime warranty on material only from a company that schedules repairs when it suits them.
If the crack is new slab movement, that is a concrete issue and it falls outside a coating warranty everywhere in this industry. If the coating released around a crack we filled, that is workmanship and it is ours. We will tell you which one we are looking at honestly.
Ask before you buy. Many do not. A transferable warranty is a genuine selling point when you list the home, so it is worth getting in writing.
Tell us the room, the rough size and your town. You get a written price, not a two-hour pitch. Fastest way is to text a photo of the floor to (815) 585-1750.
