Licensing news
Three new states now regulate home inspectors
For most of the last decade, the answer to "how many states license home inspectors" held steady around 34. In fourteen months, three states changed it. Iowa began requiring credentials in July 2025, and Montana and Utah both started licensing on January 1, 2026. If you learned the state map before 2025, it is out of date.
Iowa: no board, no license, but membership is mandatory
Iowa's Senate File 460, effective July 1, 2025, took an unusual path. Instead of creating a licensing board, the law requires a home inspector to be a member in good standing of a national home inspector association whose own membership standards require at least 100 inspections and passage of a psychometrically sound exam. In practice that means the established associations, and the National Home Inspector Examination qualifies as the exam. The state wrote its floor and outsourced the enforcement of it to the profession's own institutions (Iowa Legislature, SF 460).
Montana: a full license, with insurance at the center
Montana's license, created by SB 269 and HB 225 and effective January 1, 2026, sits with the Department of Labor & Industry's new Home Inspector Program (dli.mt.gov). Entry is 40 hours of instruction or passage of an approved national exam, plus membership in a national association. The heaviest requirement is not education but coverage: $100,000 of general liability and $100,000 of errors-and-omissions insurance, with 40 hours of continuing education every two years to keep the license.
Utah: a license keyed to certification
Utah's HB 58 created the "private home inspector" license under the Division of Professional Licensing, in Utah Code 58-56-9, effective January 1, 2026, with applications accepted from May 1, 2026. The entry credential is certification from an approved organization rather than a state-built exam pipeline. The administrative rules were still being finalized through 2026, so anyone inspecting in Utah should check DOPL's current requirements directly rather than relying on secondhand summaries, including this one.
The pattern across all three: none of the new states built exam machinery of their own. All three lean on the national associations and the NHIE, and two of the three made insurance the tallest hurdle. Nebraska did something similar in 2023 with a registration-only requirement built around a $250,000 certificate of insurance. If more of the remaining unregulated states act, expect this shape, not the classic licensing board.
What the map looks like now
By our count, 36 states regulate the profession in some form: 33 with a license or certification, Nebraska with registration, and Iowa and Pennsylvania with association-membership mandates (Pennsylvania's dates to Act 114 of 2000). Fourteen states still have no statewide requirement, including California, which regulates inspector conduct through a trade practice act without licensing anyone.
For consumers the practical advice is unchanged by any of this: in licensed and unlicensed states alike, the substance of an inspection is set by the standards of practice, not the statute. Ask the inspector which standard they inspect to and what their report covers; our guide to what a home inspection actually covers walks through exactly that. A license tells you the state checked a floor. The standard tells you what you are buying.
Sources
- Iowa Legislature, Senate File 460 (2025), legis.iowa.gov.
- Montana Department of Labor & Industry, Home Inspector Program, dli.mt.gov.
- Utah Code 58-56-9 (HB 58, 2025), Division of Professional Licensing, utah.gov.
- Examination Board of Professional Home Inspectors, per-state regulation summaries, nationalhomeinspectorexam.org.
- Nebraska Secretary of State, home inspector registration, sos.nebraska.gov.