How do I check a pest control company is licensed?
The short answer
Ask for the company's licence number and the name it is held under, then check it with your own state or provincial regulator — in most US states that is the department of agriculture or an equivalent structural pest control board, and in Canada it is the provincial environment or agriculture ministry. There is no national register in either country.
What to ask for, in this order
- The business licence number and the exact legal entity name it is held under. It is often a company rather than the person at your door.
- Whether the technician attending is certified or is working under a certified applicator's supervision, which is a normal and lawful arrangement and is worth knowing.
- Proof of liability insurance, and for termite and wood-destroying-organism work, whether they carry the coverage that category usually requires.
- Any complaint or enforcement history the regulator publishes.
Where to look
Pesticide applicator licensing in the United States is administered by the states, usually through a department of agriculture, and several states run a separate structural pest control board. In Canada it sits with the provinces. Search the regulator for the state or province where the work will happen, not where the company advertises — a company operating across a state line needs to be licensed in both.
This site does not verify licences and does not claim to. An earlier plan for this project assumed it could: the public-record signal available covers under one per cent of the businesses here, and inspecting those matches showed them to be name collisions rather than licence records. Publishing a licence status from that data would have been a confident-looking fabrication, so it is not published at all.
What this site does show
Every listing here carries the full distribution of a business's Google ratings rather than only the average, the share of ratings that are one or two star, whether the owner replies to reviews, which pests reviewers actually name, and the published hours. Those are measured rather than claimed, and they are a different and complementary check from licensing.
Also asked
- Is there a national pest control licence in the United States?
- No. Pesticide applicator certification operates under a federal framework, but licensing is issued and enforced by each state, and several states add their own structural pest control requirements on top. A company licensed in one state is not thereby licensed in the next one.
- Does a trade association membership mean they are licensed?
- No. Association membership is a voluntary affiliation and can be a reasonable signal about how a business presents itself. It is not a licence, it is not issued by a regulator, and it should not be accepted in place of a number you can check.
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General information about pest problems and about hiring, not advice about your specific property. Pest control licensing, wildlife protection and landlord and tenant law are all set state by state and province by province across the United States and Canada, so your own regulator is the current answer. How we read the data.