Wyoming to Delaware: home inspector license reciprocity

Delaware licenses home inspectors statewide. The Board of Home Inspectors sits in the Division of Professional Regulation under chapter 41 of title 24 of the Delaware Code, and nobody may inspect, advertise or hold themselves out as a home inspector in the state without its license. This is a professional license and should not be confused with Delaware's contractor position, which is a Division of Revenue business tax registration rather than a Division of Professional Regulation credential. The board licenses through four published routes: endorsement for an inspector already licensed elsewhere, experience for an inspector based in a state that licenses nobody, examination for a newcomer, and the Home Inspector Trainee registration that the examination route is built on. The trainee tier is a training registration rather than a second destination: a trainee practices only under the direct, personal supervision of a Delaware-licensed inspector, who reviews and signs every report and takes total responsibility for it, and a trainee may not be charged a fee or made to sign a non-compete by that supervisor. The full Home Inspector license is what an experienced inspector moving to Delaware applies for. Delaware designates the National Home Inspector Examination as its written examination, and it writes no law and rules paper of its own. Insurance is a real condition of licensure here rather than an afterthought: the applicant or the applicant's employer must carry at least $50,000 of errors and omissions cover and at least $250,000 of liability cover, certified directly by the carrier. Licenses expire on August 31 of odd-numbered years and renew on 40 hours of approved continuing education. Applications and renewals run through the DELPROS online system, and the board reviews a completed file at its next meeting, held on the second Tuesday of January, March, May, July, September and November.

Wyoming issues no home inspector license, certificate or registration, and no Wyoming agency regulates the work. Title 33 of the Wyoming Statutes, which is the state's complete list of licensed and regulated professions, runs to forty-nine chapters covering abstractors, accountants, architects, attorneys, barbers, chiropractors, collection agencies, cosmetologists, debt adjusters, dentists, funeral directors, nurses, nursing home administrators, optometrists, pharmacists, physical therapists, physicians, psychologists, real estate brokers and salespersons, surveyors and engineers, veterinarians, speech-language pathologists, radiologic technologists, real estate appraisers, geologists, water well drilling contractors, athletic trainers, midwives, dietitians and acupuncturists, among others. There is no chapter for home inspectors, and there is no chapter for general or residential contractors either. The Secretary of State's listing of every agency that files administrative rules shows the same thing from the other direction: it names the boards of accountancy, architecture, cosmetology, dentistry, geology, medicine, nursing, optometry, pharmacy and the rest, the Real Estate Commission, and the Department of Fire Prevention and Electrical Safety, but no inspector board of any kind. Nothing is pending, and an inspector arriving from a licensing state has no Wyoming credential to apply for, no examination to sit and nothing to transfer. Because Wyoming holds no examination, the National Home Inspector Examination has nothing to stand in for here, and any 'certified' designation an inspector advertises comes from a private trade association rather than from the state. What governs the work instead is general law. The Wyoming Consumer Protection Act, sections 40-12-101 through 40-12-114, makes it an unlawful deceptive trade practice to claim knowingly a sponsorship, approval or affiliation one does not have, to represent that a service is of a standard or grade it is not, to represent that replacement or repair is needed when it is not, or to engage in unfair or deceptive acts or practices; the attorney general enforces it and an injured consumer who has given the statutory notice and received no cure may sue for actual damages, individually or as a class. Beyond that the written inspection agreement and ordinary contract and negligence law set the duty owed, because Wyoming has enacted no statutory standard of care for home inspectors, no rule about what an inspection report must contain, and no limit on what an inspection contract may disclaim. The licensed trades sit around the edges of the job: any electrical work coming out of a report must be done by an electrician licensed by the State Fire Marshal's Office, and the adjacent credentials a Wyoming inspector might reasonably move toward are the real estate appraiser license, the real estate broker or salesperson license, the professional engineer or land surveyor registration, the architect license, and the water well drilling contractor license. Wyoming has no state contractor licensing at all; cities license building trades themselves, and the City of Cheyenne's contractor licensing regulations, the most developed municipal scheme in the state, cover only building trades and create no inspector class.