Arizona to Arkansas: master plumber license reciprocity

The Master Plumber license is Arkansas's highest person-held plumbing credential, issued statewide by the Department of Health's Plumbing and Natural Gas Section under Ark. Code Ann. § 17-38-301 et seq. A master plumber may contract for and supervise plumbing work and is the license under which journeymen and registered apprentices work; a plumbing business must operate under a licensed master. An applicant must have worked at least one year as a licensed journeyman plumber and have five years of total experience in the trade, then pass the Section's written master plumber examination on the Arkansas Plumbing Code. Arkansas's only signed plumbing reciprocity agreement, with Oklahoma (effective October 21, 2024), covers the journeyman license only, so every out-of-state master plumber or plumbing contractor qualifies by experience verification and examination. Fees and continuing-education hours could not be confirmed because the Section's pages were unreachable during this review.

Arizona does not issue a master plumber licence. A master plumber arriving from another state who only wants to work for an employer needs no Arizona licence (except a Phoenix journeyman card for permitted work in that city). To run a plumbing business the qualifying party must show four years of practical or management trade experience (at least two within the last ten years; up to two years creditable from accredited technical training), pass the open-book Arizona Statutes and Rules Exam (SRE, $61 through Gmetrix) and the plumbing trade exam ($66 through PSI) with at least 70% within two years of applying, complete a background check for every person named on the application, register the entity if an LLC, corporation or partnership, post a licence bond or recovery-fund assessment, and pay application and licence fees ($580 for C-37, $720 for R-37, $850 for CR-37 including the $370 Residential Recovery Fund assessment, before exam fees). The ROC pages verified for this entry describe no state-to-state reciprocity agreement; under A.A.C. R4-9-106(E) the Registrar may waive the trade exam when the qualifying party 'is currently or has previously been a qualifying party for a licensee in this state or another state in the same classification, or a comparable classification as determined by the Registrar, within the preceding five years' (Application to Waive a Trade Examination filed with the licence application, not pre-approved), and out-of-state experience counts toward the four-year requirement, but the SRE is never waived for out-of-state applicants. Individual master plumber licences from other states are not, by themselves, a waiver basis: the waiver turns on having qualified a contractor licence in a comparable classification.