Arizona to Ohio: master plumber license reciprocity

Ohio has no license called 'master plumber'; its top person-held plumbing credential is the statewide Plumbing Contractor license issued by the Ohio Construction Industry Licensing Board (OCILB) to an individual who qualified by examination (R.C. 4740.01(A)), who then assigns it to a contracting company. Other states' reciprocity forms pair this license with their master plumber licenses (West Virginia's form, for example, matches its Master Plumber to Ohio's Plumbing Contractor), so it is treated here as the master level. A new applicant must be 18, a citizen or legal alien, have five years as a tradesperson in the plumbing trade immediately before applying (or be an Ohio registered engineer with three years of construction business experience), pass BCI and FBI background checks, pass both sections of the PSI-administered examination (Plumbing trade and Business & Law), carry $500,000 of contractor liability insurance in one company name, and pay a $25 application fee and $25 license fee; licenses expire annually and renew with continuing education (online CE limited to 4 hours per one-year renewal). OCILB's published reciprocity list covers plumbing licenses from Arkansas, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee and West Virginia, with the Ohio Business and Law exam still required for Mississippi, South Carolina and Tennessee licensees.

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.