Home Inspector

Crawl through a house before someone buys it, then write down everything wrong with it.

Typical pay: $74,690a year
Time to qualify: 1 to 3 yearsafter high school
Demand: Limited
License needed: Dependsneeded in 36 states

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Quick answers

How much does a home inspector make in the United States?

The median pay is about $74,690 a year. Across everyone in the job it runs from about $47,140 at the lower end to about $114,200 at the upper end. The source is listed under Sources at the end of this page.

How long does it take to become a home inspector in the United States?

1 to 3 years after high school, on the usual route.

What does it cost to become a home inspector?

$2,300 to $11,500 all in for tuition, fees, exams and kit. Living costs are not counted.

Do you need a license to work as a home inspector in the United States?

It depends where you work. You need a license, certificate or registration in Alaska, Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Maryland, Mississippi, Montana, North Carolina, North Dakota, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, Nevada, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, Vermont, Washington, Wisconsin and West Virginia. Elsewhere there is none to hold, though many employers still ask for training or a certificate.

What is the job outlook for a home inspector in the United States?

Limited demand nationally, from government outlook data. Demand varies by region, so check your area.

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Home Inspector salary in the United States

What you earn and what it costs to get there.

What home inspectors make

Median for the group

$74,690

Bottom tenth

$47,140

Top tenth

$114,200

The national median is $74,690 a year, the bottom tenth earn $47,140 or less and the top tenth $114,200 or more, in the 2025 survey. Read those carefully: the federal wage survey has no separate line for home inspectors, so it counts them inside Construction and Building Inspectors alongside salaried city code officials. Many home inspectors are self-employed and paid per inspection, so a slow housing market shows up in your income within weeks.

Starting out

$47,140 to $58,860

The bottom tenth and bottom quarter of construction and building inspectors, 2025

A first year working for an established inspection company usually pays toward this end. A first year on your own can be leaner, because nobody has heard of you yet. Many new inspectors either ride along with a busy firm or keep another job while they build referrals from real estate agents.

You get paid per house

A flat fee per house

Set by you, and higher for a big or old house

Two or three inspections a day is a full day, because each one takes two to four hours on site plus an hour writing. Add-ons like radon testing, sewer cameras and pools are billed on top.

What it costs to get there

Training course, online or classroom: Roughly $500 to $3,000, and included at no extra cost with some association memberships
State license and exam fees, where the state has them: A few hundred dollars all in
Tools: ladder, flashlight, moisture meter, gas detector, infrared camera: $1,500 to $5,000
Errors and omissions insurance, which covers you if you miss something: Often $1,500 to $3,000 a year
Report software, website, vehicle: Ongoing, this is a small business

Roughly, all in

$2,300 to $11,500

Tuition, fees, exams and kit. Not rent, food or travel

The low end is an online training course, the state exam and license fee where your state has them, and a basic kit of ladder, flashlight, moisture meter and gas detector. The high end adds a classroom course, an infrared camera, and the first year of errors and omissions insurance, which covers you if you miss something and runs $1,500 to $3,000 a year. That insurance, report software, a website and a vehicle are ongoing, because this is a small business rather than a job you are hired into. There is no federal grant for a private inspection course, though a Pell Grant can cover most of a community college construction program if you go that way first.

There is no big federal grant for a private inspection course. If you go through a community college construction program instead, file the FAFSA (Free Application for Federal Student Aid) first, because a Pell Grant can cover most of a community college bill.

What you get, and what you do not

Many inspectors work for themselves, so the usual job perks are on you.

You set your own schedule
Inspections are booked around when buyers and agents can be there, which means some evenings and Saturdays.
No employer health insurance
You buy your own, often through the federal marketplace at healthcare.gov.
No pension
You save for retirement yourself, usually in an individual retirement account.
Low overhead
A truck, a ladder and a laptop. You can start this business for less than the cost of one year of college.
Repeat referrals
Real estate agents who trust you send work for years. That relationship is the whole business.

How to become a home inspector in the United States

The exact path from high school to qualified.

The path to becoming a home inspector, step by step

Short and cheap compared with almost anything else on this site. The hard part is not the training, it is getting your first customers.

1
High school diploma or GED (General Educational Development) test
Grade 12
Take construction technology, shop and any writing class you can. You will write for a living more than you expect.
2
Learn how houses are built
1 to 5 years, and it pays
The best home inspectors come out of a trade: carpentry, roofing, electrical, plumbing or heating and cooling. You cannot spot a bad repair if you have never made a good one.
3
Take an inspection training course
Weeks to a few months
Classroom, online or a mix. Courses cover structure, roofing, electrical, plumbing, heating and cooling, and how to write a report that holds up.
4
Pass your state's exam, if it has one
Weeks of study
Many licensing states use the National Home Inspector Examination or their own version of it. Some states also require a set number of supervised inspections first.
5
Get insured and start inspecting
Ongoing
Buy errors and omissions insurance, build a website, and introduce yourself to every real estate agent who will take a coffee.

High school courses that help you become a home inspector

Construction technology or shop
Framing, wiring and plumbing basics are the whole job.
English
The report is the product. Badly written ones get inspectors sued.
Business or accounting
There is a good chance you will be self-employed.
Physics
Moisture, heat movement and loads explain most of what goes wrong in a house.

Time and money, at a glance

Years after high school: 1 to 3, counting trade experience
Admission: Open. No degree required anywhere
Total to get started: About $2,300 to $11,500 with tools, the high end including a first year of insurance
Paid while training?: Yes if you train by working a construction trade first

Who licenses this job

There is no national license. 36 states license or register home inspectors. Texas is strict, with three levels, required courses, an exam and supervised experience. The other 14 states and DC (the District of Columbia), including California, Georgia, Michigan and Colorado, have no state license, so clients look at association credentials instead. Check your state before you pay for training.

Where people train

Association training
The International Association of Certified Home Inspectors gives members over 1,000 hours of online education at no extra cost and runs live classes at a purpose-built training house.
The American Society of Home Inspectors
Runs continuing education, webinars and an annual conference, and awards the ASHI (American Society of Home Inspectors) Certified Inspector credential.
State-approved course providers
In licensed states, only courses on the state's approved list count toward the license.
Community college construction programs
The slower, cheaper way to learn how buildings actually go together.

What helps you get ahead as a home inspector

Things you don't need, but that help.

Add-ons that raise your day rate

Each is a short course and a separate fee you can charge on top of the base inspection.

Radon testing
Radon is a radioactive gas that seeps up from soil. Buyers in some regions expect the test on every house.
Sewer scope
A camera down the main drain line. Cheap to add, finds expensive problems.
Wood-destroying insect inspection
Termites and carpenter ants. Required for some loans.
Infrared camera work
Finds hidden moisture, missing insulation and overheating circuits.
Mold and air quality sampling
Extra training and lab fees, but a common request.

Nice-to-haves

A clean driver's license and a reliable truck
You drive to every job and carry a long ladder.
Comfort in tight, filthy spaces
Crawlspaces have spiders, rodents and standing water. This is not optional.
Photography
Clear photos make a report readable, and they are your defense if somebody argues later.
Calm delivery
You are telling people the house they love has a $12,000 problem, with the seller standing right there.

Where else this license goes

Home inspection sits next to several related jobs you can add or switch into. New construction phase inspections mean checking a builder's work at the framing and pre-drywall stages for the buyer. Insurance companies pay for roof condition and four-point inspections. Commercial property assessments involve bigger buildings. Some inspectors move the other way and take a salaried city building inspector job for the pension and the steady hours.

What being a home inspector is really like

Day to day, pros and cons, where you'd work.

What a home inspector does day to day

Two inspections, morning and afternoon. You arrive before the buyer, start on the roof, then the exterior, then work down through attic, living space, crawlspace and mechanical room. Three hours of photographs, notes, testing outlets and running every faucet. The buyer and their agent show up for the last half hour and follow you around asking questions. Evening is report writing: 40 pages with photos, delivered the same night because the buyer has a deadline.

The honest pros and cons of being a home inspector

The good

Cheap and fast to get into compared with a degree
You run your own business and keep your own schedule
Every house is different, so it never gets boring
Real skills that transfer to building inspection or contracting

The hard parts

Your income rises and falls with the housing market
Crawlspaces, attics in July, roofs in the rain
You can be sued for what you missed, so insurance is not optional
You spend as much time selling yourself to real estate agents as inspecting

Work life

Typical hours: Flexible, but includes evenings and Saturdays
Remote work: Report writing yes, inspecting no
Physical demand: High: ladders, roofs, crawlspaces
Unionized: No, many are self-employed

Similar paths

Things nobody tells you about being a home inspector

Things people don't tell you.

You report, you do not repair

Standards of practice bar an inspector from fixing what they find, and in many states from bidding on the repair work. The whole value of the job is that you have no reason to invent a problem or hide one.

The job is not growing

The federal career profile for construction and building inspectors, the group home inspectors are counted in, projects little or no change in employment from 2025 to 2035. Openings come mostly from people leaving or retiring.

There is a training house built to be broken

The International Association of Certified Home Inspectors runs a building it calls the House of Horrors, deliberately full of defects, so inspectors can practice finding them without wrecking somebody's real home.

How a home inspector compares

Every list is built from the same numbers shown above, so you can see where this career sits next to the others.

Highest paying skilled trades in the US12 of 84

More skilled trades careers in the US

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Where these numbers come from

Last checked October 2026. Pay figures are typical full-time annual amounts in United States dollars, based on Bureau of Labor Statistics wage data and published pay scales. They vary by state, employer and experience. Tuition is for in-state students at public schools unless the card says otherwise. How every figure on this site is sourced and checked.