Crawl through a house before someone buys it, then write down everything wrong with it.
Click through it
Pay, the path, pros and cons and the facts on one printable page. Good for a wall or a guidance counsellor.
Or read the whole thing here
What you earn and what it costs to get there.
Typical
$74,690
Starting out
$47,140
Busy owner-operator
$114,200
The national median is $74,690 a year and the bottom tenth start near $47,140. 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. Most home inspectors are self-employed and paid per inspection, so a slow housing market shows up in your income within weeks.
$45,000 to $58,000
Your first year, working for an established inspection company
A first year on your own is usually worse than that, because nobody has heard of you yet. Most new inspectors either ride along with a busy firm or keep another job while they build referrals from real estate agents.
Roughly $300 to $600
A typical single-family home inspection, more 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 and are where a lot of the profit sits.
Tuition, fees, exams and kit. Not rent, food or travel
The low end is an online training course, the state exam and licence 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.
Most 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.
The exact path from high school to qualified.
Short and cheap compared with almost anything else on this site. The hard part is not the training, it is getting your first customers.
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.
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.
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.
Pass the exam your state requires
Weeks of study
Many states use the National Home Inspector Examination or their own version of it. Some states also require a set number of supervised inspections first.
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.
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
You will almost certainly be self-employed.
Physics
Moisture, heat movement and loads explain most of what goes wrong in a house.
There is no national license and the rules change at every state line. Texas is strict: the Texas Real Estate Commission runs three levels, apprentice inspector, real estate inspector and professional real estate inspector, each with required courses, an exam and supervised experience. Other states have a license with lighter rules, and a handful have no state license at all. Where a state does not license, clients and real estate agents look at association credentials instead. Check your own state's rules before you spend a dollar on training.
Association training
The International Association of Certified Home Inspectors gives members over 1,000 hours of free online education 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.
Things you don't need, but that help.
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.
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.
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 pay more per job and involve bigger buildings. Some inspectors move the other way and take a salaried city building inspector job for the pension and the steady hours.
Day to day, pros and cons, where you'd work.
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 good
The hard parts
Things people don't tell you.
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 United States Department of Labor career profile rates the outlook for construction and building inspectors, the group home inspectors are counted in, as below average with employment expected to decline. Openings come mostly from people retiring.
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.
In Texas you start as an apprentice inspector under direct supervision, move to real estate inspector, and only reach professional real estate inspector, the level that lets you work with no sponsor, after more education, more experience and another exam.
Last checked September 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.