Free checkers · Rules checked October 22, 2026
Every state runs the apprentice → journeyman → master ladder differently — different hours, different category minimums, different answers on whether your license counts across a state line or survives a lapse. Exam schools will happily sell you a course before you are eligible to sit. This site computes the answer first, from the boards' own published rules.
Four questions, four checkers
Your state + your hours, split the way your state splits them. Get eligible now, the exact gap by category — or the warning that unregistered hours may not count at all.
Plumbing license reciprocity by state is a patchwork, not a system: Texas takes only Louisiana & Arkansas, Indiana and Georgia take nobody. All 2,550 pairs, computed.
A lapsed license is a fee in one state and a career restart in another. In Texas, expired over 2 years means re-register as an apprentice and re-pass every exam. Where is your line?
Every licensed state makes a master plumber sit in the legally responsible seat. No seat filled, no company — the owner gate checker reads your state's exact rule.
Why a checker, not another guide
Exam-prep sellers charge $149.99 just to process a Texas application and $296.99 for a state course. Software companies print reciprocity tables to sell software to your boss. The boards publish the rules as PDFs and never compute them. Every one of them is paid when you start something. We sell one thing — a $49 kit — so the checkers here can tell you the answers that end a sale: not yet, not in that state, your hours don't count, reinstate before it's a restart.
State ladder: apprentice → journeyman → master
Exam $110 · License $75
State ladder: apprentice → journeyman → master
License $200
Contractor-license state (no state journeyman license)
Fees not published
State ladder: apprentice → journeyman → master
Fees not published
Contractor-license state (no state journeyman license)
Fees not published
State ladder: apprentice → journeyman → master
Fees not published
The dataset
Hours, category minimums, exam fees, reciprocity pairs, lapse lines and master-of-record rules for all 51 jurisdictions — taken from the boards and statutes themselves, checked October 22, 2026, and re-swept quarterly. Where sources conflict, we print the conflict. Where a figure is not published, the site says “Not published” instead of guessing.
Read the dataset and how it is maintained →
Included in the $49 PlumberLicenseCheck Kit
One payment. Yours to keep. The checkers above stay free either way.
Start with the guides
8,000 is the famous number. It is also wrong in Minnesota, Maryland, Colorado and a dozen other states — and the split inside the hours matters as much as the total.
The map searchers ask for: which states endorse which, which review case by case, and which two accept nobody at all.
The most expensive sentence in the trade. In registration states, unregistered hours are hours the board treats as if they never happened.
