Which Indiana trades need a license?

Indiana has no statewide contractor license. For most one-truck trades, the state asks for an LLC and insurance and nothing else. The licenses that do exist come from two places: the city or county where the job is, and the state chemist's office, which licenses anyone who applies pesticides or fertilizer for pay.

Here's the rule trade by trade, from the agencies' own pages.

The state layer

The Indiana Professional Licensing Agency licenses plumbers under the Plumbing Practice Act, and plumbing is the only building trade on its list. A plumbing license takes about four years of experience before the journeyman exam.

Electricians, HVAC contractors, and general contractors are not licensed by the state. They're licensed by cities and counties, so the rule depends on where you work and changes at the city limit. Handymen, painters, landscapers, pressure washers, detailers, and cleaners have no state license either.

Indiana also has no dollar threshold above which work needs a state license. Virginia licenses work over $1,000 and California over $500, and those numbers get repeated as if Indiana had one. It doesn't. The $150 figure in Indiana law is a written-contract requirement, covered in its own post, not a license.

The Indianapolis layer

Indianapolis fills the gap the state leaves. Business and Neighborhood Services licenses five kinds of contractor: general, electrical, HVAC, wrecking, and plumbing, where your state license gets registered locally. That covers the consolidated city. Lawrence, Beech Grove, Speedway, and Southport run their own rules, and so does every other Indiana city with a building department.

The general contractor license is the one a handyman or a fence and deck crew bumps into. It requires a $10,000 surety bond, a liability policy at $500,000 per occurrence for injury and $100,000 for property damage, workers' comp or a signed no-employee waiver, and an orientation class in your first 60 days. The fee runs up to $247 for a two-year term.

The city's rule is that all contractors must be licensed and pull the required permits, and the two travel together: if the job needs a permit, it needs a licensed contractor. Patching drywall, hanging a door, and painting a room don't pull permits. A deck, a structural wall, or a new circuit does. When you're not sure, the licensing office answers email at [email protected].

The pesticide and fertilizer layer

This is the license that catches mobile operators, because it attaches to a service instead of a trade.

The Office of Indiana State Chemist, run out of Purdue, requires a business license for any company that applies pesticides or fertilizer to someone else's property for hire. The person doing the applying has to be a certified commercial applicator in the right category. Lawns are category 3b, turf management, which covers both pesticides and fertilizer on turf. Beds and shrubs are category 3a, ornamental.

Two parts of the rule that operators miss: herbicides count as pesticides, and buying a product over the counter changes nothing about whether applying it for money needs the license. A mowing operator who adds weed control from a hardware-store jug is applying a pesticide for hire.

There's a legal way to sell the service before you hold the license. The business doing the application has to be the licensed one, so you can put a fertilization program on your menu, quote it, and schedule it, and have a licensed applicator do the spray. Licensed operators take that work. Then sit the 3b exam over the winter.

Enforcement is complaint-driven, and licensed companies report unlicensed competitors, because they paid for the exam.

Pressure washing, with one caveat

Plain-water pressure washing needs no license from anyone.

Soft washing is less clear. Indiana's rules define a for-hire applicator as anyone applying any pesticide to another person's property for pay, with no carve-out for the products washers use. A roof treatment sold to kill algae uses a product that may be registered as an algaecide or fungicide, which would make the application a pesticide use. The State Chemist's office hasn't published a position on it. Before you add roof washing to the menu, call them at (765) 494-1492 and ask.

Free help

Indiana funds people whose job is to answer these questions for free. The Indiana Small Business Development Center has a Central Indiana office at Butler. SCORE Indianapolis pairs you with a retired business owner. The Business Ownership Initiative offers free coaching and microloans from $1,000 up.

When to ask

The trap has the same shape every time: an operator is doing fine, a customer asks for something adjacent, and it goes on the menu without anyone checking. A mowing operator in west-central Indiana described exactly that, a year into a hardware-store fertilizer program and about to start selling fertilizing plans, when someone pointed out that Indiana requires a license for it.

Adding a service to your booking page is the moment to run this list. Mowing, detailing, washing, cleaning: LLC and insurance and go. Anything you spray, and anything that pulls a permit inside Indianapolis: check first, sub it if you need to, and get the license when the demand proves it's worth the exam.