In 4 states, mold inspectors can’t be the ones who sell the fix

Who gets paid when your mold turns out to be bad?

Texas, Florida, New York and Louisiana all forbid it being the same company twice. One outfit looks. Another fixes. Where those laws don’t reach, one van does both jobs.

The visit goes like this. Somebody walks your basement with a flashlight, presses a moisture meter to a wall, then peels back a corner of carpet. It’s worse than it looks, they tell you. And then, standing in the same room, they write you a price to make it go away.

Nothing about that afternoon is unusual. Four states make that illegal on any job big enough to need a license.

Those laws are worth your time for one reason. Whoever answers “how bad is it” gets paid more when the answer is worse. Nobody has to lie for that to bend a judgment call, quietly and repeatedly, toward more work.

We aren’t saying people doing this are bad at it. Plenty are careful, trained through private programs, and worth every dollar you hand them. Plenty already keep looking and fixing apart because they think it’s the only clean way to work. Our point concerns the arrangement rather than the people in it.

Which leaves one question, and it isn’t whether they keep a certificate, because everybody is certified by somebody. Ask who tests, who fixes it, and whether those two cash checks from the same company. That’s the one to put first, in every state, at any price.

Why did four states write the same rule?

Because somebody watched free inspections turn into invoices.

When Maryland’s analysts went looking at mold licensing in 2016, an out-of-state company wrote back and described what it kept running into. Companies were offering free mold assessments, then convincing homeowners they needed remediation.

Free to find out. Priced to fix.

The arithmetic underneath isn’t complicated. Every extra square foot somebody finds is another square foot somebody gets to bill for, and in your basement they’re the only person who can read a result.

None of that needs a villain, and we keep coming back to that. It needs an ordinary person with a mortgage, a slow month, and a wall nobody else can see behind.

The same reasoning shows up in every one of those statutes, which is what makes it worth noticing. Four legislatures, working separately, ended up on one rule, that the person who tells you how bad it is must not be the person you pay to make it better. Nobody needed to prove a single case of fraud to justify that. The incentive does it by itself.

A conflict of interest does not require anybody to be dishonest to do damage.

What does each state ban?

Texas says it in one line of statute. Nobody licensed there may perform both assessment and remediation on the same project. Owning a stake in both companies on the same job is out too.

Florida runs a clock on it. A company can’t clean up a building it checked within the last 12 months, and can’t check a building it has only now cleaned. Referral fees passing between the two are barred in both directions. A first offense is a second-degree misdemeanor. A third one is a felony.

New York comes at it backwards. A licensed remediator there can’t start work until a licensed assessor has written up what is there, so the job splits in two before anybody opens a wall.

Louisiana calls doing both on one property a violation, and owning an interest in both companies a violation as well. What makes Louisiana the interesting one is that it doesn’t license assessors at all. Its whole list of trades carries a single mold entry, remediation, and a license only applies above $7,500. So a state that never created an assessor license still wrote down that the two jobs stay apart.

Three of those rules came out of legislatures. One came out of a contractor licensing board. Nobody coordinated, they wrote the same sentence anyway, and we would hand you that before anything else on this page.

Which states license mold assessors?

Texas, Florida, New York, Louisiana and Washington DC all license mold work. Each picked a different trigger, and we could not find two that match.

Square feet. Floor area again. Ownership. Dollars. Tenancy. Which one you fall under is an accident of your address.

We opened those five programs at source, plus four states carrying none, which were Maryland, Minnesota, Washington and Wisconsin. We didn’t read all fifty, so treat that as what we checked rather than a tally of this country.

What a license buys is every bit as uneven, and that’s the part that surprised us most. A Florida assessor passes an exam. They need either a two-year degree with 30 semester hours in microbiology, engineering or a related science, plus a year in the field, or a high school diploma and four years of it. They carry at least $1 million in insurance. They submit a full set of fingerprints for an FBI check.

A New York assessor is 18 or older, takes an approved course, pays $150 and works for a licensed company. No degree. No field experience.

Same two words on both cards, and the gap between them says more than either card does.

What happened in Maryland?

Maryland passed a mold licensing law in 2008 and never issued one license under it.

Chapter 537 set up licensing for cleanup firms, required $1 million in liability cover, handed the job to Maryland’s Home Improvement Commission and named a deadline of June 1, 2010. Then nothing arrived to pay for it. A 2011 law pushed that deadline to July 1, 2013. It passed unfunded too, which left firms doing this work, in Maryland’s own words, “technically in violation of the statutory licensing requirement.” By the time anyone is arguing about who pays, visible mold is already past the first band.

Analysts had priced the whole program at $61,900 to start in fiscal 2009. They priced it again at $72,700 for fiscal 2018. Nobody found it.

One line in the 2016 review is worth knowing, and we had to read it twice. Maryland’s commission reported receiving no substantive consumer complaints about bad mold work across the entire period. You can read that two ways. Either a problem was smaller than the law assumed, or homeowners who got bad work done had no idea, and nowhere obvious to say so.

A 2024 workgroup came back and asked legislators to reconsider, this time adding licensing for assessors. It also told them to copy homework from Washington DC, because a great number of people work both sides of that border. Maryland is live and unfinished, then, and about as clear a picture as we have of why most places carry nothing.

Can anybody tell you your air is safe?

No, and this is where every argument we have had about mold testing quietly ends. EPA puts it plainly. No EPA or other federal limits have been set for mold or its spores, so no sample can be checked against a federal standard.

A lab counts spores in your air and sends you a page of results. Nobody can check that page against a legal threshold, because none exists.

Which changes what a test is for. It can confirm something grows where you suspected. It can set one room against outdoor air. It can’t tell you a house passed.

So real weight falls on one person’s judgment, standing in your basement, deciding how bad this is for you. Which is the whole reason four legislatures cared who signs that person’s checks.

Minnesota’s health department goes further than most. It says it doesn’t recommend testing in most situations, partly because “There is no health-based standard for mold levels in air.”

EPA’s household guide opens with a line worth taping to a door. “The key to mold control is moisture control.” Find the water, stop it, then clean what grew. We’d rather hand you that than a number, because none was ever going to make this call for you.

When can you clean it up yourself?

Anything under about ten square feet, roughly a three-foot square, most households can handle themselves, and EPA says so in plain terms.

That figure turns up everywhere once you notice it. New York’s household guidance uses ten square feet. Washington State’s health department describes a patch three feet by three feet. Then it tells readers to find a professional by checking under “Fire and Water Damage Restoration” in your Yellow Pages. A whole state’s referral system, and it’s a phone book category.

Texas draws its own line higher, at 25 contiguous square feet, and its licensing department is blunt about anything under that line. Their words: “in most instances, areas of visible mold of less than 25 contiguous square feet can be cleaned up by people who are not licensed.”

Size is the last thing we would weigh, though. Mold behind a wall, under flooring, or fed by a leak nobody has found is a different job from a patch on bathroom grout, however small a visible part looks.

And whatever decides if it comes back has nothing to do with who cleans it. If water is still arriving, it grows back. An expensive cleanup over an unfixed leak buys you a few months.

What should you ask where nobody licenses it?

Wisconsin licenses none of this, and Wisconsin’s health department still tells homeowners to check whether the firm inspecting is financially related to the firm doing repairs. It also says out loud whose job that is. Yours.

Sit with that for a second. A state with no program at all hands you the four-state rule as homework.

The rest of that page is the best hiring advice in this subject, and we’d put it above any certificate on any wall.

Get more than one estimate on identical scope. You can’t compare different scopes, and a vague one is how a small job becomes a large bill halfway through.

Refuse a phone quote. Nobody prices mold sight unseen.

Ask for a written report covering areas inspected, sampling results, a cause and a fix. If nobody names the cause, you’re being sold a cleanup rather than a repair.

Walk away from anyone promising to remove all mold from a building. Nobody can do that.

Use a laboratory accredited by EPA or by the American Industrial Hygiene Association. Wisconsin points at private groups that hand out certificates, and in the same breath says it doesn’t endorse, license or regulate any of them.

One last line off that page tells you how common all this must be. When a contractor advertises as “State Certified” or “State Endorsed,” Wisconsin asks homeowners to send that name to its consumer fraud division as a deceptive trade practice.

So keep looking apart from fixing, wherever you live. It’s the cheapest protection we know of in this whole subject. Texas, Florida, New York and Louisiana reached that rule separately, and applying it costs nothing in a state that never wrote it down. Hire one company to look. Hire a different company to fix. Then ask the question that outlasts both of them, which is who found the water.