Search this question and the results answer a different one: what a homeowner should expect to pay. Consumer cost pages are fine for the homeowner, and useless for the operator standing behind the clipboard, because they price the visit and ignore the paperwork. This guide prices it from the operator's side. What the free inspection is for, what the signed report carries that the free look does not, how to set the report fee from your own costs and exposure instead of from a competitor's coupon, and what to do when the agent who sends you four closings a month asks why the fee is not lower.
The short answer: price the signature, not the walk-around
A basic termite inspection for a worried homeowner can reasonably be free, because it is a sales call wearing a flashlight. If you find activity, the inspection just earned you a treatment job, and the cost of the visit belongs in your marketing budget. The wood destroying insect report ordered for a real estate closing is a different transaction and should never be free, because the buyer of that service is not buying your time. They are buying a formal document on a prescribed form, signed by a licensed inspector, delivered inside a closing timeline. Price the free look at zero on purpose, as lead capture with a stated scope, and price the report as a standalone professional service whose fee reflects the liability and the deadline, whether or not it ever leads to a treatment. The rest of this guide is how to draw that line so it holds.
A termite inspection and a WDI report are two different products
The confusion starts with the word "inspection," which the trade uses for both. On site, the work looks similar: probing sills and reading mud tubes in the usual moisture traps. What differs is everything around the walk.
The homeowner inspection answers one private question: does this house have termites, and what would you charge to fix it? Nobody else relies on the answer. There is no form behind it and no lender waiting on it. If you miss a hidden colony behind finished drywall, the practical consequence is a second call and an awkward conversation.
The real estate WDI inspection produces a regulated document that other parties act on. For any HUD or VA guaranteed transaction, the findings go on form NPMA-33, which is approved for FHA and VA loans, requires the inspector's name, signature, and license number, records what was visibly found, and carries signature lines through which the seller discloses known history and the buyer acknowledges receiving both pages.1 Some states prescribe their own paper on top of that. Texas requires every real-estate-transaction WDI report to be issued on the state's official form, with no alterations permitted, and treats a lender form like the VA's as a supplement to it, not a substitute.3 Texas also spells out who may perform the inspection at all: a licensed certified applicator or technician in the termite and wood destroying insect control category, following inspection procedures the state wrote out area by area.2
Same flashlight, different product. One is a conversation. The other is a signed instrument in a property transfer, produced under someone else's rules, on someone else's clock. Once you see the two products separately, the pricing question stops being "what does a termite inspection cost" and becomes two easier questions: what is the free look worth to your pipeline, and what does the signed report need to earn on its own?
What the report fee is buying: the form, the liability, the deadline
When a title company or agent orders a WDI report, three things are being purchased, and none of them is the hour on site.
The form. The report must land on the prescribed document, completed the prescribed way. The NPMA-33 wants findings sorted into its visible-evidence categories, with treatment recommendations that follow its own guidelines and an itemized accounting of every obstructed or inaccessible area, down to stored items and insulation.1 Texas adds a diagram with approximate perimeter measurements and marked areas of activity and conducive conditions, and requires the issuing business to keep the inspection records for at least two years.2,3 That is administrative work with regulatory consequences for getting it wrong, and it happens back at the office, after the visit the customer thinks they are paying for. If your shop already treats records as a discipline, and in this trade it should, the report is the same habit applied to a transaction document. The recordkeeping side of that discipline is covered in pesticide application recordkeeping requirements.
The liability. The form limits the inspection to readily accessible visible areas and says plainly that concealed infestation may exist, but the limitation does not make the signature weightless.1 A buyer who closes on a house and finds active termites in month three will read your report line by line, and so will their attorney. The fee is partly an exposure fee, the same way a notary bond or an engineer's stamp is priced. Shops that hand out signed WDI reports for free are carrying that exposure for nothing.
The deadline. The report is void for mortgage purposes ninety days after the inspection date, and closings move.1 The order usually arrives with a settlement date attached, which means the inspection has to be scheduled inside someone else's timeline and the completed form delivered before it. Work that must happen this week is worth more than work that can happen whenever the route allows. Every other trade prices urgency; this is yours.
Setting the report price from liability and turnaround
Build the number from the floor up. The median wage for pest control workers is $44,730 a year, about $21.51 an hour, and that is an employee wage before payroll burden, the truck, licensing and continuing education, and insurance.4 A WDI inspection is not a quick spray stop: the site work takes as long as the house demands once crawl spaces and attics are involved, the drive time wraps it on both ends, and the form work adds more at the desk. By the time the loaded cost of a licensed inspector's half day is counted, a report priced under a hundred dollars is close to charity even before the liability is priced at all.
So price it in three layers. First, the delivery cost: the loaded hours the visit and the paperwork consume, at your real cost per hour. Second, the exposure premium: a margin for being the licensed name a lender relies on, which your errors-and-omissions premium can help you calibrate, since your insurer has already priced your risk once. Third, the turnaround premium: a standard fee for standard scheduling and a stated surcharge when the closing needs the report inside a few days. Publishing that rush surcharge does two useful things. It gets you paid for the scramble, and it stops the scramble from being free, which is the only thing that keeps every order from becoming a rush order.
What you should not do is set the fee by copying whoever in your market advertises the cheapest inspection, because their number is usually a free-inspection shop quoting the walk-around price for the report product. You would be matching a price for a service they are not selling. Consumer cost aggregators quote wide ranges for this work precisely because they are averaging shops that price the signature with shops that have not noticed they are giving it away.
When a free inspection is lead capture and when it is a giveaway
None of this argues against free inspections. It argues for knowing which product the free version is. A free termite inspection for a homeowner who suspects a problem is a strong offer: it lowers the barrier for a customer who is already worried, and when activity turns up, the visit converts to a treatment job at full price. The free look is the top of your treatment funnel, and its cost is a marketing cost you can measure against the jobs it lands. How you then price the treatment itself is its own decision, covered for another slow-season service line in how to price bed bug treatments.
The free inspection becomes a giveaway the moment its output is a signed document someone else relies on. If the "free termite inspection" ends with your license number on an NPMA-33 headed to a title company, you have given away the report product and kept its liability. The clean rule: free ends where the form begins. State it on your site and your quotes exactly that way. The inspection is free; the written wood destroying insect report for a real estate transaction is a separate service at a stated fee. Customers accept the line without friction, because the two things plainly are different, and the ones who push back are usually not homeowners at all but transaction parties who wanted the document without the fee.
One more boundary keeps the free look from leaking money: scope it. A free inspection covers accessible areas on a standard visit. It is not a free return trip every time a seller clears out a crawl space, and it is not free consulting for a buyer's renegotiation. The NPMA-33 itself notes that reinspecting an area made accessible after the fact may carry an additional fee; borrow that logic for the free tier too.1
Real estate agent volume and the referral discount question
Do this work well and the phone starts ringing with agents and title companies instead of homeowners. That is the best problem this service line produces: transaction work is repeat business from professionals who order the same document the same way, and it arrives all year. It also brings the inevitable ask: we send you a lot of these, what can you do on the fee?
A volume discount to a steady referrer can be legitimate business. Give it as a stated rate for a stated volume, on the report fee, in writing, and hold two lines while you do it. First, the report is never free and never priced under its delivery cost, because a below-cost report subsidizes someone else's closing with your license. Second, the discount buys scheduling loyalty, not findings. The form you are signing states that neither the company nor the inspector has any interest in the property, and an inspector whose report answers to a referral pipeline has an interest, whatever the paperwork says.1 The agents worth keeping understand that a report lenders trust is the entire value of the service, and that the shop willing to shade a finding for referral flow is exactly the shop whose reports will eventually be worthless to them. Say yes to a modest, documented volume rate. Say no, permanently, to free reports and to any arrangement that ties your fee to the deal closing.
A worked example: one house, two phone calls
The numbers below are illustrative, chosen to show where the money moves. Set your own from your own costs.
Monday, a homeowner calls about mud tubes on the garage slab of her 1,800 square foot house. Free inspection, 40 minutes on site. You find an active subterranean termite infestation and quote a $1,400 perimeter treatment with a one-year service agreement. She approves it Thursday. The visit cost you perhaps $90 in loaded time and produced a $1,400 job: marketing money, well spent.
Tuesday, a title company calls about the same neighborhood: a VA purchase is closing in twelve days and needs a WDI report. This order gets your report rate: $175 standard, and had they called with four days instead of twelve, $245 with the published rush surcharge. The inspection takes a full hour and a half including the crawl space, the NPMA-33 takes another forty minutes with the diagram and the inaccessible-areas key, and the finished form is delivered to the title company two days later, inside its ninety-day validity window with room to spare. No activity found, so no treatment follows. The $175 has to stand entirely on its own, and it does, because it was priced to.
Now run the free-report failure mode. The shop across town does the Tuesday job for nothing, hoping a treatment falls out of it. No activity is found, so nothing falls out. They spent the same loaded half day you did, signed the same liability you did, and earned zero, and the title company has now learned their signature costs nothing. Multiply by every clean house in a transaction market, which is most of them, and the free-report shop is quietly running the least profitable service line in the county while its inspectors' signatures back other people's closings.
Put both prices on paper before the phone rings
We built EosLog's quote generator so a pest control operator can keep the inspection fee, the WDI report fee, and the rush surcharge as saved line items, drop them into a quote in seconds, and follow a positive finding with a treatment estimate the customer signs from their phone.
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Sources and further reading
- National Pest Management Association, Form NPMA-33, Wood Destroying Insect Inspection Report (HUD-hosted; approved for FHA and VA loans; invalid for securing a mortgage or settlement of property transfer if not used within 90 days of inspection; visual inspection of readily accessible areas; inspector and company certify no interest in the property inspected).
- Texas Administrative Code, Title 4, §7.175, Official Wood Destroying Insect Report Inspection Procedures (inspections for a WDIR must be conducted by a licensed certified applicator or technician in the Termite and Wood Destroying Insect Control category; required diagram and conducive-conditions reporting; corrective treatment on a real estate transaction report only with visible evidence).
- Texas Administrative Code, Title 4, §7.176, Real Estate Transaction Inspection Reports (real-estate WDI reports must be issued on the department-prescribed form with no alterations; lender forms such as the VA's are supplemental; inspection records retained a minimum of two years).
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Outlook Handbook, Pest Control Workers (median annual wage $44,730 in May 2024, about $21.51 per hour; used here as an employee-wage baseline for loaded-cost math, not a billed rate).
This guide reflects general US pest control practice as of 2026 and is not legal or pricing advice. WDI inspection rules, required forms, and licensing categories vary by state, and every dollar figure in the worked example is illustrative. Set your inspection and report fees from your own costs and exposure, and confirm the form and procedure rules with your state's structural pest control regulator before selling real-estate inspection work.