Termite Inspection Cost Calculator

About $135 for a standard visual inspection, and most national pest companies will do one for nothing. A wood destroying insect report for a property sale is $260, because it is an official state form with the inspector's liability attached and records kept for years. A forensic investigation with moisture meters, a borescope and thermal imaging is $625. Reported figures are $75 to $325 for a visual inspection against a national average near $100, $200 to $500 for a WDI report, and $500 to $1,500 for a forensic one.

Yes, and they are also a sales call — both things are true. A licensed inspector walking your foundation for an hour is a real service and they are genuinely good at finding termites; what you trade is your time and a conversation about treatment at the end. The incentive worth remembering is that the person telling you whether you have termites is paid for selling the treatment. So ask to be shown the evidence physically rather than described, and before agreeing to a four-figure treatment get a second opinion from somebody not quoting for the work. What a free inspection cannot be is a WDI report.

A wood destroying insect report — sometimes WDO — is an inspection recorded on the official form your state controls, with a diagram of the structure, findings on past as well as present activity, previous treatment history, and the inspector's liability attached. You need one if a lender, a buyer or a purchase contract asks for an inspection, because a courtesy inspection will not be accepted in its place however thorough it was. It is $260 here, and in a busy market allow about a week rather than expecting it same-day.

That the inspector could not look there, and it is the phrase that decides how much a report is worth. Termite evidence lives in the places that are hard to reach — the crawl space, the sill plate, behind bath walls, under a porch — so a report with large areas marked not accessible has told you very little. It is usually not the inspector's fault: they cannot enter a crawl space with a blocked hatch or under eighteen inches of headroom. Clear the hatch, move stored boxes off the interior foundation walls and the garage perimeter, clear the attic access and cut back shrubs touching the siding before the appointment.

It should, and an inspection that does not is not really an inspection — the crawl space is where the mud tubes on the piers, the damaged joists and the sill plate evidence are. It costs about 20% more than a slab house here for exactly that reason: it is time spent on somebody's side with a flashlight and a probe. Confirm before booking that the inspector will enter rather than look in from the hatch, and make the access possible beforehand so it does not come back marked inaccessible.

Annually is the standard recommendation, and in the Southeast, along the Gulf and in the Southwest it is genuinely justified by the pressure. Every two or three years is reasonable on a slab house with good drainage in cooler, drier parts of the country. Always get one before buying a property, and always as a WDI report rather than a courtesy look. And get one immediately if you see winged insects swarming indoors in spring, small piles of discarded wings on a windowsill, mud tubes on foundation walls, hollow-sounding wood, or paint bubbling as though from water with no water source.

Because an inspection is one person walking a perimeter, going under or over the house and sounding what they can reach. A 3,000 square foot house takes perhaps twenty minutes longer than a 1,500 square foot one, which is why the figures here move by about $25 across that whole range. What genuinely changes the price is how the house sits — a crawl space or a basement means inspecting from underneath — and how much of the property is in scope. If a company quotes an inspection priced by square footage, they are pricing a treatment proposal rather than an inspection.

If you are buying the property, yes, and it costs about 25% more. A shed on timbers, fence posts, railroad ties in the landscaping, a woodpile against the wall and tree stumps within thirty feet are reservoirs that will reinfest a treated house, so finding out about them before you own them is worth the money. Even on your own house, the three places activity turns up most often are the three most likely to fall outside "the dwelling" in a report: a deck ledger bolted to the house, a garage slab poured against the foundation, and a porch with wooden posts set in soil.

For when something is already wrong rather than for finding out whether it is. It uses moisture mapping, a borescope through small holes into wall voids, thermal imaging where that helps, probing and sometimes limited opening up, and it produces a photographed written report intended to stand up in a dispute. The usual reasons are suspected structural damage, a treatment that appears to have failed, a warranty claim, or an argument about what a previous inspection or a seller knew. It is $625 here against a reported $500 to $1,500.

You can do a useful first pass, and it is worth doing before paying anybody. Walk the outside of the foundation looking for mud tubes — pencil-width earthen tracks running up concrete or masonry. Check windowsills in spring for small piles of discarded wings. Tap accessible framing in the crawl space, basement and garage with a screwdriver handle, listening for hollow spots, and push the tip into anything that sounds soft. Look where wood meets soil: deck posts, porch posts, fence rails against the siding. What you cannot do yourself is write a report anybody will accept, or reliably clear a house that looks fine.