Nevada Contractor License Cost: Board Fees

Nevada’s licensing fees are set by the Board in regulation, not by the statute — NRS 624.280 only caps them. The figure most easily got wrong is the $300 in NAC 624.130, which the regulation scopes to considering an application for a classification the applicant is not licensed in. It is charged per application, and NAC 624.590(1) requires one application per classification, so two classifications cost it twice.

The ceilings, and the actual charges

NRS 624.280 permits the Board to fix the fees and limits them: an application “must not exceed $550”, a license “must not exceed $900 biennially”, an examination “must not exceed $300”. Those are maxima and are not what is charged. The examination ceiling in particular is not a charge at all — the Board’s fee regulation sets no examination fee, for the reason given under what is not a Board fee below. The $300 that is collected is the application-consideration fee two rows down, and the two figures are unrelated.

The amounts collected are in NAC 624.130, which opens “The Board will charge and collect the following fees”. Among them:

The ceilings, and the actual charges

what	fee
Application for a license in a classification the applicant is not licensed in	$300
To issue or renew a license	$600
To issue or renew an inactive license	$300
Late filing of an application to renew an active license	$150
Late filing of an application to renew an inactive license	$75
Permanent increase or decrease of the monetary limit	$250
Increase of the monetary limit for a single project	$75
Change of the qualified person or other principal on a license	$250
Change in the name of the licensee	$250
An application regarding a conversion of the licensee under NRS chapter 92A	$300
Broaden a license to the entire classification or other subclassifications	$250
Administrative fee where a cash deposit has been established with the Board	$200

Three of those repay attention. The permanent limit change costs the same to go down as to go up. The $600 issue-or-renew fee is the same figure for a new license and for a renewal — the license runs two years, which is why the statutory ceiling is expressed biennially. And the conversion line is the only place in the fee schedule that touches a change of entity: NRS chapter 92A governs mergers and conversions, so an application about converting the licensee is a thing the Board considers, for $300. What it does not tell you is the outcome — neither NRS 624 nor NAC 624 says whether a license survives such a change, and this site does not fill that gap in either direction.

The schedule has 21 lines in total; the ones above are the charges a licensee or applicant is most likely to meet. The remainder are duplicates of documents, printed pamphlets and licensee reports, certificates of eligibility, and a returned-check charge.

Charged per application, not per applicant

NAC 624.590(1) requires a separate application for each classification, and NAC 624.130’s $300 attaches to the application rather than to the applicant. So the classification decision is also a cost decision — see the classification the fee is charged per.

Worked through, for one classification on an active license: $300 to consider an application for a classification the applicant is not licensed in, plus $600 to issue the license, is $900 in Board fees for the biennium.

For two classifications the application fee is charged twice — NAC 624.590(1) requires a separate application for each — but this site does not publish a combined total. NAC 624.130 fixes the $600 at “to issue or renew a license”, and whether two classifications are issued as one license or two is a question of how that line is read rather than of what it says. Ask the Board for the total before budgeting on one. That total does not include the examination, the financial statement or the bond, none of which is a Board fee — see below — and the Residential Recovery Fund payment is a statutory ceiling rather than a fixed amount, so it is not added here either.

The calculator above covers the fee paths in NAC 624.130 that turn on an answer: a new application, a renewal, and a change of monetary limit. The $250 change of the qualified person or other principal in the table is a fee without a scenario to compute, so it is listed and not modelled.

What is not a Board fee

Three real costs sit outside this schedule, and none can be added to a Board-fee total:

• The examination. NAC 624.130 sets no examination fee, because under NAC 624.600(1) the examination is administered by an independent testing service whose charges are its own. That is not the same as the examination being free.
• The financial statement. It is a filing, not a fee, and what it must be scales with the monetary limit requested — see the financial statement, which is not a fee. The accountant prices it.
• The surety bond. NRS 624.270(4) has the Board fix the amount per applicant, between $1,000 and $500,000, with reference to financial and professional responsibility and the size of the operation. The amount is therefore not knowable in advance, and the surety prices the premium.

The charge that varies with the monetary limit

A residential contractor also owes the Residential Recovery Fund assessment, which NRS 624.283(2)(c) ties to renewal and NRS 624.470(1) bands by the monetary limit on the license. The statute states those bands as “not to exceed” amounts, and subsection 3 requires the Board to reduce them once the fund passes 150 percent of its largest balance in the previous fiscal year — so the statutory figures are ceilings that may well have moved. This site does not publish a figure for the assessment until the current one is confirmed; the calculator says it applies and withholds the number.

Not stated here

Whether any of these fees is refundable. NAC 624.130 sets the amounts and says nothing about refunds, so the question is not answered by the provision the figures come from, and this site does not answer it from anywhere else. That is the same posture as the Residential Recovery Fund assessment above: named as open rather than left unmentioned.

See also the biennial renewal and how Nevada contractor licensing works.