Unlicensed Contracting in Nevada: The Law and the Penalties

In Nevada, submitting a bid without an active license is itself the offense — no work has to have been performed — unless the person is exempt under NRS 624.031. The penalty escalates across three offenses, from a misdemeanor to a category E felony, and a court may add the costs of prosecution and investigation on top of the fine.

What the law prohibits

NRS 624.700(1):

It is unlawful for any person or combination of persons to: (a) Engage in the business or act in the capacity of a contractor within this State; or (b) Submit a bid on a job situated within this State, without having an active license therefor as provided in this chapter, unless that person or combination of persons is exempted from licensure pursuant to NRS 624.031 .

Three things in that sentence are easy to miss. Bidding is prohibited independently of doing the work. The license must be active, so a suspended or lapsed one does not satisfy it — and under NRS 624.283(1) a license not renewed on time is automatically suspended. And the prohibition is subject to the exemptions in NRS 624.031, which is part of the rule rather than a footnote to it.

Those exemptions are broader than people expect, and include work performed exclusively by an authorized representative of the United States Government, the State of Nevada, or a city, county, irrigation district, reclamation district or other municipal or political subdivision of the State. The section runs to many more numbered paragraphs and should be read rather than summarized.

The penalties

NRS 624.750(2) sets an escalating scale, prefaced “Except as otherwise provided in subsection 3 and unless a greater penalty is otherwise provided by a specific statute”:

(a) For a first offense, is guilty of a misdemeanor and shall be punished by a fine of not less than $1,000 nor more than $4,000, and may be further punished by imprisonment in the county jail for not more than 6 months. (b) For the second offense, is guilty of a gross misdemeanor and shall be punished by a fine of not less than $4,000 nor more than $10,000, and may be further punished by imprisonment in the county jail for not more than 364 days.

For a third or subsequent offense the same subsection makes it a category E felony, with a fine of not less than $10,000 nor more than $20,000 and possible imprisonment in the state prison.

The fines are mandatory minimums — “shall be punished by a fine of not less than” — while the imprisonment is discretionary at each level (“may be further punished”). The prefatory clause matters too: a greater penalty provided by another statute is not displaced by this one.

Costs and damages on top

NRS 624.700(3) allows a court to require a person convicted under subsection 1 to pay court costs and the costs of prosecution, the Board’s reasonable costs of investigating the violation, and “Damages the person caused as a result of the violation up to the amount of the person’s pecuniary gain from the violation” — or any combination of those. This is discretionary: “may be required to pay”.

What is not covered here

NRS 624.700(4) says what becomes of the bid or the contract itself:

If a person submits a bid or enters into a contract in violation of subsection 1, the bid or contract shall be deemed void ab initio.

What that means for money already earned is a different question, and it is not addressed on this site. Whether an unlicensed contractor can recover anything for work already done — by restitution, quantum meruit or otherwise — turns on case law and on how “void ab initio” is construed against other doctrines, rather than on what the statute says on its face. That needs a lawyer rather than a reference page. The quoted subsection is the statute’s own words; the consequence is not stated here in either direction.

If you are checking someone else’s status, see checking a contractor is licensed. If the answer is to get licensed, getting licensed instead and the classification a licensee must hold are the starting points, and how Nevada contractor licensing works is the overview.