Plumber licensing in Indiana

Indiana has no reciprocity with any state — the board's FAQ says it flatly, and the claim you may have seen about Ohio, Illinois, and Kentucky is false at every leg. What an out-of-state license does here is qualify you: the journeyman application's trade route requires a current out-of-state plumbing license showing four years of experience, plus an employer affidavit — then you sit the Indiana exam.

Note the trap in reverse: four years of experience with no license anywhere has no clean journeyman route on the board's current instructions. Military spouses and dependents are the exception — a provisional license without examination, issued within 30 days and good for a year.

No temporary or provisional license exists for an ordinary traveler — but Indiana's helper carve-out is broad and statutory: helpers, laborers, registered apprentices, and other employees of a plumbing contractor or journeyman need no license so long as they do not hold themselves out as plumbers or act in a plumber's capacity.

That puts a candidate on the payroll and the jobsite on day one, at helper scope and wage, moving to journeyman work only when the card arrives. The $10 apprentice registration is the cleaner variant for a longer stay. The carve-out is about capacity, not paperwork — a pending application is not a defense to running journeyman work.

Two routes to the journeyman exam: completion of a Commission-approved apprenticeship, or the plumbing-trade route — which requires a current out-of-state license plus four years and an employer-signed affidavit. Approval goes through the board, then you test. The no-license fallback exists only on the contractor side, not journeyman.

A registration rather than an exam credential: age 17, enrolled in a Commission-approved program, with the sponsor certification signed by the approved school naming your supervising journeyman or contractor. Filed online, $10, expiring October 1 of even years, renewed by confirming you are still enrolled.

Statutory preemption: no city or county may require any other form of licensing from a state licensee. What locals may do is require the plumbing contractor — not the worker — to register with a local official for inspection records, at a reasonable fee, and run their permits and inspections.

Indiana licenses both: the contractor license for whoever undertakes and bids the work and answers for the whole project, the journeyman license for the worker performing it under that contractor's responsibility. Acting as either without the license is unlawful — while the entry workforce (helpers, laborers, registered apprentices) is carved out by the same statute.