What a Licensed Electrician Means in Pennsylvania

If you're holding an electrician's estimate and looking for the state license number that proves the person is qualified, you're not going to find one, because Pennsylvania doesn't license electricians. There's no state exam, no state board, and no state list of licensed electricians to look a name up on.

So "licensed electrician" painted on a truck isn't a state credential. Two Berks towns, Reading and Kutztown, issue their own electrician's licenses, and if your job isn't in one of them, that part doesn't apply to you.

That doesn't mean you're flying blind. The paper in your hand has things on it you can check in a few minutes, and the first one is a number that starts with the letters PA. Everything below applies just as well to any of the electricians working in Berks County you call for a quote.

Pennsylvania doesn't license electricians.

I want to be clear about how far this goes, because it surprises people. The state doesn't license or certify electricians, or most other construction trades, or the people who work for them. Nobody at the state level tests an electrician on electrical work and hands out a card. There's no list you can look up to see if someone passed.

So when an electrician tells you they're licensed, they could mean one of a few different things. They might mean they're registered with the state, and that registration isn't a license. They might mean they hold a license from the City of Reading or the Borough of Kutztown, the two Berks municipalities with an electrician's license of their own. Or they might just be using the word the way people use it in conversation, without meaning anything precise at all. The rest of this post is about telling those apart.

What the PA number on your estimate is.

What the state does have is a registration, not a license. It's called the home improvement contractor registration, and it's run by the consumer protection bureau in the state Attorney General's office. It's the same registration an HVAC contractor or a roofer carries. I've written about what a licensed HVAC contractor means in Pennsylvania separately, and it's the same story. Nobody is tested on electrical skill to get one. It's a record that a business filed its details with the state, showed proof of insurance, and disclosed things like prior judgments and bankruptcies.

Not every contractor has to register. The line is $5,000 of paid home improvement work in the previous tax year, all of it added together, not the price of your job. Someone under that line doesn't have to have a number, so ask before you assume the worst.

The registration number has to appear on every contract, estimate and proposal, and in advertising too. It reads as PA followed by digits, like PA123456. If a home improvement contract has no number on it, the law says it can't be enforced against you. Treat that as a reason to get the number before you sign, not as a way out of paying for work already done.

The checks to run before you sign.

These are the checks a homeowner can run in a few minutes, in the order you'd do them with the estimate sitting in front of you. They're the same first steps as checking any contractor's license in Berks County, with the electrician's wrinkles added.

1. Find the PA number on the estimate itself. Look at the header, the footer and the fine print near the signature line. It reads as PA and then digits.
2. Look that number up. The Attorney General's office keeps a public search that tells you whether a contractor is registered, and the consumer protection line at 1-888-520-6680 will answer the same question if you'd rather ask a person. The search takes about a minute.
3. Read the insurance term in the contract. The law says the contract has to promise two things about insurance. One, that they carry liability insurance of at least $50,000 for personal injury and at least $50,000 for property damage their work causes. Two, how much they carry on the day you sign. So the contract shows you the numbers, and $50,000 is the least either one can be. A contract without that paragraph isn't enforceable against you, and that's another reason to read it before you sign.
4. If the work is in Reading or Kutztown, ask about the municipal license. Both towns license electricians, and the town office that issues the license can tell you about it. Reading's Building and Trades Division is 610-655-6284, and in Kutztown it's the borough's Community Development Office.
5. Everywhere else in Berks, there's no municipal electrician's license to check as far as I know. Your own township or borough office can confirm that in one call, and either way the PA number and the insurance line are your checks.

What Reading licenses.

One thing about the words first, because both towns use them. "Master electrician" and "journeyman electrician" aren't Pennsylvania titles. No state law defines either one. They mean something only where a municipality has written them into its own ordinance, and there, the ordinance defines them.

In Reading, an Electricians' Examining Board decides who qualifies and gives the tests, and the city's Building and Trades office handles the licenses. The two classes a homeowner is most likely to hear are master and journeyman. A master electrician is the one who contracts for the work. To get that license a person has to have been a licensed journeyman for two years and passed the master electrician exam of the ICC, the International Code Council. A journeyman does the installation work for a master, and gets there through an apprenticeship registered with the state, or eight years under a master, plus the ICC journeyman exam.

Reading's list is longer than those two. The city also issues a special license to the owner of a commercial or public-service building who employs their own electrician, a special electrician license to that employee, and an appliance installer license for people who work for an appliance contractor. Under the city code, the first grade of that appliance installer license covers wiring for household appliances such as washers, dryers, water heaters and garbage disposals. So if you hear a class name that isn't master or journeyman, it may still be a Reading license.

What Kutztown licenses.

Kutztown's borough licenses come in five classes: master commercial, master residential, journeyman, apprentice and installer. There are three ways to get a master license there. One is already holding a master or residential electrician's license from a Pennsylvania city big enough to count under state law, and Reading is one. Another is ICC certification plus a few years of experience. The third is having held the borough's license before, with a current employer who vouches for them. The installer license is different: it's issued on request with the fee, and no exam is involved.

Two more Kutztown rules apply to the electrician, not to you, if your house is there. Kutztown's own permit sheet says any electrician working in a one- or two-family home has to hold the state home improvement registration as well as the borough license. And contractors have to have $300,000 in general liability insurance on file with the borough, which is the borough's own requirement on top of the $50,000 figures the state puts in your contract.

What all of this adds up to.

A Reading license is Reading's and a Kutztown license is Kutztown's. Neither one is a license to work in the next township, though Kutztown will issue its own license to someone who already holds Reading's. Anywhere else in Berks County, a license from either town is a credential the electrician went and earned rather than something your township requires. Think of it as a plus, not a requirement.

One more thing that has nothing to do with licenses. Nearly all electrical work needs a permit, and a state-certified inspector checks the finished work, so someone other than your electrician sees the job. Which jobs need a permit is its own question, and your township's permit office answers it.

None of these checks tells you whether the person is good at the work. For that you're back to the ordinary way of hiring anybody: references, reviews, and whether they explain the job in words you follow, which the guide to hiring home services in Berks County covers.

If the search comes back with nothing, or the number on the estimate belongs to a different name, ask the contractor about it before you sign. It might be a typo, and it might not, and either way you want it cleared up first. And if your estimate has no PA number on it at all, ask for one before anything else. If the answer is that they're too small to need one, that's allowed, and it's your call whether that's who you want doing electrical work in your house.

Nobody can show you a Pennsylvania electrician's license, because there isn't one. What you can do is look at the paper you're already holding: find the PA number, look it up, read the insurance line, and ask your municipal office whether it licenses electricians. Start there, with the estimate in your hand. Then, if you want a second quote to compare it against, the Berks County electricians page is a good place to find one, and what electricians charge by the hour here is worth reading before the next estimate lands.