Texas Plumbing Insurance Lapse Report
Analysis of 8,650 active licenses · data as of August 13, 2026
894 of 8,650 active Responsible Master Plumber licenses in Texas — 10.3%, about one in 10 — carry an insurance certificate that has already expired according to the Texas State Board of Plumbing Examiners' own licensee file. The license is current. The insurance on file with the board is not.
Almost all of those lapses are recent: only 8 of the 894 expired more than a year ago. That pattern points at paperwork drift around annual renewals rather than a population of plumbers working uninsured — which is the honest reading, and still leaves 894 companies whose public record a homeowner cannot rely on today.
Why this matters
Texas requires a Responsible Master Plumber to maintain liability insurance and file proof of it with the board. The board publishes the expiry date of that certificate in its public licensee file. That makes the gap measurable: a plumbing company can hold a license the state lists as current while the insurance record behind it lapsed months or years ago.
An expired certificate on file is not proof that a company is uninsured today — it may have renewed coverage without the board's record catching up. It does mean the public record a homeowner would check does not show current coverage, and that is worth one question before work starts: can you send me your current certificate of insurance?
This is the kind of check no consumer would run by hand across 8,650 licenses, and no major directory publishes. It is also why insurance status is the first ranking factor for plumbing listings on this site — see our methodology.
Lapse rate by county
The 15 Texas counties with the most active RMP licenses, of 325 counties with at least one. Among these, Williamson County has the highest share of expired certificates (13.1%) and Lubbock County the lowest (4.0%).
| County | Active licenses | Insurance expired | Lapse rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Harris | 928 | 83 | 8.9% |
| Bexar | 571 | 49 | 8.6% |
| Tarrant | 554 | 49 | 8.8% |
| Dallas | 548 | 34 | 6.2% |
| Williamson | 291 | 38 | 13.1% |
| Travis | 251 | 12 | 4.8% |
| Montgomery | 232 | 23 | 9.9% |
| Collin | 221 | 19 | 8.6% |
| Denton | 213 | 16 | 7.5% |
| El Paso | 185 | 16 | 8.6% |
| Lubbock | 150 | 6 | 4.0% |
| Johnson | 140 | 16 | 11.4% |
| Fort Bend | 125 | 8 | 6.4% |
| Comal | 116 | 9 | 7.8% |
| Kaufman | 116 | 12 | 10.3% |
How long Texas plumbers stay licensed
Active licenses by the decade the license was first issued. Longevity is the second ranking factor we apply, after insurance.
A further 662 active licenses are excluded from this chart: the board's file records their original license date as 01/01/1901, its placeholder for an unknown date. We treat those as unknown rather than as licensed since 1901.
Endorsements
Endorsements are additional qualifications an RMP can hold beyond the base license: 662 active licenses carry a medical gas endorsement (7.7%), 230 a water supply protection specialist endorsement, and 193 a multipurpose residential fire protection sprinkler endorsement. Medical gas work in particular is a hospital and clinic specialty that most residential plumbers never hold.
Method and reuse
Source: the Texas State Board of Plumbing Examiners' public Responsible Master Plumber licensee file, ingested in full and analyzed as of August 13, 2026. We count one row per active RMP license. "Insurance expired" means the certificate expiry date the board publishes is earlier than the analysis date; 8 licenses have no insurance date on file at all and are counted separately from both groups. Figures recompute automatically each time we re-ingest the file, so they may differ slightly from an earlier citation.
You are welcome to cite or republish these figures with attribution to Homversa and a link to this page. Journalists and researchers who want the county-level breakdown in full can request it at [email protected].