Four Years of Experience: What Nevada's Board Accepts as Proof

The experience behind a Nevada contractor license is not counted over a whole working life. The Nevada State Contractors Board states the requirement as a quantity held inside a window, and states separately which documents evidence it. Both sit on its License Requirements page.

A quantity inside a window

The Board’s own statement of the requirement carries the window and the years in one sentence:

The person who will act as the trade qualified individual must have had, within the fifteen years immediately before the filing of the application, at least four full years of experience as a journeyman, supervising employee or contractor in the specific classification requested.

Four full years is the quantity; the fifteen years immediately before the filing of the application is the window it must fall inside. The two are one requirement, so experience earned outside that window does not answer it, however long it ran. The trade qualified individual is the person in whom it is met, the capacities that count are journeyman, supervising employee and contractor, and the measure is the specific classification requested.

Who the Board says may hold the role

The Board sets out who that person may be in relation to the business applying, attributing the rule to a section of the statute:

Pursuant to NRS 624.260, the qualifier can be an owner, officer, member, manager or employee of the company. Each qualifier must be a bona fide member or employee of this company, and actively engaged in the contracting business.

That is the Board’s statement of what NRS 624.260 requires, reproduced as the Board’s statement rather than as the words of the section. Each of the five positions is a relationship to a business — the one that will hold the license once it issues — and two qualities are required of whoever occupies it: bona fide membership or employment, and active engagement in the contracting business. Neither is satisfied by a title alone.

The documentation the Board will accept

The Board introduces its list plainly:

The Board will accept the following types of documentation in support of your experience.

Four Certification of Work Experience Forms, which the Board calls the Certificates, are listed for each trade qualifier, and two further kinds of documentation follow:

A current masters certification issued by a governmental agency in a discipline substantially similar to the requested classification; or,

Proof of transferrable military experience and training.

A masters certification qualifies on two conditions in the Board’s wording: that it is current, and that a governmental agency issued it in a substantially similar discipline.

Training displaces three of the four years at most

Education enters as a substitution with a ceiling on it:

Training received in a program offered at an accredited college, university or equivalent program accepted by the Board may be used to satisfy up to, but not more than 3 years of experience. You will need to provide written documentation of any training or education claimed in place of experience. Acceptable documentation includes copies of apprenticeship certificates and college transcripts.

The phrase that governs is up to, but not more than 3 years. Against a requirement of four full years, training displaces three at the outside, so at least one year of actual experience always remains. The program must be offered at an accredited college or university or be an equivalent program the Board accepts, and what is claimed in place of experience is documented in writing — apprenticeship certificates and college transcripts being the Board’s examples.

Education is not itself a condition of licensure. The Board says so directly:

You do not have to meet any education requirements in order to qualify for a contractor’s license.

The two statements sit together: no schooling is required, and where schooling is offered instead of experience it counts for no more than three years.

Self-employment, evidenced differently

Experience gained working for oneself is not excluded, and is evidenced differently:

If self-employment is being relied upon to establish any portion of the experience requirement, we will need a list of customers for whom you worked, including their complete mailing addresses and phone numbers.

Any portion is the operative phrase: the customer list is asked for where self-employment supplies part of the four years as much as all of it.

Where the Certificates are not required

The Board identifies circumstances in which the Certificates are not called for, one of them recent service on another Nevada license:

the qualifier has served as a qualified employee in the same classification on another Nevada state contractor’s license within the last 5 years; or

The classification must be the same one, the license another Nevada state contractor’s license, and the service within the last five years. The other circumstance is a waiver of experience certification by endorsement, resting on licensure in a state Nevada has determined to have substantially equivalent requirements, which the Board lists on its State Equivalency Chart.

The Board’s License Requirements page states each point above, under its experience requirements. The role the experience attaches to and the classification the experience must match are treated separately, as are the rest of what Nevada requires, how the application proceeds and how a Nevada contractor license works.