Who Pays for the Termite Inspection?

Nobody is required to. There is no federal rule assigning the termite inspection fee to the buyer or the seller, and I have not found a state that assigns it either. It is a contract term, which means it is negotiable, which means the answer depends on what your purchase agreement says and who asks first.

That is the honest answer, and it is not the answer most pages give you. Here is what is actually written down.

• The one place a federal agency addresses this directly is the VA, and its rule changed on 15 June 2022. Pages published before then are wrong.
• The inspection fee, the treatment, and the structural repairs are three separate negotiations. They get conflated constantly, almost always in the seller’s favour.
• “The seller pays in the South” is custom, not law. Treat it as an opening position.
• The seller signs the form too, and in doing so discloses what they know about past infestation, damage, repair, and treatment. That signature is worth more to you than the inspection fee.

Who this is for

You are under contract, a WDI inspection is on the list, and someone has told you it is “normally” paid by the other side. You want to know whether that is true before you argue about it.

If you already have the report in hand and you are trying to read it, go here instead.

The one place there is an actual rule: VA loans

VA requires a wood destroying pest inspection report as a Minimum Property Requirement for certain properties, based on where they sit on the Termite Infestation Probability map. If it applies, the Notice of Value says so.

For years, veterans were barred from paying that fee in most of the country. VA describes its own history plainly: “Historically, VA has authorized, as a local variance, that Veterans may be charged for a wood destroying pest inspection report in a limited number of states and territories.”

That changed. VA Circular 26-22-11, dated 15 June 2022, authorized it nationwide:

Effective immediately, VA is authorizing in advance, as a local variance, that Veterans may be charged wood destroying pest inspection fees, where required by the NOV. Veterans may also pay for any repairs required to ensure compliance with MPRs. Veterans are encouraged to negotiate the cost of the wood destroying pest inspection and repairs with the seller.

Three things follow from that paragraph, and they matter in this order.

The veteran may pay. Not must. The final sentence is VA telling buyers to negotiate, which is unusual language for a federal circular and worth quoting back to anyone who tells you the fee is automatically yours now.

The circular also covers repairs, not just the inspection. Repairs needed to meet Minimum Property Requirements can be paid by the veteran, and on these files they generally have to be finished before the loan is guaranteed.

The circular is valid until rescinded. A Change 1 was issued on 28 July 2022, and it only updated a footnote, redirecting the Termite Infestation Probability map reference to the VA Lenders Handbook M26-7, Chapter 12, Topic 33. The substance has not moved since 2022.

If a page tells you a veteran cannot pay for the termite inspection, it was written before June 2022 or copied from something that was. That is a useful test to run on the rest of the page while you are there.

FHA and conventional loans

The NPMA-33 form hosted by HUD carries the line “This form is approved for FHA and VA loans,” so the same document does duty on both. When an FHA file requires the inspection, the report is made on that form.

The conditions that trigger the requirement on an FHA file live in HUD’s Single Family Housing Policy Handbook 4000.1. I have not read that section against the current handbook, so I am not going to summarise it here. Every plain-English version of it I found online traces back to other content sites rather than to HUD, and that is not good enough for a page someone is going to make a decision on. When I have read it, it will be on this page with the section number attached.

On a conventional loan there is usually no requirement at all unless the appraiser sees something, or the contract creates one. Which means the whole question is contractual, and you are back to negotiating.

Why “the seller pays in the South” is not a rule

It is genuinely common in much of the Southeast for a seller to provide a clear report as part of the deal. It is also common for that to be assumed rather than written, and for the assumption to quietly cover only the inspection and not the treatment.

I do not have a sourced, state-by-state record of who customarily pays, and I am not going to publish a 50-state table of it, because as far as I can tell nobody has one that traces to anything more solid than other websites saying so. Custom is real. It is just not citable, and a table of uncited custom is exactly the kind of thing that looks authoritative and misleads people.

What you can do instead takes one message: ask your agent what the last three termite findings in your market settled at. That is local, current, and specific to your price band, and it beats a national average that was never measured.

The three things you are actually negotiating

Keep these separate on paper. Sellers, agents, and pest control companies all have reasons to blur them, usually without meaning any harm.

1. The inspection fee. The smallest number in this entire process by a wide margin. It is also the one that gets argued about most, because it is the one that appears first.

2. The treatment, if one is recommended. This is where the money is. A recommendation can be triggered by old evidence with no documentation of a past treatment, with nothing alive on the property. Ask for the seller’s treatment records before you ask for a credit.

3. Structural repairs, if there is damage. A different trade entirely, and the WDI inspector is not qualified to price it. The form says so directly: the inspector’s “training and experience do not qualify the inspector in damage evaluation.”

Winning item 1 and conceding items 2 and 3 is a bad trade, and it happens because item 1 comes up first, while everyone is still being pleasant.

What it costs

I do not have a price range for a WDI inspection that I am willing to publish, because every figure I could find traces back to home-services aggregators that do not say how they collected it, and several of them contradict each other.

Here is what to do instead, and it is more useful anyway. Call three licensed operators in your area and ask two questions: what do you charge for a WDI report on a house this size, and do you also sell termite treatment? The second answer tells you more than the first.

Two things worth knowing while you are on the phone. Firms offering termite services must be licensed by your state, and EPA’s guidance is to ask to see the licence. And a report is invalid for a mortgage or property transfer if it is not used within 90 days of the inspection date, so ordering it very early in a long escrow can mean paying for it twice.

Here’s what I’d actually do

I would not spend negotiating capital on the inspection fee. I would offer to pay it, early and without being asked, and I would use that to buy a much more valuable concession: that I choose the inspector.

The company that inspects is very often the company that would like to treat. Paying for the report myself removes that entanglement for the price of the smallest line item in the transaction, and it means the report belongs to me.

Then I would put my effort where the money is. Before discussing any dollar figure on treatment, I would ask the seller for records of previous treatments and any existing bond or service agreement, and I would ask whether that agreement transfers to me and at what cost. A transferable bond is worth real money and gets forgotten in almost every one of these conversations.

On a VA file specifically, I would print the third sentence of Circular 26-22-11 and keep it in the folder. VA is on record encouraging you to negotiate this with the seller. That is not a bad thing to have in writing when someone tells you the rules changed and now it is simply your bill.

Sources

• Circular 26-22-11, Pest Inspection Fees and Repair Costs — Veterans Benefits Administration, US Department of Veterans Affairs, 2022-06-15. Accessed 2026-08-01. All VA policy quotations on this page are from this circular.
• Circular 26-22-11, Change 1 — Veterans Benefits Administration, 2022-07-28. Accessed 2026-08-01.
• Form NPMA-33, Wood Destroying Insect Inspection Report (7/01/19) — National Pest Management Association, hosted by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development. Accessed 2026-08-01.
• Termites: How to Identify and Control Them — US Environmental Protection Agency, updated 2025-10-21. Accessed 2026-08-01.