Michigan Company Fined $10,000 for Unlicensed Plumbing in 17 Wisconsin Cities, and What the Penalty Looks Like Nationwide

Plumbing without a license carries a different penalty in nearly every state, and most states use more than one enforcement tool at once: a criminal misdemeanor charge, a civil or administrative fine that can run into the thousands of dollars per violation, and in several states, a penalty that keeps accruing for every day the unlicensed work continues. A 2025 enforcement case out of Wisconsin shows how quickly that adds up. State regulators fined a Troy, Michigan company, HydroCorp, $10,000 after finding it used unlicensed workers to install water meters in 17 Wisconsin municipalities.

For how licensing works state to state, see how to get a contractor license in each state. This case, and the state by state penalty comparison below it, is about what happens when that licensing step gets skipped.

At a glance

• Wisconsin fined HydroCorp $10,000 for using unlicensed workers to install water meters in 17 municipalities; current law caps the department's administrative forfeiture at $2,000 per violation (Wis. Stat. 145.12(5)(a)).
• Illinois, Maryland, and West Virginia charge unlicensed plumbing as a misdemeanor and count each day of the violation as a separate offense.
• Texas now assesses a flat, non-negotiable $4,000 administrative penalty per violation for employing an unlicensed plumber, effective January 1, 2026.
• Florida can charge a first offense as a misdemeanor and a repeat offense, or one committed during a declared state of emergency, as a third-degree felony, on top of a separate $10,000 administrative fine.

What Happened in Wisconsin

The City of Ashland hired HydroCorp in 2023 to replace water meters at roughly 3,000 residential and commercial properties, under a $296,370 contract. The Wisconsin Department of Safety and Professional Services opened an investigation and, in October 2025, issued an enforcement action finding that the workers performing the installations were not licensed plumbers in Wisconsin.

The finding mattered because water meter replacement counts as plumbing work under state law, and Wisconsin requires a licensed master plumber to be in charge at all times of any plumbing installation (Wis. Stat. 145.06(2)). DSPS did not stop at Ashland. The same enforcement action cited HydroCorp for unlicensed work in 16 additional municipalities: Baldwin, Bellevue, Curtiss, Eagle, Elkhorn, Glendale, Hudson, Hurley, Luck, McFarland, Monona, Oakdale, Seymour, Spring Valley, Wilson, and Winter, for 17 municipalities in total.

How It Was Caught

The investigation traces back to a single complaint. Ashland master plumber Zygmund Jablonski Jr. filed the complaint that triggered DSPS's review, and according to reporting on the case, he had warned city officials about the licensing problem as early as 2022, three years before the fine was issued.

DSPS followed the Ashland finding with a broader warning. In September 2025, the department sent a letter to every municipality in Wisconsin, flagging the licensing requirements that attach to water meter replacement work specifically. That letter is a signal that Ashland was not treated as an isolated case.

The Exemption That Didn't Apply

Ashland's mayor, Matt MacKenzie, said the city believed HydroCorp's workers were covered by a state law exemption for municipal utility employees performing plumbing work without individual licenses. That belief turned out to be the core mistake.

Wisconsin's exemption is narrow by design. Under Wis. Stat. 145.06(4)(f), a public municipal water utility's own employees may install, repair, or replace water service piping between the property line and the meter, including meter installation, without a plumbing license, but only if that utility had regularly performed the work for at least five years before January 1, 1964. The exemption covers direct municipal employees. It does not extend to a private contractor's crew working under contract, which is exactly the arrangement Ashland used. DSPS's order found that HydroCorp, as a private company, simply lacked properly Wisconsin-licensed plumbing staff for the work.

The Fallout

Ashland stopped using HydroCorp once the licensing issue surfaced and finished the remaining installations with its own city utility workers. Mayor MacKenzie told reporters, "If we thought there was a danger of anything, we'd definitely be on top of it," while the city consulted its own attorneys and asked DSPS whether the completed installations need to be reinspected.

Ashland still does not know how many of the roughly 3,000 meters were installed by HydroCorp's unlicensed workers versus the city's own licensed staff. That unresolved split is itself a cost: every meter in question is a candidate for reinspection until the city and DSPS sort out the record.

How Wisconsin Calculates the Penalty

Wisconsin's plumbing law gives DSPS two separate tools, and the $10,000 fine against HydroCorp reflects the civil one. Wis. Stat. 145.12(1) makes working as an unlicensed master plumber a criminal offense, with a fine of $100 to $500 or up to 30 days in jail, and each day of the violation counted separately. Separately, Wis. Stat. 145.12(5)(a) lets the department skip the criminal process and assess a civil forfeiture directly against anyone who violates the licensing requirement in Wis. Stat. 145.06, up to a cap of $2,000 per violation, with 12 percent annual interest on any amount left unpaid. With HydroCorp's unlicensed work spread across 17 municipalities, a $10,000 total is consistent with the department assessing forfeitures for several of those violations under the $2,000 cap; the full order itemizing exactly how DSPS reached that number was not available through public enforcement records at the time of writing.

Penalties for Unlicensed Plumbing Across the Country

Wisconsin's structure, a modest criminal fine paired with a larger civil forfeiture, is one of several models states use. The table below compares six states; the notes that follow fill in what a table cell cannot hold.

Notes on the table:

• Illinois counts each day of noncompliance as a separate offense, and a court can also bar use of plumbing installed in violation of the law until it is brought up to code.
• West Virginia's fines only start after a cease and desist order is issued and ignored; each day after that notice is its own offense, which is how a short job can still produce a five-figure total.
• Maryland's $100-a-day figure applies to practicing without a license; a separate, higher fine of up to $1,000 or six months in jail applies to knowingly skipping the insurance the state requires.
• Texas's $4,000 figure is new: the Texas State Board of Plumbing Examiners ended settlement discounts for employing an unregistered worker, effective January 1, 2026, so every violation now carries the full administrative penalty.
• Florida's administrative fine can be cut in half if the unlicensed contractor becomes certified or registered within a year of the fine; the criminal charge, by contrast, only gets more serious on a second violation or one committed during a declared state of emergency.

Why the Fine Is Rarely the Real Cost

A $10,000 fine sounds survivable next to a $296,370 contract, but the fine is usually the smallest number in the story. HydroCorp lost the rest of an active municipal contract, and 17 municipalities now have a documented licensing violation attached to their records. Ashland is paying its own attorneys to sort out a reinspection question that would not exist if the original installers had been licensed, and the city still cannot say with confidence which of its 3,000 meters need a second look.

That pattern repeats in every state in the table above. A criminal misdemeanor becomes a public record that follows a contractor into the next bid. An administrative fine that doubles on a second violation, as Illinois and West Virginia's statutes both do, punishes a company that treats the first fine as a cost of doing business. And in states that count unlicensed days separately, a project that runs long does not just cost more in labor, it costs more in exposure, every single day.

The common thread is a missing person, not a missing form. Every one of the states above requires someone with a real license to be legally in charge of the work, and the fine is simply what happens when that requirement is treated as optional.

The Structure the Penalty Is Protecting

Wisconsin's master plumber rule, and every state penalty in the table above, exists to enforce the same idea: a company's authority to do licensed work runs through a specific, credentialed person who is actually responsible for it, not through a name on a contract. In the states that use the term, that person is a qualifying agent, someone who qualifies the company as an owner or a full time W-2 employee who genuinely supervises the work, which is the same function Wisconsin's master-plumber-in-charge rule performs under different vocabulary.

HydroCorp's problem was not a paperwork gap. It was the absence of that person on the actual job sites. A company operating in several states at once, where the qualifying structure goes by different names and different rules, is exactly the situation licensing services in all 50 states are built to track. If your company needs to place a qualified person before a regulator finds the gap for you, hire a qualifying agent or look into contractor qualifier services for help managing it across more than one license at a time.

How Contractors and Municipalities Can Avoid This

1. Verify the license, not the company. A contractor's business registration says nothing about whether the specific workers on site hold the trade license the job requires. Check the individual's license with the state board directly.
2. Read exemptions narrowly, and in writing. Ashland's mistake was reasonable on its face, a municipal utility exemption, applied to utility-type work, but the exemption's actual text covered only direct municipal employees. Get the board's written confirmation before relying on any exemption for a contractor's crew.
3. Put licensing proof in the contract, not just the bid. Require the contractor to name its licensed master or qualifying individual before work starts, and to notify you immediately if that person changes.
4. Treat a whistleblower complaint as a warning, not noise. The Ashland case started with one local plumber's complaint, raised years before the fine. A competitor or a licensed tradesperson flagging a licensing gap is usually right about the law, even when it is inconvenient to hear.
5. Confirm who is actually accountable before, not after, the work starts. If no one on the crew can produce a current license, the project should not start, regardless of who signed the contract.

FAQ

What is the penalty for plumbing without a license? It depends on the state, and most states combine more than one penalty. Common tools include a criminal misdemeanor fine (as low as $100 in Maryland, as high as $1,000 on a second Illinois offense), a civil or administrative fine that can reach $2,000 to $10,000 per violation (Wisconsin, Texas, and Florida), and, in some states, felony exposure on a repeat violation or one committed during a declared emergency (Florida).

Can a company be fined more than once for the same project? Yes, in most states. Illinois, Maryland, and West Virginia all treat each day of unlicensed work as a separate offense, and Wisconsin's forfeiture statute is written the same way, per violation rather than per project. HydroCorp's $10,000 fine, spread across 17 municipalities, is an example of a single enforcement action covering multiple separately countable violations.

Does a municipal employee exemption cover a private contractor hired by the city? Generally no. Wisconsin's exemption for municipal utility employees, the one Ashland believed applied, covers only workers directly employed by the municipality, not a private company's crew working under contract. Other states write similar exemptions narrowly for the same reason; always confirm the exact scope with the board rather than assuming a government-adjacent job qualifies.

What happens to work that an unlicensed contractor already completed? That depends on the jurisdiction and is often unresolved even after a fine is issued. In the Ashland case, the city asked the state regulator whether the completed water meter installations need to be reinspected, and as of the most recent reporting, that question had not been answered. Illinois law goes further and allows a court to bar use of plumbing installed in violation of the law until it is brought into compliance.

Is unlicensed plumbing ever a felony? In some states, yes, under specific circumstances. Florida charges a first unlicensed contracting offense as a first-degree misdemeanor, but a second offense after a prior conviction, a violation committed during a state of emergency, or unlicensed work on pollutant storage systems is a third-degree felony.

How was the Wisconsin $10,000 fine actually calculated? Wisconsin law lets DSPS assess a civil forfeiture of up to $2,000 for each violation of the licensing requirement in Wis. Stat. 145.06, separate from the smaller criminal fine in Wis. Stat. 145.12(1). A $10,000 total across 17 municipalities is consistent with the department assessing forfeitures for multiple violations under that cap, though the department's own order was not available in public records reviewed for this article.

Sources

• State fines contractor for unlicensed plumbing work, Daily Reporter, retrieved 2026-10-13
• State fines contractor for unlicensed plumbing work, WNA News, retrieved 2026-10-13
• Wisconsin Statute 145.06, plumbers, retrieved 2026-10-13
• Wisconsin Statute 145.12, penalties, retrieved 2026-10-13
• 225 ILCS 320/29, Illinois Plumbing License Law, retrieved 2026-10-13 (ILGA's site blocks automated fetching; text confirmed through its own search index rather than a direct page load)
• West Virginia Code 21-14-7, retrieved 2026-10-13
• Maryland Business Occupations and Professions Section 12-607, retrieved 2026-10-13
• Maryland Department of Labor, unlicensed plumbing practice, retrieved 2026-10-13
• Texas State Board of Plumbing Examiners, $4,000 fine announcement, retrieved 2026-10-13
• Florida Statute 489.127, prohibitions and penalties, retrieved 2026-10-13
• Florida Statute 489.13, unlicensed contracting, retrieved 2026-10-13

If your company is sorting out a licensing gap, planning ahead of one, or just wants to confirm the right person is in charge of the work on paper and on the job site, talk to us or call 615-219-2110.

Penalty amounts and legal classifications are set by each state's legislature and licensing board and are subject to change. Figures here were confirmed at official state sources on October 13, 2026. Verify the current penalty with the relevant board before relying on any figure in this article.