Rhode Island is redrawing the line between the company that dries a house and the person allowed to supervise putting it back together. Three different legal states are in play at once, and a restoration operator needs them kept separate: a statute that has been law since July 2, 2025; a rule the Contractors’ Registration and Licensing Board only proposed on October 2, 2026; and a license requirement that does not bite until January 1, 2028. The proposed rule gets its public hearing on Wednesday, October 21, in Cranston, and written comments run through November 1. What is still movable is in the proposal. What is not is in the statute.
What the statute already decided
The Rhode Island residential contractor licensing law, chapter 5-65.4, took effect on passage — July 2, 2025. It creates two individual licenses: one for supervising construction of new residential structures, and one for structurally remodeling existing ones. The buildings in scope are one- to four-family dwellings. Contractors who perform only nonstructural home improvement work “shall remain subject exclusively to the registration system” in chapter 5-65 — the registration your company already holds.
The Board must finish the implementing rules by January 1, 2027. Beginning January 1, 2028, no person may supervise new residential construction or structurally remodel an existing residential structure without the license. Holding the license also fulfills the chapter 5-65 registration requirement for that individual. Commercial work is outside it — the Board’s own public notice says the new requirements do not apply to commercial construction — and a five-unit building is outside the statutory definition of a residential structure.
The penalties are already on the books, and they are dormant. Chapter 5-65.4 punishes operating as a supervisor or remodeler without the license — a misdemeanor for a first or second offense, a felony for a third — but the conduct it describes is not prohibited until the 2028 date arrives. Until then, a registered Rhode Island contractor may still do this work under chapter 5-65, exactly as today.
The line the Board has only proposed
Everything specific lives in proposed rule 440-RICR-10-00-7, and it is a proposal: filed October 2, 2026, regulation status Proposed. The statute defines “structurally remodeling” as work the Board identifies as impacting components that support a building’s safety or integrity, plus any other work the Board identifies that requires permits or inspections under the state building code. The proposal is that identification.
On the license side of the proposed list: foundations, interior partition walls, retaining walls, load-bearing walls, beams, columns, joists, rafters, fascia, sheathing, floor slabs, sheeting, shoring, and underpinning — plus window installation or replacement that alters rough openings, headers, or other structural components. On the registration side, the proposal’s nonstructural examples: ceilings, flooring, doors, trim, finishes, paint, cabinetry, plastering, tiling, decorative materials, and in-kind window replacement that leaves the rough opening alone.
Now walk a water job across that line. Emergency water extraction, drying equipment, and contents handling are not named anywhere in the statute or the proposed rule — the dry-out stays on registration, as it does today. The rebuild is where the lists start deciding. Replacing sheathing or a floor slab is on the structural side. Plastering and finishes are on the nonstructural side. Drywall itself is never named — and “interior partition walls” are. Whether hanging gypsum on a partition your crew opened to dry the cavity is finishing work or work on an interior partition wall is a question the proposed text does not answer, and the proposal never says that needing a permit, by itself, makes work structural. Note, too, that cutting away any wall or partition is already outside “ordinary repairs” under the state building code law — the building official can be in your job before anyone has settled which credential the supervisor needs.
One more boundary the proposal draws and a fire contractor should see: demolishing an existing building in order to construct a new one sits inside the new-construction supervisor’s license, not the remodeler’s. When a total-loss teardown becomes “new construction” rather than structural remodeling of what stands is a classification neither text makes.
The credential is a person
Chapter 5-65 registers your company and names a responsible designee. The new license is issued to a natural person. Under the proposal, that person may bid and perform licensed work in a business’s name only if they own the business, or are an employee holding the owner’s written authorization. “All work performed under the License, regardless of the scope, is personally supervised and overseen by the individual License holder.” The application attestation adds the field standard: the licensee will “be regularly present on the construction site when licensed work is being performed.”
The proposal sets no maximum number of simultaneous jobs, no distance limit, and no definition of “regularly.” The Restoration Industry Association’s October 13 advocate update flags exactly this: “The proposed personal-supervision requirements deserve attention when one company runs several jobs at once.” If the same individual works through a second company, that entity needs its own license or registration. One person is the credential, and that person’s presence is the compliance model.
Registration is not a grandfather clause
The statute answers the grandfathering question in one sentence: the Board may create a pathway for contractors registered before January 1, 2027, “but it shall not be a grandfathering based solely on registration status prior to January 1, 2027.” A long-held registration, by itself, earns nothing.
What the proposal offers instead is an exam waiver — and only an exam waiver. A contractor registered before January 1, 2027, with a complete application in by January 1, 2030, could skip the examination by submitting a $100 review fee, references from at least two construction professionals, references from three to five consumers, financial disclosures, and a portfolio of five to ten projects “of the type” for which the license is sought, showing the applicant performing as a construction supervisor. The pre-license education is still owed (a 5-hour course plus 12.5 hours on the residential code, with the OSHA 10-hour course allowed to cover 10 of those hours), the fee is still owed — $600 for the supervisor license, $500 for the remodeler, each for a two-year term — and the insurance is still owed: $2,000,000 general aggregate under the proposal, against the $500,000 combined single limit a registrant carries today. Whether a portfolio of dry-outs and finish repairs satisfies a standard written for supervision of structural work is a question the Board has not answered.
The Board expects roughly 3,000 applicants, applying its March 2026 registrant survey — 30.97 percent of 4,543 respondents interested in a license — to about 10,000 registrants statewide. Licensees would also keep records of contracting, permitting, and approvals for ten years after substantial completion, under the proposed professional standards. And the subcontractor rule you already work under does not change: a non-employee drywall installer, framer, or floor-covering installer needs their own chapter 5-65 registration today, license or no license.
What a comment can still move
Comments cannot reopen the statute. The 2028 date, the one- to four-family scope, the two license types, and the ban on grandfathering by registration alone are enacted. What remains the Board’s proposed choice — the Board’s own analysis lists these as discretionary — is nearly everything an operator will feel: the fee amounts, the $2,000,000 insurance figure, the pre-license and continuing-education hours, the exam-waiver design, and above all the structural and nonstructural lists and the supervision sentences. Drywall after a dry-out, subfloor versus finish flooring, fascia versus trim: those edges are in proposed section 7.4, and they are open.
Written comments go to James Gallo, Chief of the Contractors’ Registration and Licensing Board, at dbr.contractorregistration@dbr.ri.gov, or by mail to the Board at 560 Jefferson Blvd, Suite 100, Warwick — in writing only, not by telephone. The hearing is Wednesday, October 21, 2026, at 10:00 a.m. at the Department of Labor and Training, Main Classroom 73-1, 1511 Pontiac Ave, Building 73, Cranston. RIA is collecting members’ practical examples of the mitigation-to-structural handoff and of multi-site supervision — without customer names — at vscarfo@restorationindustry.org.
The preparation that costs nothing: decide now who in your company the person would be, audit your service list against the two proposed lists, and if the waiver pathway survives, start the portfolio file while the jobs are recent. Washington rewrote its claims clocks this month and the operators who read the actual text early wrote the scopes that fit it; this desk’s read of that rule is Five Business Days. Rhode Island is rewriting who may stand on the rebuild. The comment window is the cheapest input an operator will ever buy on a rule like this, and it closes November 1.
Sources: R.I. Gen. Laws ch. 5-65.4 (enacted July 2, 2025) and ch. 5-65; proposed rule 440-RICR-10-00-7 and the Board’s September 23, 2026 regulatory analysis, at rules.sos.ri.gov; CRLB’s licensing notice at crb.ri.gov; RIA Advocate update, October 13, 2026. This desk’s standing documentation doctrine — the record that makes any of this defensible — is Document, Hold, Respond.