Insurance License Hub

The Washington Emergency Adjuster license

Emergency Adjuster

Not a license but a registration, and Washington asks for it in the one situation where it asks for nothing else. A nonresident independent adjuster working a single loss, or the losses from a catastrophe the governor has proclaimed, needs no Washington license provided the registration is filed. It runs 180 days from the proclamation, not from the day it was filed.

Course

None

This license has no pre-licensing course route.

Ways in

1

There is no state exam for this license.

Exam

n/a

Not required on any of the routes below.

Every way to qualify

  1. Route 1 Register against the governor's proclamation before working the claims

    No state exam for this license

    An adjuster license somewhere else

    • an independent adjuster license in the applicant's home state or designated home state, whose number and state go on the registration form

    and the registration itself

    • A registration filed with the commissioner naming the adjuster, the contact details, the home state and license number, the governor's proclamation number or the single loss, and every insurer the adjuster is representing; where the adjusting firm being represented is itself unlicensed, the Office requires the firm to file a registration too

    RCW 48.17.420(2) is drafted as an exemption with a condition rather than as a license: no Washington license is required of the nonresident independent adjuster for a single loss, or for losses out of a catastrophe common to all of them from which the governor proclaims a state of emergency, "if the nonresident independent adjuster registers with the commissioner as an emergency adjuster". Substitute House Bill 1037 added the registration on 2021-07-25; before that the exemption stood on its own. RCW 48.17.420(3) then holds the emergency adjuster to every disciplinary provision of Title 48 and Title 284 WAC and to the jurisdiction of Washington's courts, and caps the work at 180 days unless the commissioner extends it. The Office's form says which 180 days: they run from the disaster proclamation date, not from the day the form was submitted, and a proclamation extended past 180 days needs a fresh registration, as does a second disaster. Crop losses are outside this altogether. The subsection opens "Except for losses arising under crop insurance", and RCW 48.17.420(4) gives the crop equivalent with no registration in it at all.

    Read at app.leg.wa.gov on 2026-08-19

No national seller sells a course for this license. There is nothing to sell: the emergency adjuster registration asks for an adjuster license held somewhere else and a form filed against the governor's proclamation number, with no examination, no course and no qualification of its own.