Do I Need an Exterminator?
Nine questions, two minutes, no email required and nothing stored. It scores how likely your situation is to need professional treatment rather than a door sweep and a bait station — and it is built to tell you when the answer is no, which is more often than you might expect.
This is a screening tool, not an inspection. It scores how likely your situation is to need professional treatment based on your answers — it cannot see your property, and only an inspection can confirm what you actually have. If someone has had a severe reaction to a sting, or a bat has been in a room with a sleeping person or an unattended child, stop and seek medical advice rather than reading a score.
What the questions are actually testing
Three things separate a pest you can handle from one you cannot, and the questions are weighted around them.
The first is whether there is a reservoir. A wasp nest treated at dusk is over, because the whole colony was there. Bed bugs, German cockroaches, and fleas all have life stages that survive a single treatment — eggs and pupae that no product reliably penetrates — so they need a programme timed to the hatch rather than a visit. That is why those three carry the heaviest weighting on their own question.
The second is whether the building is involved. Noise in a wall or ceiling means something is living inside the structure rather than visiting it, and termites, carpenter ants, and wildlife in a roof all cost more in repair than in treatment. Those are the situations where waiting is genuinely expensive rather than merely uncomfortable.
The third is whether you have already found the way in. Almost every failed rodent treatment comes down to the same thing: the animals inside were removed and the opening they used was not closed. If you can find and seal the gap, a great deal of pest control becomes a job you can do yourself. If you cannot, that map is most of what you would be paying for.
What you can reasonably do yourself first
Plenty, and it is worth being specific. Remove standing water — blocked gutters especially — and you cut mosquito pressure more than any spray will. Fit a garage door sweep for $20 to $40 and you close one of the two most common rodent routes in the region. Pack copper mesh into a visible gap rather than foam, which mice chew through in a night. Use a slow-acting gel bait beside an ant trail rather than spraying it, because spraying kills the foragers and leaves the colony.
What does not work is worth knowing too: ultrasonic repellers, which independent testing has repeatedly failed to validate; foggers for cockroaches, which drive German roaches deeper into voids and into adjoining rooms; and peppermint oil or mothballs for mice, which at best change a mouse's route through the same house.
What happens if you do call
The on-site inspection across Worcester + Central Massachusetts is free. We identify the species before anything is applied, map how they are getting in and photograph the openings that matter, and give you the method, the products, where they go, and a fixed price in writing before we start. If what we find is a moisture problem, an open sill plate, or a door sweep, that goes in the written findings — including when the right next call is a carpenter or a plumber rather than us.
For what any of it costs before you pick up the phone, every price on this site is published: see the pest control cost guide or work out a planning range with the cost calculator.
Not sure what you are dealing with?
A free on-site inspection across Worcester + Central Massachusetts answers it properly. No obligation, no lock-in.
Answers
Quiz questions
How does the scoring work?
Each question carries a weight from 2 to 4, and the total decides the band. The heaviest questions are the ones that most reliably separate a nuisance from a job: noise inside the structure, a pest that damages the building, and the three species that breed indoors continuously. Answering "not sure" counts as half, which is deliberate — on a question like whether the droppings are rice-grain or blunt-ended, uncertainty is itself mildly informative.
Why does a failed DIY attempt score against me?
Because it is genuinely useful evidence rather than a judgement. Over-the-counter products work reasonably well on the pests they are designed for when the nest or entry point is accessible. If you have used them properly and the problem has not ended, the most likely explanation is that the nest or the opening has not been found — and finding it is the part that is hard to do yourself.
Why does living in a multi-family building matter?
Because shared walls, utility chases, and dropped ceilings mean a problem in one unit rarely stays there. Treating one apartment while an adjoining one is untreated produces a reliable pattern of clearing and returning weeks later. It does not make your problem worse — it changes what an effective treatment looks like, and often who is responsible for arranging it.
Will you tell me if I do not need you?
Yes, and it happens regularly. A yellow jacket nest in October in a spot nobody walks past will die off with the frost. Mice in an attached garage may genuinely be a $20 door sweep. Light rodent contamination in one basement corner does not warrant a remediation, whatever anyone else quoted. Each of those is a smaller invoice or no invoice, and each is sometimes the right answer.
Is this a substitute for an inspection?
No. It is a screening tool that scores the likelihood your situation needs professional treatment, based on what you can observe. It cannot see your property, identify a species, or find an entry point. If someone has had a severe reaction to a sting, or a bat has been in a room with a sleeping person or an unattended child, that is a medical call rather than a quiz.