How to hire a restoration project manager: requirements, pay to offer, where to find them and how to screen

A restoration project manager owns each job from the first site visit to the final invoice: scoping the loss, scheduling crews and subcontractors, keeping the customer and the adjuster informed, and tracking the job's costs against its budget. On insurance-program work, that ownership extends to the program's documentation and communication steps. When the job has no clear owner, files stall, invoices wait on paperwork, and the margin on the job leaks.

So build your requirements list around four things: restoration experience you can verify, estimating and job-costing skill, communication across the customer–adjuster–program triangle, and the ability to own a gross profit number. Ask every candidate to show you jobs they have personally run — the loss type and size, the crew and trades they scheduled, and the final invoice against the original estimate.

Calibrate the bar to the work your company takes. A PM who will run large commercial or insurance-program files needs deeper adjuster communication and documentation discipline than a residential-only shop requires. Write the requirements from your own job mix — water versus fire and smoke versus mold, mitigation versus rebuild — instead of copying a generic posting.

Draw the seams early, too. Your estimator scopes losses and writes the estimates; your crew leads run the field day to day; the PM owns the job end to end and the number on it. If you put someone into a PM title who is really a scheduler or a second estimator, the mismatch shows up in their first quarter.

This page is the employer's side of that role. The candidate-facing view — what the work involves, how PMs move up, what the career path looks like — is the guide on what a restoration project manager does. Keep the two apart when you write a posting: describe the job you need done, not the career you assume.

Start with a seam worth getting right: certifications and licenses are different things. An IICRC certification is an industry credential from a certifying body. A state license is law. Neither substitutes for the other, and no certificate makes a candidate licensed for work a state regulates.

On the credential side, the IICRC certifications you will see on PM resumes include Water Damage Restoration Technician (WRT), Applied Structural Drying (ASD) and Applied Microbial Remediation Technician (AMRT). All three sit in IICRC's restoration division, covering water damage and drying, structural drying, and mold and sewage remediation respectively. Treat them as credentials to verify rather than assume: IICRC-certified technicians need 14 CEC hours every four years to stay certified, and Master designations and inspectors need 14 CEC hours every two years. Confirm a certification with the certifying body rather than relying on the certificate PDF in the application.

Xactimate is a separate track: it is Verisk's product, and Verisk's user certification has three levels — Level 1, Level 2 and Level 3 — each a prerequisite for the next. Each exam is listed at USD 120 in Verisk's store as of October 2026, an exam must be taken within 12 months of purchase, and a certification is valid for two years. A certification tells you the candidate passed an exam; the skills test below tells you whether they can estimate your jobs. We cover Verisk's Xactimate certification levels, exams and costs in detail on the estimator side.

On the safety side, treat "OSHA-certified" as a red flag on a PM application: OSHA's own Outreach Training Program page says the 10-hour and 30-hour courses are a voluntary program, do not meet the training requirements of any OSHA standard, and are not a certification. OSHA has no mold-specific standard; its mold guidance points to general sanitation standards and to non-regulatory consensus standards such as IICRC S500 and S520. Treat the cards as a plus, and never as the qualification that lets a PM run regulated work.

Licenses follow the work, not the title. Mold licensing is state law, and where it exists the license attaches to the company or the named individual doing the work, not to the PM title. The states verified in our research include:

• Texas — mold assessor and remediator licensing through the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation (TDLR), which took the program over from DSHS on November 1, 2017.
• Florida — mold assessor and mold remediator licenses through the Department of Business and Professional Regulation (DBPR).
• New York — mold assessment and remediation licensing through the Department of Labor under Labor Law Article 32.
• Louisiana — a Mold Remediation license from the Louisiana State Licensing Board for Contractors (LSLBC) for remediation projects of $7,500 or more.
• Washington, DC — certification and licensing for residential indoor mold assessment and remediation through the Department of Energy and Environment (DOEE).

Asbestos abatement carries its own layer of state licensing and accreditation. EPA directs asbestos professionals to their state agency for approved courses, and BLS notes that some states require workers to have permits or licenses for each type of hazardous waste they remove — particularly asbestos and lead. The detail is in the mold remediation licensing guide and the asbestos abatement licensing guide.

Whatever the work, make the license check part of screening rather than an afterthought. Ask which state credentials the candidate holds for the work they will run, then confirm with the agency that issues them before you assign regulated work. Rules change and agencies reorganize — Texas's program moved agencies in 2017 — so confirm the current requirement with the agency named.

No Bureau of Labor Statistics wage line is titled "restoration project manager" in the sources this research checked, so your posting should not quote one. The closest available benchmark is the BLS occupation group construction managers (SOC 11-9021). In the BLS OEWS May 2025 release, that group's median wage was $114,990 a year ($55.28 an hour), and the middle band — the 25th to 75th percentile — ran $88,550 to $151,640, across all industries and payroll jobs.

Read that as a bracket, not a target. The group covers every kind of construction manager, including large commercial builders, so it is not specific to restoration — and it counts payroll employees only. Use it to sanity-check your range; use your own books to set it: the job volume the PM must carry, the gross profit on those jobs, and how much of the estimate-to-close process the role owns.

Structure the offer before you argue about the number. If you pay a salary and treat the PM as exempt, the federal salary level for the FLSA's executive, administrative and professional exemptions is $684 per week under 29 CFR 541.600. Meeting the salary level is only one part; the exemption's duties tests have to be met too, and state salary floors can sit above the federal one. If the PM is non-exempt, overtime comes at 1.5 times the regular rate — and any production, retention or attendance bonus you promise is not discretionary, so it must be included in the regular rate for overtime under 29 CFR 778.211. Confirm the classification with the Department of Labor or employment counsel.

The posting itself may need the number in it. In the states verified in our research:

• California — employers with 15 or more employees must include the pay scale in job postings.
• New York — businesses with four or more employees must list a compensation range, minimum and maximum, and say when a job is commission-based.
• Washington — employers with 15 or more employees must disclose the wage scale or salary range and a general description of benefits.
• Illinois — employers with 15 or more employees must include the pay scale and benefits in postings.
• Colorado — job postings must disclose compensation and benefits, and employers may not ask about or rely on an applicant's pay history.

That is the set this research verified, not a complete list of states. Confirm your state's current posting rule before you publish the ad.

For the full series — the percentiles, the state-by-state figures and how the proxy is labelled — the restoration project manager pay data page carries the tables. This page sticks to what to do with them.

Work the internal bench first. Crew leads and estimators already know your documentation standards, your customers and your margin targets. A promotion into project management, with structured training for the gaps — drying documentation, estimate defense, contract paperwork — can ramp faster than a cold hire, because the person already knows how your company runs jobs.

The second pool is adjacent construction: superintendents, assistant superintendents and project engineers from building and remodeling firms bring scheduling and subcontractor management. They will need the restoration-specific layers added — moisture documentation, category and class scoping, insurance-file communication — so budget onboarding time for that.

The third pool is candidates already in restoration at other companies, including the franchise networks around you. They know the work and can ramp fastest. Compete on the role, the pay and the authority you hand them — not on promises about on-call you cannot keep.

Post the opening where restoration people look: the general job boards, the restoration-specific boards, your careers page, and your franchise network's own channel if you run one. State the pay range, the on-call rotation and the travel expectations in the posting itself — a PM candidate screens you on those terms as hard as you screen them. You can see the candidate-facing side of this role in the restoration project manager job listings on this site.

Keep the ad lawful while you write it. Under EEOC rules, a job ad may not show a preference for, or discourage, people based on race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age (40 or older), disability or genetic information. The EEOC's own example is an ad seeking "recent college graduates", which may discourage people over 40 from applying. Write the requirements as the job's actual demands — licenses the work requires, certifications you require, schedule and travel stated plainly — rather than as code for a type of person.

Screen in stages, and make each stage cheap to fail. Stage one is the work-history screen: jobs run, loss types, the mitigation-versus-rebuild split, and the estimate values handled — verified by reference calls, not by how the resume reads. Stage two is the structured interview. Stage three is the skills test. Stage four is the site. Checks come last.

Build the skills test from your own files. Hand the candidate a closed job — redacted — and ask them to scope it, sketch it in Xactimate, price it, and tell you where the gross profit went and what they would have done differently. Then ask them to walk you through a job they personally closed: the original scope, the changes and supplements, the final number against the estimate, and what they told the adjuster at each step. You are listening for a PM who can defend a number line by line.

The site visit is the ride-along for this role. Bring the finalist to a live job — a mitigation dry-down in progress works — and watch what they notice without being prompted: moisture readings logged or missed, documentation gaps, the customer conversation, and whether they flag the issues the crew is skating past. Say little. A site visit is their test as much as yours.

Run background checks last, with the federal process followed exactly. A check run through a screening company is a consumer report under the FCRA: before you order it, the FTC requires a written, stand-alone disclosure — not a line inside the job application — and the candidate's written permission. If you are considering rejecting the candidate based on the report, the pre-adverse-action step comes first: a notice that includes a copy of the report and "A Summary of Your Rights Under the Fair Credit Reporting Act". The EEOC allows you to consider criminal records, but not to treat applicants differently by race or national origin when you do, and state law may bar asking about criminal history until later in the hiring process. Confirm your state's rules before you build the form.

Keep the interview lawful, too. Before an offer, EEOC guidance under the ADA bars medical and disability questions and medical exams — you may ask whether the candidate can perform the job and how. Build the offer from the role's value rather than the candidate's salary history. California generally bars seeking an applicant's salary history, and Illinois bars asking about or screening applicants on wage or salary history — salary-expectation questions are allowed in both states. Colorado bars asking about or relying on an applicant's pay history. Confirm your own state's rules with your state labor agency.

Onboarding a PM is a handover, and it should be sequenced like one. Start with the systems and standards: your job management software, your documentation expectations, your customer-communication rules, your escalation triggers. Move next to shadowing live files with you or your production manager. Then hand over real job files, starting with the simplest active jobs, and widen from there.

Put the money rules in writing on day one: what the PM can approve, what still needs you, and how gross profit is reported and reviewed. The paperwork has its own clock — Form I-9, Section 2, must be completed within three business days of the employee's first day (or by the first day for a job that will last fewer than three business days). And whatever you promised in the interviews — bonus structure, certification sponsorship, vehicle, on-call rotation — belongs in the offer letter and the handbook, not in memory.

Retention for a PM runs on the same levers as any production role, with more weight on authority. Pay that tracks the number they own beats a flat salary with a silent cap. Real decision rights over their jobs beat micro-management dressed up as support. An on-call rotation that does not quietly burn them out beats a schedule that does. Sponsor the training that compounds — IICRC coursework, Xactimate depth — because credentials with renewal cycles keep both the PM and your bench current.

One structural note: a PM hire changes the org chart around them. Decisions that used to come to you now stop at their desk, and crew leads gain a second reporting line. Say that out loud when you announce the role, or the authority you gave the PM on paper will not survive contact with the crews.

Hiring the PM is one decision inside the whole people-side operation. The guide to hiring for your restoration company covers the employer side — pay, background checks, safety programs, onboarding, retention — in one place, and the standards you set for this hire are the ones your next hires inherit.

Employer information, not licensing, legal, insurance, health, safety or tax advice. Confirm requirements with the state agency or certifying body named, and classification, pay and background-check questions with the Department of Labor or counsel.