Types of License and Permit Bonds (With Real Bond Amounts)

There are hundreds of license and permit bonds in the United States, and almost every list of them is alphabetical — which only helps if you already know your bond’s name. Most people arrive here having been told “you need to be bonded” by somebody, without being told what the bond is called.

So this list is organized by who is requiring it of you. That is the one thing you always know. Find the agency that is asking, and your bond is in that section.

First, where license and permit bonds sit

Surety bonds sort into four families. License and permit is the biggest by count:

• License and permit bonds — required by a government agency before it will issue a license or permit. The subject of this guide.
• Contractor bonds — bid, performance, payment and maintenance bonds tied to a specific construction contract rather than to a license.
• Court bonds — ordered by a judge in a probate, guardianship or civil matter.
• Fidelity bonds — cover employee theft. Often bought voluntarily or because a client contract asks for them, not because a government agency requires them.

If a private client asked you to be “bonded and insured,” you are probably looking for a fidelity bond, not a license bond.

State licensing agency bonds

The largest category. A state agency licenses your profession and requires a bond as a condition of that license. In Texas:

Bond	Amount	Term	Required by
Auto dealer (GDN)	$50,000	2 years	TxDMV
Notary public	$10,000	4 years	Secretary of State
Public adjuster	$10,000	2 years	Dept. of Insurance
Mortgage broker	$25,000 – $200,000	1 year	Dept. of Savings & Mortgage Lending
Third-party debt collector	$10,000	1 year	Secretary of State
Telephone solicitor	$10,000	1 year	Secretary of State
Health spa	$20,000 – $50,000	1 year	Secretary of State
Money services / transmitter	$300,000 – $2,000,000	1 year	Dept. of Banking
TABC alcohol	$5,000 – $30,000	2 years	Alcoholic Beverage Commission

Two patterns are worth noticing. First, the Secretary of State registration bonds — notary, debt collector, telephone solicitor, health spa — cluster at low amounts and are mostly flat-rated, so they are cheap and issue instantly. Second, the amount scales with exposure: a notary handling signatures posts $10,000; a money transmitter holding customer funds posts up to $2 million and gets underwritten like a bank.

The $10,000 figure shows up so often that people buy the wrong bond by matching the number instead of the agency. Our guide to the $10,000 surety bond in Texas sorts out which license uses which form.

Federal agency bonds

Fewer bonds, bigger amounts, tighter underwriting.

Bond	Amount	Term	Required by
Freight broker (BMC-84)	$75,000	1 year	FMCSA
Medicare / DMEPOS	$50,000	1 year	CMS
Tax preparer	$5,000	1 year	Varies by jurisdiction

The BMC-84 is the hardest common license bond to place. The surety is guaranteeing unpaid freight charges — the exact obligation that fails first when a brokerage runs short on working capital — so underwriters look at liquidity, not just credit. If you have been declined, our guide to BMC-84 approval requirements covers what underwriters actually review.

City and county permit bonds

The most commonly missed category, because people assume a state license covers everything. It does not. Cities bond the work done in their own right-of-way, and those bonds are separate from anything the state requires.

Houston

Bond	Amount	Work covered
Sidewalk, driveway, curb & gutter	$2,000	Concrete work in the public right-of-way
Sign contractor	$25,000	Sign erection and installation
Wrecker / tow	$5,000	Licensed tow operations

Other Texas cities

City	Bond	Amount
Dallas	Sidewalk contractor	$2,000
Dallas	Paving	$10,000
Austin	Right-of-way contractor	$10,000
San Antonio	Right-of-way	$10,000 per permit or $100,000 blanket
San Antonio	Sidewalk / curb / gutter	$2,000
San Antonio	Sign contractor	$45,000
Fort Worth	Parkway contractor	$10,000 / $25,000
Fort Worth	Street & storm drain	$25,000
El Paso	Blanket building & construction	$10,000 / $25,000
Lubbock	Contractor compliance	$20,000

Note the San Antonio structure, because it is the model several cities use: a per-permit bond if you pull work occasionally, or a larger blanket bond covering every permit you pull that year. If you work steadily in one city, the blanket is usually cheaper than a stack of individual bonds.

Statewide equivalents exist too — the general Texas right-of-way bond and encroachment bond cover work in state-controlled right-of-way.

Vehicle title bonds

A category of one, and it behaves differently from everything above.

A Texas bonded title is not tied to a license at all. It is what you post when you own a vehicle but cannot produce clean title paperwork. The bond amount is 1.5 times the vehicle’s appraised value and it runs for three years, after which the title clears if nobody has made a claim. If a previous owner or lienholder turns up with a better claim, the bond pays them.

If that is what you are here for, the full walkthrough is in our guide to getting a bonded title in Texas.

The same categories outside Texas

Bond names and amounts change at every state line, but the categories do not. If you are licensing in another state, you are still looking at the same four groups — and usually at one of these recurring bond types:

• Auto dealer bonds — required in nearly every state to hold a dealer license. Amounts commonly run $10,000 to $100,000 depending on the state and dealer type.
• Contractor license bonds — required by states and cities that license contractors. Texas is unusual in not licensing general contractors at the state level, so contractors here meet these at the city permit desk instead.
• Notary bonds — required by most states, typically $5,000 to $15,000, and almost always flat-rated.
• Mortgage broker and lender bonds — required by state banking or mortgage regulators, usually scaling with loan volume.
• Collection agency and debt collector bonds — required by most states that register collectors.
• Freight broker bonds (BMC-84) — federal, so identical in all fifty states at $75,000.
• Alcohol and fuel tax bonds — required where a business collects a tax it must remit to the state.
• Telemarketing, travel agency, employment agency and health club bonds — consumer-protection bonds required where customers pay in advance for services.

The rule that holds everywhere: the requiring agency sets the amount and prescribes the form. Two states can require the same bond type at wildly different amounts, and a bond written for one state’s form will not satisfy another’s.

”Miscellaneous” bonds — the catch-all

Sureties bucket anything without a standard program as a miscellaneous bond. Utility deposit bonds, unusual municipal forms, brand-new licensing categories, one-off obligee-drafted forms.

This label sounds ominous and is not. It means the bond is quoted from the form rather than off a rate table. Practically: send the actual PDF the agency gave you rather than describing it, and expect a quote in hours rather than instantly.

If your bond does not appear on any list you can find, it is almost certainly one of these. It is still writable.

How to work out which bond you need

The decision path takes about two minutes if you have the agency’s paperwork in front of you:

1. Who is asking? A state agency, a federal agency, a city permit office, or a private client. That picks your section above — or, for a private client, points you at fidelity bonds instead.
2. What is the exact bond name on their form? Not the amount. Agencies say “get bonded for $10,000” and leave out which of the five $10,000 bonds they mean.
3. Who is named as obligee? The bond has to name the requiring agency. A bond naming the wrong obligee gets rejected at filing even if the amount is right.
4. Is there a city layer on top of the state one? If you do permitted work in the right-of-way, assume yes until you have checked.

Get those four answers and the bond is straightforward. Guess at them and you buy a bond that gets handed back at the counter — the most common and most avoidable delay in the whole process.

Frequently asked questions

How many types of license and permit bonds are there? Hundreds nationally — every state agency and most cities can create their own. But they sort into four groups by who requires them: state licensing agencies, federal agencies, city and county permit offices, and vehicle title bonds. Once you know which of those is asking, the list of possible bonds shrinks to a handful.

What is the most common license and permit bond? By volume, the notary bond. Nearly every state requires one and there are far more notaries than auto dealers or freight brokers. By dollar value, auto dealer bonds and freight broker bonds dominate — $50,000 and $75,000 respectively.

Do I need a separate bond for each license I hold? Yes. Each bond is written on the form the requiring agency prescribes and names that agency as obligee. Two bonds can both be for $10,000 and still be entirely different legal instruments. If you hold a notary commission and a public adjuster license, you carry two bonds.

What is a miscellaneous surety bond? It is the industry’s catch-all bucket for bonds that do not fit a standard program — an unusual obligee, a one-off municipal form, a new licensing category. It does not mean the bond is a problem. It means it is quoted from the form rather than from a rate table, so send the actual form over and expect a short turnaround instead of an instant quote.

Does one bond cover me in every Texas city? No. A state license bond covers the state license statewide, but city permit bonds are separate. A contractor with a Texas state registration who pulls right-of-way permits in Houston, Dallas and San Antonio may need a city bond in each, on top of anything the state requires.