The Chattanooga Pest Data This Site Publishes

Four species with four different windows is why a single swarm season does not describe this area well. A homeowner who finds winged insects on a windowsill in September is not outside termite season; light southeastern subterranean termites are flying then. The species matters for identification more than for treatment, since the inspection that follows is much the same.

Two details in that table do more work than the months. The first is time of day: eastern subterranean termites swarm in daylight, so a daytime cloud around a window in April is consistent with the commonest species here, while Formosan swarmers are drawn to lights at night in late spring. The second is rain. Swarms cluster in the days after rainfall, which is why they arrive in bursts rather than evenly across a season, and why two neighbors can see them on the same afternoon.

What a swarm indicates is a colony old enough to produce reproductives, not a house that changed status overnight. The identification detail, including how a termite swarmer differs from a flying ant at wings, waist and antennae, is on the termite treatment page.

This is the section that exists because this site does not do the checking. No company is inspected here before a connection is made, no charter number is confirmed, and no insurance certificate is seen. Printing the state's own route is the honest substitute for a claim about vetting, and it happens to be a better check than any private one, because it comes from the body that can revoke the charter.

Three things are worth asking for, and all three are ordinary requests:

• The registered business name and charter number. Trading names differ from registered names, and the lookup works on the registered one.
• The applicator's certification card. The company holds the charter; the person applying product holds the certification. They are separate documents and both are current or they are not.
• A certificate of insurance, sent by the insurer. A general liability certificate names the insurer, the policy period and the limits.

Those numbers are the Tennessee Department of Agriculture's own published lines, given here as a reader's verification route. They are not a booking line and they do not reach the publisher of this site, whose only contact address is on the contact page.

The calendar below is a working guide, not a schedule anything obeys. A mild February pulls swarms forward, a wet week moves them again, and a house with an open crawl space vent runs its own weather. What the pattern is genuinely useful for is deciding whether what you are seeing is expected or odd, and when a quarterly plan's exterior visits are worth having.

One local point sits behind most of it, and it is practitioner description rather than a statistic. Pre-1980 housing around Brainerd, St. Elmo and North Chattanooga largely sits on crawl-space and block foundations, often with thin or absent vapor barriers and open vents. Tennessee Valley humidity, red clay and Chattanooga shale keep those crawl spaces damp, which is the condition that supports wood decay and subterranean termite pressure. There is no Census tabulation of foundation type, so no share, percentage or count is published anywhere on this site, and none should be inferred from the sentence above.

The winter end of the calendar, which is the busiest part of it, is covered on the rodent removal page.

Read the source column before the number. A statewide one-time range and a city-level average of quoted residential jobs are different measurements, and comparing them directly produces a conflict that is not really there. The reason the two general pest rows differ in the middle while nearly matching at the extremes is worked through on the methodology page.

None of these figures is a quote. This site sets no prices, takes no payment and cannot honor any number on this page. Only a written estimate from a company that has looked at the property can price a job, and what such an estimate should itemize is on the cost page.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Outlook Handbook gives a 2025 national median of $45,250 a year, or $21.75 an hour, for pest control workers, with the 10th percentile at $34,680 and the 90th at $61,890. Those are national and are labeled national wherever they appear. The Chattanooga metro all-occupation mean of $28.21 an hour, May 2025, covers every job in the area and is not a pest control wage; it is used only where the difference is spelled out.

Figures also move. Cost guides revise without notice, portal addresses change and phone numbers are reassigned, so the retrieval date beside each row tells you how stale a line may be. If a number matters to a decision, read it at the publisher rather than trusting a pest control website, including this one. Errors can be reported to the operator, and what to include so a correction can be acted on is set out on the contact page.

Sources for this page: University of Tennessee Extension publication PB1344 for termite species and swarm timing; University of Tennessee Entomology and Plant Pathology trap survey, 2025, for Formosan swarming; the Tennessee Application of Pesticides Act as administered by the Tennessee Department of Agriculture, tn.gov/agriculture, for charter and applicator certification requirements and the Consumer and Industry Services contact lines; US Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Outlook Handbook, pest control workers, 2025, and BLS metropolitan occupational employment statistics for the Chattanooga metro area, May 2025, for wages. Cost figures from pestcontrolpricing.com (Tennessee), termitetreatmentprice.com (Tennessee), homeyou.com (Chattanooga) and brixor.ai (Chattanooga 2026), all retrieved 2026-09-06 and cited by name without endorsement.