The one decision that ends this
You need a company that sells exclusion — finding and physically sealing every entry point in the building — and you need to say that word on the phone.
What you will mostly be offered instead is a recurring treatment contract: a technician arrives quarterly, refreshes bait stations, sprays a baseboard, and leaves. That contract is not a fix. It manages a population that keeps being replenished through a hole nobody closed. Fixr prices a quarterly rodent contract at $450 to $900 a year for mice and $500 to $1,000 for rats, which is a permanent subscription to a temporary state.
Exclusion is the other line item, and it is startlingly cheap by comparison: Fixr puts mouse exclusion at $50 to $300 and rat exclusion at $175 to $500. UC IPM says it plainly — exclusion is “the most successful and permanent form of house mouse control,” and for rats, “the most successful and longest-lasting strategy.”
This is the whole reason the I’ve had mice for a YEAR threads exist. Those homeowners weren’t unlucky or lazy. They bought treatment when the problem was construction.
The question to ask, verbatim: “Do you do exclusion in-house, and will the quote list every entry point you’re sealing and what material you’re sealing it with?” A company that does exclusion answers with a walk-around and a list. A company that doesn’t will steer you back to a service plan.
Mice or rats — it changes the job, not the trade
Both go to pest control. But say which one you think you have, because the inspection is different.
Mice. Light, fast scratching, often high in a wall or running across a ceiling. Rice-grain droppings. UC IPM: house mice “can squeeze under gaps ¼ inch tall, and through openings 3/8 inch wide,” and every hole larger than ¼ inch has to be closed. Fixr’s version is the one to hold in your head while you walk your foundation: anything larger than a pencil. That is a much smaller defect than most people are looking for — a gap where a pipe enters, a worn dryer vent flap, the corner where siding meets the sill plate.
Rats. Heavier and louder — audible gnawing, thumps, and a scrabble you’d mistake for a squirrel. Droppings two to three times mouse size. UC IPM notes a rat can get under a door with only a half-inch gap, and that rats chew straight through “plastic, foam, wood, and caulk,” which is why so much amateur sealing fails. Roof rats nest in attics, wall voids, and ceiling voids; Norway rats work the basement, ground floor, and burrows along the foundation. Different search, different inspection.
The urgency differs too. Mice are a nuisance that becomes a contamination problem. Rats chew wiring and water lines, and they enlarge openings rather than merely using them. Fixr: rat extermination $500 to $750 (national average $600) against mouse extermination $450 to $600 (national average $525).
Why poison inside a wall is the wrong tool
A poisoned rodent doesn’t leave to die. It dies where it is, which — if the bait station is inside and the runway is a wall cavity — is inside your wall. You have converted a noise you can ignore into an odor you can’t, plus a drywall cut. UC IPM gives the same warning even for exterior baiting: seal the building first “to prevent poisoned rats from coming inside to die.”
Fixr prices dead mouse removal at $100 to $200 as a separate call-out, which is most of an exclusion job spent undoing your own bait placement. If you get there anyway, the dead-animal-in-the-wall page covers locating it by fly cluster before anyone cuts.
Traps do everything poison does and give you two things poison never will: a body you can remove, and a count. That count is your data. Catches falling to zero after sealing is how you know the exclusion held.
What a real exclusion job looks like
A legitimate exclusion visit has a shape, and it’s easy to check against.
- A full exterior perimeter walk, at ground level and on the roofline. The inspector should be pointing at things and naming them.
- Interior inspection of the places the envelope is already open — under sinks, behind appliances, the rim joist in the basement, the attic, the crawl space, around every plumbing and electrical penetration.
- A written list of entry points, not a count. “Twelve entry points” is a sales number. “Utility penetration behind the washer, dryer vent, northeast soffit return, garage door corner seals” is a scope.
- Metal, not foam. Copper mesh, hardware cloth, sheet metal, mortar. UC IPM specifies steel wool, wire screen, or sheet metal precisely because rodents chew everything else. If the quote says expanding foam or caulk as the primary material, it is a cosmetic job.
- A warranty on the seal, usually a year or more, with the terms in writing.
- Trapping running alongside it, to clear the animals already inside — because sealing a house with a live population in it just relocates them deeper.
What an upsell looks like: an immediate quarterly-contract quote before anyone has been outside, bait stations placed on the first visit as the primary strategy, a “we’ll keep coming until it stops” framing with no end condition, and a discount for signing today. None of those are illegal. They’re just not the thing that ends this.
If you can’t name the part the inspector is pointing at, the parts glossary has the vocabulary — soffit, fascia, rim joist, weep hole, sill plate. Knowing the words is the difference between a quote you can compare and a quote you have to trust.
The quote sanity-check
Homeowners regularly post rodent quotes that bear no relationship to the numbers above — a $20,000 quote from a national brand for scratching in the walls, or $13,000 spent with the rats back afterward. Those are real posts, and they’re worth knowing about before your own inspection, because the pattern behind them is consistent: a large multi-phase package that bundles exclusion, attic decontamination, full insulation replacement, and a multi-year service plan into one number, sold on the day of inspection.
Some of those line items are legitimate. A badly fouled attic really does need the insulation replaced, and that is genuinely expensive. But it is a separate decision from getting the mice out, and it should be a separate line you can decline.
Against Fixr’s national numbers — mouse extermination $450 to $600, rat extermination $500 to $750, exclusion $50 to $500 depending on species and scope — a five-figure quote for scratching in a wall needs each component itemized and justified before you sign anything. Ask for the exclusion priced on its own. If the company won’t separate it, that tells you what the package is for. Reading a quote that feels wrong breaks down the specific pressure tactics.
Get three quotes. Rodent work has enormous price spread for identical scope, and a same-day signature discount is the tell.
The droppings, and the one rule that matters
Rodent droppings and urine are a respiratory exposure, not a contact one. Hantavirus spreads when virus particles from urine, droppings, saliva, and nesting material become airborne — which is precisely what sweeping and vacuuming a dry mess does. This is not a theoretical concern with dry rodent debris in an enclosed attic or crawl space.
Washington State’s health department gives the method directly: do not stir up dust by vacuuming, sweeping, or any other means. Instead, thoroughly wet the contaminated area — droppings, nests, trapped mice — with a 10% bleach solution (about 1½ cups of household bleach per gallon of water), let it soak for 10 minutes, then remove everything with a damp towel and bag it.
Gloves and an N95, and ventilate the space before you go in. If the contamination is extensive — a heavily used attic, an accumulated nest area — that’s a professional decontamination job, not a Saturday.
If you rent
Report it in writing, today, and keep the copy. Rodent infestation is a habitability issue in most states, and the sequence matters: a text or email creates the timestamp that makes everything after it enforceable.
The important structural point is that the real fix isn’t yours to buy. Exclusion means sealing the building envelope — soffits, siding, foundation penetrations — and no tenant has the right to do that work. Buy traps if you want to sleep tonight. Don’t buy an exclusion job for a building you don’t own, and don’t accept a landlord’s offer to “have the exterminator come by” as a resolution if the exterminator is only spraying. Ask for the exclusion scope in writing, same as you would as an owner.
If it stalls there, the landlord-won’t-fix escalation path covers the order to do things in, including when the local housing or health department becomes the right call.
Who will refuse the job, and what to search instead
Fewer flat refusals here than with wildlife — most pest companies genuinely do mice. The failures are subtler and more expensive.
- Municipal animal control will not come for rodents in a private home. Not their remit, not close to it. Skip this call entirely; it’s the day most people lose.
- Plenty of pest control companies don’t do exclusion at all. They aren’t refusing so much as not selling it — their business is recurring treatment and their technicians aren’t carriers of sheet metal. Ask before booking, not after.
- Wildlife removal companies will sometimes decline mice and rats as too routine, or price them as a wildlife job. But their exclusion work is often the best available, so they’re worth calling for the sealing even if a pest company does the trapping.
- Handymen will take the job and do it wrong. This is the one that costs the most, because it looks like success. Expanding foam and caulk both look like a sealed hole and neither survives a determined rodent. If you hire a handyman for the physical repair, hand him the inspector’s list and specify the material.
- Insulation contractors will decline to work in an attic contaminated with droppings and urine until it’s been remediated. That’s correct, and it means decontamination comes before re-insulating, not with it.
- Your homeowners policy is very commonly a no as well: rodent and vermin damage is a standard exclusion in most policies, on the theory that infestation is a maintenance issue. Read yours before you assume a claim exists.
The searches that reach the right trade: rodent exclusion, rodent proofing, pest exclusion, wildlife exclusion, nuisance wildlife control operator. Searching exterminator mostly surfaces the companies selling the contract you don’t want.
The same license-and-scope boundaries produce refusals across every trade — who declines what, and who says yes instead.
The order to do this in
- Traps first, tonight. Snap traps along walls where you’ve seen droppings, perpendicular to the wall, trigger end toward it. This buys you sleep and gives you a count.
- Book an inspection with exclusion explicitly on the table. Fixr puts a standalone rodent inspection at $75 to $100 for mice and $100 to $150 for rats, frequently waived if you proceed.
- Get the exclusion scope in writing — every point, every material, the warranty term.
- Seal, with trapping still running. Live animals inside a sealed house need somewhere to go, and you want that somewhere to be a trap.
- Decontaminate — wet, bleach, bag. Never dry.
- Repair the underlying defect. The rotted soffit or failed vent flap that let them in is a building problem, and metal mesh over rot is a two-year solution.
- Confirm at four to six weeks. Zero catches and silence at night means it held. Any catch means one point was missed, which is what the warranty is for.
One note on timing
Rodent pressure climbs sharply as night temperatures drop — roughly September through November across most of the country, which is when the interior population you didn’t know about becomes audible. That has a practical consequence: exclusion companies book out in the fall, and the quotes get less negotiable.
If you’re reading this in late summer and you’ve heard anything in a wall, that inspection is cheaper and faster now than it will be in October. And if you’re already in the season with mice in the walls, the calendar is the reason your neighbor suddenly has the same problem. It isn’t personal, and it isn’t a sign the house is failing.