First, confirm the question applies

The tent-or-no-tent debate belongs to exactly one termite. Drywood colonies live inside the wood of the structure, so both options on this page (gas that penetrates every board, or targeted work in specific boards) are ways of reaching them there. Subterranean termites live in the soil, and neither option touches them; if the evidence at your house is mud tubes, this whole page is moot and the answer is soil treatment. That’s worth stating hard, because tents do get quoted for mud-tube problems, and it’s never the right call. If you haven’t confirmed which termite you have, settle that first; the species comparison in the related guides below takes ten minutes and can save you the price of the wrong job entirely.

Once drywood is confirmed, the choice runs on two variables, and only two. How widespread is the infestation? And can the galleries actually be reached? Everything else — the marketing, the fear, the discount for signing today — is noise around those two questions. Fumigation exists because gas reaches what drills can’t. No-tent treatment exists because a confined colony doesn’t need a whole-house solution. Both are legitimate. Each has a zone where it’s the only honest answer, and a company’s willingness to recommend either one, depending on what the inspection found, is the best character reference in this trade.

When the tent is the right call

Tenting earns its disruption when the infestation has outrun the alternative. The clear cases: frass or damage showing up in multiple rooms; galleries running through wall voids, closed eaves, or other places no drill or foam wand can follow; evidence in the attic and the garage and a bedroom window frame at once, which usually means multiple colonies from swarms across different years. In those situations, spot treatment becomes a wager that the inspector found every last gallery. When a colony can sit sealed inside a board for years without showing, that’s a bad wager, and paying for it twice costs more than the tent.

There’s also a class of house that pushes toward the tent on its own: older homes with decades of swarm seasons behind them, complicated rooflines with closed soffits, and construction nobody can open without a remodel. An inspector can be excellent and still unable to see inside a sealed wall void. The fumigant doesn’t need to see; that’s the entire argument for it.

Fumigation isn’t the only whole-structure tool. California formally recognizes two: fumigation and heat treatment, which cooks the wood to lethal core temperature instead of gassing it, gets you home the same day, and suits households that want no fumigant involved. Heat has its own physics to respect (dense construction sheds heat, and heat-sensitive belongings leave first), so between the two, the structure and the household usually decide.