Lice Treatment & Lice Removal Service in Boston, Massachusetts

A note from the school nurse, a scratchy head at bedtime, a tiny egg glued to a strand of hair: however you found it, nobody has to be bundled onto the T or into traffic on the Pike to get it handled. LiceDoctors sends a trained technician to your apartment, condo or house in Boston and the towns around it, and same-day appointments are usually available, including weekends.

Every person who lives with you gets checked, from the baby to the grandparent in the in-law apartment, and anybody with lice is treated before the technician goes. Follow the plan you are given afterward, and the 30-day guarantee covers a free re-treatment if lice return in that window.

Call LiceDoctors Boston: (617) 517-4197 or book online.

Neighborhoods and towns on our Greater Boston map

Our technicians cover the city's neighborhoods and a wide ring of cities and towns, out past Route 128 and along both shores. The hourly rate includes the drive for trips of up to 30 miles. When the technician travels farther than that, a two-hour minimum applies, which is most likely at the far edges of the list below.

Inside the city

Visits happen in Dorchester triple-deckers, South End and Charlestown row houses, Beacon Hill walk-ups and apartments in Allston, Brighton, Fenway and Back Bay. We also go to Jamaica Plain, Roslindale, West Roxbury, Hyde Park, Mattapan, Roxbury, South Boston, the Seaport, East Boston and the North End.

Cambridge, Somerville and the inner ring

Cambridge, Newton and Medford each have their own page. Somerville, Brookline, Chelsea, Revere and Malden are covered right here on this one, along with Watertown, Belmont, Arlington, Everett, Winthrop and Milton. Most of these towns are a short drive from the city line, and many have triple-deckers and two-families of their own.

Route 128 and MetroWest

Along Route 128, Waltham, Lexington, Woburn, Needham and Wellesley have pages, and Burlington and Dedham are on the list too. Farther west, Natick and Framingham have their own pages, and Concord is covered as well.

North Shore, Merrimack Valley and South Shore

Up the North Shore, Lynn, Peabody and Beverly have pages, and Salem, Swampscott and Marblehead are covered. In the Merrimack Valley, Lowell and Haverhill have pages, with Andover and Lawrence in between and Billerica and Chelmsford on the way out from the city. South of the city, Quincy has a page, Braintree, Weymouth and Hingham are covered from here, and Plymouth has its own page farther down the coast. Toward the Rhode Island line there is Attleboro, and on the South Coast, New Bedford.

From your first call to the last comb-through

Call (617) 517-4197 or book online. Most days, a same-day appointment is available, and visits are scheduled 365 days a year, on weekends and holidays too, from early morning until well into the night. Lice found on a Sunday evening before school can usually be dealt with before the Monday bell.

No logo or lettering marks the technician's car. That discretion counts in a city of shared porches, front stoops and condo hallways, where neighbors notice who comes and goes. A fourth-floor walk-up in the North End and a single-family house in Needham get the same visit, but parking is not the same: if your street is resident-permit only, mention it when you book so you can work out where a visitor can leave the car. In a building with a concierge, telling the desk you are expecting a guest is all it takes.

The visit opens with a check of everyone who lives in the home, parents included. If a head has lice, the technician treats it right then, at that one appointment. You are billed for the time the visit takes, not per person, so checking the toddler who has not scratched once still costs only the minutes it takes.

Here is the treatment in plain terms. After explaining what is about to happen, your technician coats the hair in oil and sections it. A professional-grade comb then goes through every section, and lice and eggs come out of a Back Bay toddler's curls the same way they come out of a Framingham teenager's ponytail. Once the hair dries, nits the comb missed are lifted out by hand, strand after strand. A final round of oil and one more full comb-through finish it. That strand-by-strand stage is slow on purpose, because a few missed nits can restart the whole thing.

Most families should set aside 2.5 to 3 hours, so a weeknight visit that starts after dinner can run past bedtime. One child with short hair often takes about an hour. In a small apartment, the kitchen table and a laptop with a movie make the time go faster.

At the end comes the follow-up plan. It is olive oil and combing, done at home, and its job is the eggs too small for anyone to spot on the day of the visit. In almost every case there is no second appointment. Nobody is contagious once the technician leaves, so skip the deep clean and the trip to the laundromat with every sheet in the apartment.

Rebecca, Crystal and the rest of the Greater Boston team

The technicians on the Greater Boston team are Rebecca, Crystal, Lisa, Jennifer, Denisha and Michele.

All five of the newest Google reviews here came in September 2026, during the first weeks of school. Matt wrote that Crystal "came on time" and treated both his own hair and his wife's, then explained the process and the follow-up well. Sara said she was "so grateful for her time, education and help." Emily wrote that her technician made the whole process feel less stressful and was "especially great with my kids." Arsha and Travieso each kept it short: great service.

Two things in those reviews are worth knowing before your visit. First, grown-ups get lice too, and they are treated in the same appointment as the kids, on the same hourly clock. Second, the teaching matters. Matt and Sara both singled out how well things were explained, and that explanation is what carries you through the follow-up plan and keeps the 30-day guarantee in force.

If your child is nervous, say so when the technician walks in. A movie, a snack break or a seat on a parent's lap can turn a long comb-out into something a five-year-old will sit through.

What Boston-area schools and daycares expect

The state's position

Rules vary from town to town in Massachusetts, and the state's advice is the starting point. The Massachusetts Department of Public Health says no healthy child should be excluded from school because of head lice, and, siding with the national pediatric and school nurse groups (AAP and NASN), it says "no-nit" policies should be dropped. The same page acknowledges that many school departments and child care sites still require children to be free of nits before they come back, and it tells parents to know their own school's or daycare's policy.

That note names child care sites as well as schools, so if your youngest goes to daycare or preschool, ask about nits there too, before the morning you need an answer.

The city and two suburban examples

Boston Public Schools does not post a lice-specific policy online, so your school nurse is the one to ask. Two suburban districts show how far apart local rules can be.

Under Brookline's lice management guidelines from 2008, a child with live lice is sent home for treatment by the end of the school day and may not come back until the following day, and only after a check by the nurse or a designee. All live lice and most nits should be gone first. Brookline's guidelines name a pediculicide shampoo as the treatment, so check with the nurse that a LiceDoctors visit is acceptable there. Brookline does no mass screenings, and a note asking parents to check their children's heads goes home to everyone in the class.

In Stoughton, south of the city, children with live lice, or with nits and no recent treatment, are dismissed to a parent for treatment. Once properly treated they are not kept out of school, even if some nits remain, and the school nurse decides whether there is evidence of treatment when they return, so ask that nurse ahead of time what will count.

Before your child goes back

Ask the nurse or daycare director two direct questions: does my child need to be nit-free, and will a LiceDoctors visit count as treatment? If nit-free is the rule, tell your technician. The strand-by-strand nit removal at the end of the visit targets nits, although a few nits can still turn up in the days after, which is normal and what the follow-up plan is for. Need paperwork for a BPS nurse, your boss or a camp? Email the LiceDoctors office, and within one business day the note is in your inbox. Then check every sibling, and let the families of your child's best buddies and carpool partners know so they can look too. Our school-by-school guide covers more towns, and there is a separate post on Cambridge and Brookline school lice policies.

Summer camp, snow days and lice season around Boston

Nationally, the lice-search calendar has a summer spike and a winter lull: interest in treatment is highest in July and August, when kids here are at camp, and lowest in February. Calls track camp, back-to-school, sleepovers and winter break. Expect the same pattern locally, with the end of camp season running straight into the first weeks of school in late August and September.

Plenty of Boston-area kids spend part of the summer at day camps or at overnight camps in New Hampshire and Maine, and lice picked up there can come home along with the duffel bag. A careful check the night camp ends is worth the ten minutes it takes.

Winter is the season parents worry about, and the worry usually lands on the wrong thing. Coats, hats and scarves pile up in school cubbies, and every shared beanie looks suspicious. Lice can travel that way, but far less often than when heads touch. They cannot jump or fly, and off a head a louse has a day or two at most.

The bigger winter factor is closeness: holiday visits with cousins, kids doubling up in beds when relatives are in town, and long snowed-in weekends of movies on the couch. A quick look through everyone's hair after a big family gathering is a habit worth building.

Massachusetts pricing for an in-home visit

LiceDoctors bills by the hour, and that hourly rate covers your whole household rather than each person. Here, $199 buys the first hour of a technician's time, and every hour after that runs $179, charged in 15-minute pieces. Every appointment has a one-hour minimum. The drive is free for trips up to 30 miles, and a trip longer than 30 miles makes the minimum two hours.

A few examples help. One child with short hair, about an hour, is $199. Two hours comes to $378, a 2.5-hour visit, common for a family, is $467.50, and the long end of a family visit, 3 hours, is $557. A family of four typically lands around $480. Because the clock sets the price, a family of five is not charged five times over.

A Sunday visit adds $20, and on the biggest holidays of the year a holiday fee may apply too. Lice treatment counts as an eligible HSA and FSA expense, so either card works. Planning to submit to your health plan for possible reimbursement? Request a receipt that lists a diagnosis code; whether the insurer pays is its call, not ours. See the pricing page for everything else.

What stands behind every Boston-area visit

In 20+ years of in-home work, LiceDoctors has treated over 600,000 clients. Keep up the simple at-home plan, and the success rate is 99.6%.

The protocol your technician follows in a Somerville walk-up or a Wellesley colonial got its review and approval from Dr. Madeleine Sowash, MD, FAAD. A dermatologist, Dr. Sowash serves as Lead Medical Advisor to LiceDoctors.

Nothing in a LiceDoctors visit comes from the pesticide aisle, and there is no heat device or enzyme product either; the method is all-natural and chemical-free, so it is safe for everyone in the house, a grandparent visiting from out of state included. Across the US, a lot of lice no longer respond to common over-the-counter treatments, and a comb-out does not depend on any of those products working.

If lice come back within the 30-day window even though you stuck with the plan, the 30-day guarantee gets you a free re-treatment. LiceDoctors has also contributed to Casa Myrna, a Boston domestic violence shelter.

Call before the next school morning

Lice turn up most in kids roughly 3 to 11, a Roslindale preschooler or a Newton fifth grader, and in the grown-ups who share their homes. Having them is no comment on your housekeeping. If you are reading this at 10 PM with a flashlight and a fine-tooth comb, put the comb down and call. Tell us your neighborhood or town, and we will look for the earliest slot a technician can make.

Call LiceDoctors Boston: (617) 517-4197 or book online.