What is the difference between review and sealing?
Review is work; sealing is a statement. One examines the documents, the other attests to them — and confusing the two is how seals get sold as signatures.
Review is the examination: documents checked against codes, calculations, and each other. Sealing is the attestation applied afterward by a licensed engineer taking professional responsibility for the work. Sealing without review is prohibited; review without sealing is legitimate, and sometimes exactly what a project needs.
Two acts, one sequence
In a standard engagement the acts are consecutive stages of a single process: the review produces findings, findings produce corrections, and the seal closes the sequence when the responsible engineer is satisfied. The sequence is the substance. Describing the seal as if it were the service — priced by the sheet, detached from any examination — inverts the relationship: it sells the statement while skipping the work that makes the statement true. Every rule in the sealing framework, from responsible charge to licensure, exists to keep the order straight.
When review stands alone
A review without a seal has real uses. A design firm may commission an independent check before its own engineer seals, catching coordination failures while they are still cheap. An owner may have documents reviewed to understand their condition before committing to a permit path. A manufacturer may need an engineering assessment of a package for a jurisdiction where the final seal will come from a local licensee. In each case the deliverable is findings — comments, corrections, a professional opinion — rather than an attestation, and the engagement is scoped that way from the start.
When only sealing will do
When a jurisdiction's submittal requirements call for sealed documents, no quantity of review substitutes: the application needs the attestation, from an engineer licensed there, on the documents as reviewed. That is the common commercial case, and it is why the two words travel together in practice. Just keep the sequence visible when you evaluate any offer — review first, seal when approved — because the sequence is where the professional value, and the legal validity, actually live. The guide to how PE review works shows both acts in their places.
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