Is it normal for a contractor to insist on an engineer for a simple kitchen wall removal?

Those hairline cracks are usally the first warning sign that the wall is doing more than just holding up drywall. If they’re diagonal or concentrated near the corners of a doorway, the house is telegraphing that there’s a load being transferred thru that specific frame. Sure, a good sheetrock guy could cover that up for a few months, but you're just masking a structural issue that will eventually become unbearable.

Your contractor is actually doing you a favor by stalling. alot of guys woud just "send it" to get paid and leave you with a sagging ceiling six months later. If you want to verify it yourself before hiring an engineer, get into the attic and look at the direction of the floor or ceiling joists. If those joists are perpendicular to the wall you want to remove, that wall is supporting them. You can't just knock it out without installing a **header** to pick up that weight.

Checking for a point load is another big step. Look directly under that wall in the basement or crawlspace. If there’s a post or another wall sitting right under it, it’s a load-bearing path. Those videos where people bash through walls over a weekend often skip the part where they spent days prepping a temporary shoring wall to keep the second story from collapsing into the kitchen. Pulling a permit for this kind of work usually requires a structural calculation anyway. If you bypass that and do it yourself, you might run into massive issues when you try to sell the house later and the inspector notices a dip in the floor. Spend the money on the engineer. It’s better to have a stamped drawing saying it’s safe than to find your kitchen covered in debris becuase the roof shifted. You don't want to be the house that ends up causing an evacuation on the local news.

Spot on. You definitely want that engineer. One thing to look for while you’re up in the attic checking joists is if they acutally overlap or "lap" right over that wall. Even if they don't look like they're carrying a massive load, builders often use those internal walls as a splicing point for shorter lumber.

If you knock it out, you're not just losing support, you're breaking the continuous span of your ceiling. Better to spend the few hundred bucks now than watch your kitchen ceiling sag two inches by next Christmas.

Have you ruled out what's actually hiding inside that wall before you start swinging? People always focus on the structural load, but have you checked for plumbing stacks or electrical home runs? If that wall lines up with a bathroom upstairs, you might be looking at a huge bill to reroute pipes. Maybe your guy is stalling because he suspects there's more than just studs in there. Have you verified there isn't an HVAC return or a main drain line buried in that 'basic' partition?

Update: I crawled into the attic and saw the joists overlapping right over that wall, just like you guys warned. I also realized the master bath is directly upstairs, so there’s probly a plumbing stack in there too. I guess the contractor was right to be cautious. If the joists are spliced there, is a header enought, or am I looking at a support column?