Minnesota Contractor Licenses - DLI Construction Trades Register

The Minnesota Department of Labor and Industry (DLI) publishes its entire current construction trades license register as public data - every electrician, plumber, boiler and high-pressure-piping engineer, residential contractor and more - refreshed continuously. This actor turns that register into a charged-per-record lookup and screening tool.

Built for: contractor and tradesman due diligence - verifying that an electrician, plumber or builder actually holds a current Minnesota license, screening enforcement actions, checking license expiration and status, and statewide trade-market sizing.

What it covers

259,243 license records (current register):

License type	Rows
Electrical	109,837
Residential Contractors	59,290
Plumbing	36,923
Boiler	34,973
High Pressure Piping	7,493
Mechanical Contractor Bond	5,362
Elevator	1,946
Building Officials	1,113
Water Conditioning	1,061
Continuing Education	1,005
Manufactured Structures	240

Across 78 license subtypes - master and journeyworker electricians and plumbers, registered (unlicensed) electricians, power-limited technicians, special engineers, qualifying builders and remodelers, building officials, backflow-prevention testers, elevator constructors and more.

Every row carries the licensee or business name, doing-business-as name, license number, license type and subtype, mailing address, city, state, ZIP, phone, status, original and expiration dates, an enforcement-action flag, and a renewal-in-progress marker. Dates come through as clean ISO (YYYY-MM-DD).

Two things this actor fixes from the raw file. First, DLI ships each status in mixed case - Expired and EXPIRED, Issued and ISSUED, Suspended and SUSPENDED - so a naive filter silently splits a facet. This actor ships a normalized status (Issued, Expired, Licensed, Revoked, Suspended, Voluntary Termination, Denied, Withdrawn) and filters and aggregates on that. Second, Enforcement_Action is a genuine public flag - 3,759 records (~1.5%) carry a DLI enforcement action.

Typical questions

• "Is this electrician's or plumber's license current - and has DLI taken an enforcement action?"
• "Show every Class A Master Electrician in Minneapolis."
• "Which residential building contractors in Minnesota hold a current license?"
• "Look up license PJ064542."
• "Find every trade license with an enforcement action on record."
• "How are Minnesota trades licenses distributed by type and status?"

Inputs

Input	What it does
licenseNumber	exact license number -> that licensee's row, e.g. PJ064542
name	licensee or DBA name substring, case-insensitive
licenseType	the trade (Electrical, Plumbing, Boiler, Residential Contractors )
licenseSubtype	exact credential, e.g. Class A Master Electrician, Journeyworker Plumber
busPers	Personal (individual) or Business (entity)
status	canonical status - Issued / Expired / Licensed / Revoked / Suspended /
enforcementAction	true = only records with a DLI enforcement action
city / state / zipCode	location filters (out-of-state licensees carry their home state)
aggregate / groupBy	one summary row per group with a count - type / subtype / status / business-or-personal / state
maxResults	cap records (default 200)

Default run = a tiny aggregate (license-type mix) - fast and safe for the daily auto-test, never a surprise full dump. For records, add a name / licenseType / city filter or a licenseNumber.

Example inputs

Look up one license number - a bare number returns that licensee's row.

{ "licenseNumber": "PJ064542" }

Master electricians in Minneapolis -

{ "licenseSubtype": "Class A Master Electrician", "city": "Minneapolis", "maxResults": 10 }

Screen enforcement actions - enforcementAction=true returns every license carrying a DLI action.

{ "enforcementAction": true, "maxResults": 10 }

The license-type mix - one summary row per trade, across the register.

{ "aggregate": true, "groupBy": "licenseType", "maxResults": 10 }

Low cost

From $0.00005 per record, down to $0.00003 at Gold - billed only for the rows you use, and each record is metered individually.

Minnesota's register is a 51 MB flat CSV with no query server behind it - there is no way to ask the state for "just Minneapolis master electricians". Rather than make every lookup pay for a full-register download, the register is mirrored, and each run queries the mirror in a single pass. That mirror is what lets a 259,243-row register behave like a live lookup at per-record pricing. Every pull is integrity-checked against the register's known shape (total count, type floors, the closed type vocabulary, the status vocabulary, license-number uniqueness, key-column coverage), so a degraded or schema-changed source fails loudly instead of returning bad rows.

Example output

licenseNumber=PJ064542 - a journeyworker plumber:

{
 "platform": "mn-dli",
 "source": "mn-dli-licenses",
 "jurisdiction": "MN",
 "licenseNumber": "PJ064542",
 "busPers": "Personal",
 "licenseType": "Plumbing",
 "licenseSubtype": "Journeyworker Plumber",
 "name": "ADAM J OTIS",
 "dbaName": "",
 "address1": "120 MINNESOTA ST WEST",
 "address2": "",
 "city": "Cannon Falls",
 "state": "MN",
 "zipCode": "55009",
 "phone": "701230998_",
 "status": "Issued",
 "statusNormalized": "Issued",
 "originalDate": "2021-09-15",
 "expirationDate": "2027-12-31",
 "enforcementAction": "0",
 "renewalInProgress": "",
 "refreshed": "2026-10-07",
 "mode": "record",
 "groupKey": "",
 "groupCount": ""
}

aggregate=true, groupBy=licenseType - the register's trade mix:

Electrical                    109,837
Residential Contractors        59,290
Plumbing                       36,923
Boiler                         34,973
High Pressure Piping            7,493

Source

• Minnesota DLI Construction Codes and Licensing data - the official public license register this actor reads.
• License data is DLI's own published register; it reflects the state's record as of the refresh.