US Contractor Licenses - 9 State Boards, One Schema

Contractor and trade licences from nine state boards. Check a contractor, look up a licence number, screen a city or county, or roll a state's licences up by type and classification.

Low cost

From $0.00005 per record, down to $0.00003 at Gold.

What you get

Each record carries:

• state, source - the board the row came from
• licenseNumber, licenseType, classification
• holderName, businessName
• status (normalised active / inactive / unknown), statusRaw (the board's own word)
• issueDate, expiryDate
• address, city, county, zip, phone
• sourceUrl, sourceUpdatedAt

States

state	Board	Rows	What it covers
CA (default)	CSLB	245,545	Every licensed contractor, with the board class (A / B / C-xx)
WA	L&I	161,794	Construction contractors, active and historical
NJ	DCA	96,776	Electrical, home improvement, plumbing, HVACR and home-inspection licences
FL	DBPR	135,213	Construction and trade licences
MN	DLI	259,753	Construction, electrical, plumbing, boiler and related trades
OH	OCILB	12,498	Contractor licences
OR	CCB	56,580	Every CCB endorsement
VA	DPOR	84,610	Class A/B/C contractors and tradesmen only
TX	TDLR	38,102	Contractor licence types only

Total corpus: 1,090,871 rows, measured 2026-10-23.

Classification

California puts the trade class in classification: A (general engineering), B (general building) and C-xx specialty classes such as C-10 electrical, C-20 warm-air/HVAC, C-36 plumbing, C-39 roofing. The filter matches a whole class token and ignores hyphens, so C10 and C-10 are the same and C10 does not match C100. A row can carry several classes ("B, C10"), and any of them matches.

Other states use descriptive classifications; the same filter then matches a substring of the classification/specialty text.

In mode=aggregate, maxResults caps the number of group rows (default 50 - raise it for the long tail).

Examples

{ "state": "CA", "classification": "C10", "maxResults": 100 }

{ "state": "CA", "name": "SMITH", "city": "LOS ANGELES", "maxResults": 100 }

{ "state": "WA", "licenseType": "CONSTRUCTION CONTRACTOR", "maxResults": 100 }

{ "state": "NJ", "licenseType": "Electrical Contractors", "status": "active", "maxResults": 100 }

{ "state": "FL", "licenseNumber": "CBC006231" }

{ "state": "TX", "licenseType": "A/C Contractor", "maxResults": 100 }

{ "state": "CA", "mode": "aggregate", "groupBy": "classification" }

Which fields each state fills

Percent of rows with a non-empty value, measured on this corpus:

state	holderName	businessName	classification	status	issueDate	expiryDate	address	city	county	zip	phone
CA	-	100	100	100	100	100	100	100	97	100	100
WA	100	100	100	100	100	100	100	100	-	100	100
NJ	54	46	100	100	100	96	100	100	100	100	-
FL	100	85	15	100	99	86	98	98	96	98	-
MN	100	4	100	100	100	100	100	100	-	100	88
OH	100	98	-	100	100	100	98	98	97	98	65
OR	-	100	100	-	100	100	100	100	99	100	100
VA	36	64	100	-	100	100	100	100	-	100	-
TX	100	99	99	-	-	100	-	-	96	-	-

A dash means the board publishes nothing for that field. Silence is not a negative fact: OR, VA and TX publish no status column, so status is blank there - an empty status does not mean the licence is expired.

Honest limits

• One row is one licence held by one person or business. A holder with several licences appears several times.
• licenseType is the board's own label. The boards cover more than construction: MN includes electricians and boiler engineers, OH includes HVAC and plumbing, OR includes every CCB endorsement, NJ includes master plumbers and HVACR contractors.
• NJ covers five contractor boards only (electrical, home improvement, master plumbers, HVACR, home inspection). The rest of New Jersey's 1.99M professional licences - nursing, cosmetology, medicine and so on - is not in this corpus.
• VA is filtered to Class A/B/C contractors and tradesmen (84,610 of DPOR's 257,138 rows). Cosmetologists, real-estate agents, architects and the other DPOR boards are not in this corpus.
• MN includes "Registered Unlicensed" rows (about 39% of the state) - Minnesota registers unlicensed contractors as well as licensed ones; licenseType says which.
• FL includes Financial Responsible Officers - the qualified individual behind a licensed business, not a licence held in that person's own name.
• status maps Expired, Inactive, Revoked, Suspended/Susp, Terminated/Termination, Cancelled, Out of Business, Deceased, Closed, Retired, Passed Away, Denied, Surrender and Superseded to inactive; Active, Current, Issued, Licensed, Valid, Clear (California's word) and Restored to active; any other word is unknown. status=active is therefore the normalised active set, not "every row that is not inactive".
• The corpus is refreshed by the operator, not live-queried per run; sourceUpdatedAt is carried where the board publishes it.
• status is normalised from the board's word (active / inactive / unknown); statusRaw keeps the original. A board with no status column stays blank.
• Filters a state cannot serve are rejected with a clear error - none are silently dropped.
• The default run (state=CA, no filters, maxResults 50) returns 50 California rows from a pinned snapshot of the corpus (measured 2026-10-21) and never touches the full store. Add any filter or raise maxResults to read the live corpus.
• Memory: a non-default query loads one state's shard into memory before filtering (the largest is Minnesota, ~260k rows). Run the actor with at least 1 GB of memory.
• phone is the board-published contact number for the licence holder; for a sole proprietor it is also the business number.

Related

Also available in this account: state-level licence and business-registry actors for Texas, California, Washington, New York and others.