Washington Contractor License Search 🔨🏗️⚡

Every registered Washington State contractor — from the official source. Straight from the Washington State Department of Labor & Industries (L&I) open-data feed on data.wa.gov — ~161,000 contractor licenses (~75,000 active), refreshed by the state every day. No CAPTCHAs, no brittle search-form scraping, no stale lists. General and specialty construction, electrical, plumbing, and elevator contractors — filterable and normalized into clean, structured records.

Contractor-license lookup is the single hottest category on Apify Store, but every incumbent scrapes L&I's fragile "Verify a Contractor" search UI. This actor pulls the authoritative L&I open dataset directly — faster, more complete, and it doesn't break when the state tweaks its website.

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Who buys this

• Construction lead-gen & sales teams — build and refresh territory lead lists of every active contractor by city, trade, and specialty.
• Materials, tool & equipment suppliers — reach newly licensed and re-licensing contractors the day they come online.
• Surety bond & insurance underwriters — pull the registry to source, verify, and monitor contractors (status, effective/expiration/suspend dates, principal of record).
• Background-check & KYB/verification providers — confirm a Washington contractor's license number, status, business type, UBI, and owner against the official state record.
• Staffing & subcontractor marketplaces — vet and enrich contractor profiles at scale.

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What you get

Filterable, normalized records with a stable schema. Filters (all optional):

Input	Meaning
city	City (partial, case-insensitive) — e.g. Seattle, Spokane, Vancouver
licenseType	L&I type code (exact) — CC Construction · EC Electrical · PC Plumbing · LC Elevator
status	Status code (A Active, E Expired, S Suspended, R Re-Licensed, O Out of Business) or status text — defaults to Active
includeAllStatuses	Return every status, not just active
licenseNumber	Exact contractor license number (e.g. 04CONCL862CR)
nameContains	Substring matched against business name OR primary principal name
specialtyContains	Substring matched against specialty descriptions (GENERAL, RESIDENTIAL, PLUMBING, …)
effectiveFrom / effectiveTo	Effective (issue) date range (ISO YYYY-MM-DD) — great for "newly licensed this month" pulls
maxRecords	Cap on results (default 5,000)
socrataAppToken	Optional Socrata app token to raise rate limits (not required)

License types: CC Construction Contractor (~148k) · EC Electrical Contractor (~9k) · PC Plumbing Contractor (~3k) · LC Elevator Contractor (~120).

Example output record

{
  "licenseNumber": "04CONCL862CR",
  "ubi": "603320569",
  "businessName": "04 CONSTRUCTION LLC",
  "licenseType": "CC",
  "licenseTypeLabel": "Construction Contractor",
  "licenseStatus": "Active",
  "statusCode": "A",
  "rawStatus": "ACTIVE",
  "businessTypeCode": "L",
  "businessType": "Limited Liability Company",
  "primaryPrincipalName": "OCHOA, ERIC JAMES",
  "specialties": [
    { "code": "01", "description": "GENERAL" }
  ],
  "effectiveDate": "2014-02-19",
  "expirationDate": "2028-03-03",
  "suspendDate": null,
  "address": {
    "street": "1900 Ne 3rd St Ste 106",
    "street2": "PMB219",
    "city": "BEND",
    "state": "OR",
    "zip": "97701",
    "country": "United States"
  },
  "phone": "(541) 410-2249",
  "sourceDataset": "m8qx-ubtq",
  "sourceUrl": "https://data.wa.gov/resource/m8qx-ubtq.json"
}

Names are whitespace-cleaned and uppercased, UBI/phone are de-noised (Socrata's trailing .0 stripped, phones formatted (NNN) NNN-NNNN), ZIPs are ZIP+4 formatted, addresses are structured, and all dates are ISO YYYY-MM-DD. (Some registrants have out-of-state mailing addresses — the address.state field reflects the licensee's address of record.)

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Example runs

• Every active construction contractor in Seattle: { "city": "Seattle", "licenseType": "CC" }
• Electrical contractors newly licensed this year statewide: { "licenseType": "EC", "effectiveFrom": "2026-01-01" }
• Look up one license by number: { "licenseNumber": "04CONCL862CR", "includeAllStatuses": true }
• All plumbing specialties in Spokane, any status: { "city": "Spokane", "licenseType": "PC", "includeAllStatuses": true }

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Data source & freshness

• Dataset: m8qx-ubtq — L&I Contractor License Data – General on data.wa.gov (Socrata SODA API).
• Volume: ~161,002 total records; ~75,259 currently Active (as of 2026-07-22).
• Refresh: updated by the state daily (dataset rowsUpdatedAt verified 2026-07-22 UTC).
• Access: affirmatively public open data on Washington's open-data portal — no login, no CAPTCHA. This actor uses the documented SODA API with a descriptive User-Agent, server-side $where filtering, polite paging, and exponential backoff.

Companion L&I open datasets exist (insurance ciwg-agsx, principals 4xk5-x9j6, bonds bzff-4fmt) and can be layered on for underwriting workflows; this actor keeps the core lean on the richest single feed so you get status, type, principal, specialties, dates, address, phone, and UBI in one record.

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Pricing

Pay-per-event — you only pay for what you pull:

Event	Price (USD)
Actor start	$0.005
License record	$0.003

A typical city pull of 1,000 active contractors costs ~$3.01. The whole active-license universe (~75k rows) runs ~$226 for a full statewide refresh — a fraction of what any list broker charges for a one-time, un-sourced CSV, and yours is re-runnable daily against the authoritative state registry.

Why these numbers: priced to the pattern of our other government-open-data actors (actor-start $0.005 + per-record $0.003, matching the Texas TABC liquor-license actor). Contractor-license lookup is the highest-demand category on Apify (top scrapers run 1,000–2,200+ times), yet every competitor scrapes L&I's brittle search UI — so a dedicated, authoritative, daily-fresh open-data feed is priced to be an obvious yes for a supplier, underwriter, or lead-gen team building a Washington book of business.

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Data is sourced from the Washington State Department of Labor & Industries public open-data portal (data.wa.gov). This actor is an independent tool and is not affiliated with or endorsed by L&I or the State of Washington.