Illinois Collection Agency Licenses

Every licensed collection agency in Illinois — 6,000+ records from the official IDFPR roster — agencies and branch offices, with expiring-license and new-license lead flags and disciplinary markers on every record.

Who this is for

• Creditors & debt buyers — placing accounts with an unlicensed agency is a compliance failure. Bulk-verify licensure and disciplinary history against the official state record before you place.
• Compliance vendors & attorneys — the FDCPA/state-compliance market runs on knowing who is licensed, who is new, and who has a disciplinary record. All three are flags on every row.
• Collection-industry suppliers — dialer software, payment processors, letter vendors, bonds and insurance. The new licenses filter is a feed of agencies that just opened their doors.
• Journalists & researchers — the licensed universe of an industry that touches millions of consumers, in one download.

What you get

One normalized record per license: agency name, license number, category, city, status, issue and expiration dates, computed expires_in_days, is_expiring_soon, is_new_license, and ever_disciplined flags. Export to Excel, CSV, or JSON, or pull on a schedule via API.

One schema across every state

Every licence roster in this catalogue delivers the same columns, in the same order, meaning the same thing — whichever state or profession the records came from. Stack this dataset on top of any other KempData roster and the columns line up.

That takes real work. Illinois writes a lapsed licensee as NOT RENEWED in block capitals; Delaware writes the identical situation as Delinquent. Both arrive here as status: "lapsed". Names arrive SHOUTING and glued together; they leave as full_name, first_name, middle_name, last_name in proper case. Dates are MM/DD/YYYY, with an _iso twin for spreadsheets and imports.

The state's own word is never thrown away. Every translated value ships beside a *_raw twin — status_raw, credential_raw, name_raw — holding the source's exact string, so you can always check our work or apply your own rules. status_basis tells you whether the standing is the state's published fact or computed from the expiration date.

lapsed is worth knowing about. It is the recall pool: people who held the licence, let it run out, and can renew. When you need experienced people in a hurry, that is the list to call.

Full column reference: docs/SCHEMA.md in the source repository.

Data source & fair use

The Illinois IDFPR professional-licensing roster on the state's official open-data API — public records the state publishes for exactly this use. No scraping; paged, rate-limit-respecting requests.

Support

Questions answered fast — usually within hours. Want a related license category covered? Open an issue and name it.