California Contractor License Lookup & Export — Contractors State License Board (CSLB)

Paste a list of names or licence numbers and get one row per matching California licence. Or export every licensed roofing contractor in California in one run. Read straight from the official register, normalised into one clean row.

See it run

Questions this answers

• Is this roofing contractor's license active in California right now, and when does it expire?
• Check these 500 subcontractor names against the California board before we put them on site.
• Export every licensed roofing, electrical, plumbing contractor in California with a phone number.
• Which California licences expire in the next 60 days?

What California actually publishes

Measured on real rows pulled from the board, not on what its documentation says. A field the board does not publish stays empty; the Actor never guesses one.

Field	Published
Licence number, status, trade	yes
Expiry date	yes
Street address	yes
City and ZIP	yes
County	yes
Phone	yes
Email	no
Insurance or bond expiry	no

California publishes a phone number on nearly every row. That makes this a calling list as well as a verification tool.

Trades covered

• General Building / Residential Remodeling
• Electrical
• Plumbing
• Warm-Air Heating, Ventilating, Air-Conditioning / Refrigeration
• Roofing
• Swimming Pool
• Asbestos Abatement
• Elevator
• Limited Specialty

A trade the board does not license is not in the list, and the Actor will not invent it.

Two modes

Lookup. One name or licence number per line. A licence number matches exactly; a name matches any licensee or business containing it. Every match comes back as its own row with the query it matched, so a list of 800 subcontractors comes back as a checked list.

Export. Pick a trade (or all of them) and get every licence in California, with onlyActive, onlyWithPhone and onlyExpiringSoon (next 60 days) filters and a maxResults cap.

What every row carries

state, licenseNumber, name, businessName, tradeLabel, status, isActive, expirationDate, daysToExpiry, isExpiringSoon, address, city, zip, county, phone, email, sourceUrl, scrapedAt, plus matchedQuery in lookup mode. Dates are ISO, phones are E.164, status is normalised so ACTIVE means active on every board.

Full detail: the record the bulk file cannot give

Pass licence numbers in full detail mode and each one comes back with the complete CSLB record: bond company, number, amount and effective date; workers' compensation carrier, policy number, expiry and classification codes; every classification; entity type (Corporation, Sole Ownership); and today's status in the board's own words.

Why it matters, measured 19 September 2026: the CSLB bulk file publishes active licences only. The licence page answers for the rest. Licence 400000 is `EXPIRED`, 500123 `INACTIVE`, 800000 `CANCELLED`, and 99999999 is `found: false` because it is not in the register. If you check a subcontractor before they start work, those answers are the job, and no bulk file gives them.

Every number comes back as a row: `checked: true, found: true` (charged), `checked: true, found: false` (not in the register, not charged), or `checked: false` (the board did not answer, not charged, and the run reports itself incomplete). Five licences take about five seconds. Add `withDetail` to a lookup or export to get the same record on every row found, up to 500 pages per run.

Built for verification

• Every query comes back as a row, matched or not, with matchedQuery to join it to your list.
• No match, no charge.
• Status normalised so isActive means the same thing as on every other board; the board's own status text is kept.
• Source URL on every row, pointing at the board's page for that licence: the primary source for a compliance file.
• Coverage printed by the run, per field, in RUN_SUMMARY: what you actually received, not what a README promises.
• Incomplete runs say so: a board that did not answer is named in the summary and the run is flagged, never passed off as clean.
• Stable ids (CA-<licence>) for diffing between scheduled runs: schedule the same list daily and you have licence-lapse alerts on your subcontractors.

Pricing

Pay per delivered row. Filtered-out rows cost nothing. A lookup that finds nothing charges nothing beyond the start fee.

Need more states?

The same tool covers 20 states in one query, with a per-state coverage table so you know before you buy which boards publish a phone or an email: https://apify.com/wellbuilt_zythem/us-contractor-license-lookup

Data source

Contractors State License Board (CSLB). A public regulatory register published so that anyone can verify a licence; contact details are the business contacts the board publishes for that purpose.