TradeCheck

Is your contractor licensed — and is the license right for the job?

A contractor license lookup across 7 state-board registers: search 312,472 licenses copied from the state boards' own files, refetched every day — one register at a time, and a name missing from the one you picked is looked for in the others. Every answer carries the date of the file it is speaking from — the boards publish on their own schedules, so those dates are not always today. And where a board records what a license is limited to, the answer says whether that reaches the job you are hiring for.

Type it as it is written on the truck or the quote. What you type stays in your browser — the register is a file your device searches locally, so no search here is sent anywhere.

Two things the boards' own lookups will not do for you

Whether it is them, when you cannot spell it

TDLR searches names from the front: type the name off a van with a letter out of place and you get nothing — and nothing is what most people read as not licensed. L&I does tolerate it, so on that register this is not a reason to start here. CCB we have not been able to check — its own search is behind a bot check we do not complete, so we say nothing about what it tolerates.

This finds them from a transposed letter, a missing word, an ampersand where the register has a slash, or the owner's name in the order a person says it — then opens the board's own record for that license — or the board's search, for the 247 Texas holders whose two licenses share one number and whose record therefore has no address to link to.

Whether the license covers your job

A Texas air conditioning license carries a class, which sets the size of system it may be worked on, and an endorsement, which sets the kind of work. A contractor endorsed only for commercial refrigeration is licensed — and not licensed to replace the air conditioning in your house. Few are: only 734 of the 20,468 Texas air conditioning licenses here carry refrigeration alone, and 7,959 carry the combined endorsement, which covers both.

Washington draws the same line differently: L&I registers electrical contractors under one license type and fifteen specialties, and 2,481 of the 9,259 on this site hold one that may not touch a house panel. A limited energy contractor is restricted to low-voltage circuits. The status word beside their name does not say so — it is the same word a general contractor's record carries.

Tell the page what the job is and every result says whether that license reaches it, against the board's own rule — or says the rule does not settle it, rather than guessing.

Three of the four registers can answer it: Texas air conditioning, and both Washington registers. TDLR issues one kind of electrical contractor license, so there is no narrower question to ask on that page. Each page says which it is.

The registers

Not sure whether the state licenses that trade at all? In Texas the answer for general contractors and roofers is nothing at all — there is no state license, so an empty result means nothing either way.