Data, corrections and removals

Where the data comes from

From the bulk files each licensing board publishes as public records: Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation (TDLR), Washington State Department of Labor & Industries (L&I), Oregon Construction Contractors Board (CCB). Each page states the publication date of the file it was built from. Nothing here is collected from anywhere else, and nothing is inferred.

What is published, and what is not

Published: the license holder's name as the board records it, the business name where it differs, the license type and number, the board's own class or endorsement code, the county or town the board records for the business, the expiry date, and the board's own status word where it publishes one.

Not published: mailing addresses and phone numbers. They are in the source files and they are public records, but a license check does not need them, and republishing them would make this a contact directory rather than a verification tool.

How these pages are made

The records are the board's. Every licence, name, number, status word and date on this site is copied from the boards' files named above, on the publication date each page states, and nothing is added to a record that the board did not publish in it.

The pages around those records are built by a program from that file, and the wording is written with AI assistance. What the wording is allowed to do is bounded by the same rule everywhere on this site: it may read a code the board publishes against the regulation that defines it — 16 TAC §75.22 in Texas, WAC 296-46B-920 and WAC 296-400A-010 in Washington — and say what that regulation says. It may not decide that a contractor is good, safe, or right for you, and it never produces a licence fact the board's file does not carry.

Not a consumer report

This site is not a consumer reporting agency and this information is not a consumer report. It may not be used for any purpose regulated by the Fair Credit Reporting Act, including employment, tenant, insurance or credit decisions.

Corrections and removals

• The board's record is wrong. We copy the board's file, so a correction has to be made there first; once the board's next file carries it, this site follows automatically.
• This site shows something the board's file does not. That is our error and we will fix it. Tell us the license number and what differs.
• You are in an address-confidentiality or victim-protection programme. We hold no addresses, but if a record still should not appear under your name, write to us and it will be removed without asking you to explain why.

Requests go to privacy@agavemind.com and are answered within five working days.

What this site records about you

Searches run entirely in your browser. The register is a file your browser downloads and searches locally. What you type is never sent to us or to anyone else, so there is no record here of who looked up whom — not on this site, not with a provider, and not in a log we could be asked for.

Nothing about a result is recorded either: not the name you searched, not whether it matched, not which license you opened. The only thing this site knows about a search is that one happened.

Analytics, and what a measurement can carry

Where a Google Analytics stream is configured for this site, the page loads Google Analytics on every visit, and what it keeps on your device depends on where you are. In the European Economic Area, the UK and Switzerland nothing is stored or read until you say so: a cookie banner asks, and until you accept there is no analytics cookie and no local storage entry of Google's. Everywhere else consent is not required for it and a first-party analytics cookie is set on thelicensefile.com alone without asking. Either way the cookie is fixed to 90 days from its first write, is not shared with sibling sites, and advertising storage stays denied. If you are shown the banner and answer it, your answer is kept in this browser for 180 days so you are not asked again; clearing site data asks again. The one thing this site itself keeps in your browser is a day marker used to notice a return visit; it never leaves the browser. Two earlier builds were wrong in opposite directions. One asked everyone in the world, which misread a duty owed in those countries and nowhere else. The next asked nobody and denied storage everywhere; that interrupted no one and Google recorded none of the visits, accepting each and discarding it. This asks only where the question is owed.

Six event names may be forwarded: visit, search_start, search_result, search_empty, official_lookup_click and return_visit, plus the page view Google's own tag sends on load. Only the name travels. Every detail a page could attach — the query, the license, the state, the trade, the result count — is dropped at that boundary and reaches no provider, and there is no field in what is sent that one could ride out on. So search_result records that a search matched something; it cannot record what.

Google's own tag sets the first-party cookie on thelicensefile.com described above, holding a client identifier, wherever storage is allowed. In the EEA, the UK and Switzerland storage is denied and it sets none, so nothing identifying you persists on this device between visits. Google receives each collection request either way under its Analytics terms, including the page URL, the referrer's origin, browser or device signals and your network address — see its partner-site notice. Our own operator sessions and a daily health check send separately-labelled events that are excluded from every count.