TradeCheck

How to check a contractor’s license in Texas

Texas licenses some building trades at state level and does not license others at all, so the first question is not “is this contractor licensed” — it is “does Texas license this trade”.

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.

Short answer. Texas licenses electricians, air conditioning and refrigeration contractors, and barbering and cosmetology establishments through TDLR, and does not license general contractors, roofers or remodelers at state level at all.

The registers on this site

Each of these is a copy of the file Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation publishes itself, refetched daily and dated with the board's own publication date. The search runs in your browser; nothing you type is sent anywhere.

What Texas licenses, and what it does not

Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation runs the licensing programs below, which are the building trades it licenses. A trade on this list has a state file behind it, and an empty search result against it says nothing at all about the person you are checking. A trade that is not on the list may still be licensed by TDLR under another program, or by another agency, or not at all — the ones people most often look for here are under the next heading.

Trades people look for here and do not find

General contractors and remodelers
There is no state license, so there is no state file and no state record of standing. The building department for the city or county where the work will happen is the office that permits and inspects it, and is the one that can say whether this contractor pulls permits under their own name.
Roofers
Not licensed by the state. A roofer may hold a voluntary trade-association credential, which is not a license and is not checkable against a state file.
Plumbers
Licensed in Texas, but by the Texas State Board of Plumbing Examiners rather than TDLR, so they are in neither TDLR file and not on any page here. The license that may contract plumbing work to the public is the Responsible Master Plumber, and the board verifies it itself. Texas State Board of Plumbing Examiners — License Verification.

How to check, in four steps

  1. Work out which trade the job is. Texas licenses by trade, and the license that matters is the one for the work being done, not the one the company happens to hold.
  2. Open the register page for that trade and search the name or the license number. The search runs in your browser against this copy; nothing you type leaves the page.
  3. Read the date. Every result states the date of the TDLR file it came from, and a license can change between files.
  4. Finish at TDLR. Every result carries a link to TDLR’s own lookup, and that lookup — not this copy — is the answer you act on.

Questions people ask

Does Texas license general contractors?

No. Texas has no state license for general contractors, remodelers or roofers, so there is no state register to check them against and an empty result here means nothing about them.

TDLR’s own list of regulated industries runs from air conditioning and refrigeration through to weather modification, and general contracting is not on it. The office that regulates the work is the building department of the city or county where it will be done — they issue the permit and they inspect the result.

The contractor is in the file. Is that enough?

No, and this site is built to keep saying so. A record here means the TDLR file published on the date shown recorded that license with that expiry date. It does not mean the license is in good standing right now.

TDLR’s published files carry no status column at all — there is no field in them saying active, suspended or revoked. Standing on these pages is therefore read from the expiry date, and an expiry date cannot know about a suspension. That is why every result links to TDLR’s own lookup and why the last step of a check is always there.

The name is not in the file. Does that mean they are not licensed?

Not on its own. There are five ordinary reasons a name is missing, and only one of them is “not licensed”.

The license may have been issued after the date of this copy. The business may be registered under a spelling or a legal name different from the one on the truck. The trade may be one Texas does not license at state level. The holder may hold a different TDLR license type from the one this page covers — a master electrician is not an electrical contractor. Or they may indeed hold no license. TDLR’s own lookup is the only thing that can tell you which, and it is one click from every search result here.

What do the letters on an air conditioning license mean?

They are the license’s class and endorsement, and they decide what work it permits. TDLR states that a Class A license “allows you to work on any size unit” while a Class B license “allows you to work on cooling systems of 25 tons and under, and heating systems of 1.5 million BTUs/hour and under”.

The endorsement decides the kind of work rather than the size: environmental air conditioning is comfort cooling and heating for people, commercial refrigeration is equipment that keeps a space cold for its intended use, and process cooling or heating is temperature control for production. A third code, C, is what 16 TAC §75.22 calls a combined endorsement — one license covering both — and it is on 7,927 of the air conditioning licenses on this site, as AC or BC. §75.22(e) covers the other case: a contractor holding endorsements of different classes is issued a separate license number for each, so a code like AEBR is one holder with two licenses.

This site prints TDLR’s own code for each license rather than a reading of it. TDLR’s published file key defines only four — AE as Environmental Class A, BE as Environmental Class B, AR as Refrigeration Class A and BR as Refrigeration Class B — and the register contains codes that key does not list. §75.22 defines the letters they are built from, which is what the register page reads them against.

Where do I complain about a licensed contractor in Texas?

TDLR takes complaints against the licenses it issues, including electricians and air conditioning contractors, through its Complaints and Enforcement office.

For a trade Texas does not license, there is no state license to act against, and the complaint routes are the city or county building department, the Texas Attorney General’s consumer protection division, or a civil claim.

Do not have the number? What a contractor license number is, and what one looks like — including the shapes counted off Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation’s own file.

Going to the board