TradeCheck

How to check a contractor’s registration in Washington

Washington registers contractors through the Department of Labor & Industries, and unlike Texas it registers general construction contractors too — so there is a state record to check for almost any building 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. L&I registers construction, electrical, plumbing and elevator contractors, and publishes its own status word for each — which is the word these pages repeat rather than working one out.

The registers on this site

Each of these is a copy of the file Washington State Department of Labor & Industries 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 Washington licenses, and what it does not

Washington State Department of Labor & Industries 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 L&I 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

A trade registered under a different license type
Each page here covers one L&I license type. A contractor registered under another type is in L&I’s file but not on this page, and L&I’s own verify tool searches all of them at once.
Elevator contractors
L&I licenses them, and this site does not hold that register. Search L&I’s own verify tool, which covers every license type it issues.

How to check, in four steps

  1. Pick the license type the work falls under. L&I registers by type, and a page here covers one type.
  2. Search the business name or the contractor license number. The search runs in your browser against this copy.
  3. Read L&I’s own word, not just the date. Where L&I records a license as anything other than active, this page repeats that word.
  4. Finish at L&I’s verify tool, which also shows the bond and insurance L&I holds on file and which this copy deliberately does not carry.

Questions people ask

Does Washington license general contractors?

Yes. L&I registers general construction contractors as well as the specialty trades, which is the main way Washington differs from Texas for someone checking a builder.

They are on the construction contractors page here, with the specialty L&I records beside each registration — general, roofing, painting, landscaping and the rest. It is one register and one page, because a homeowner holding a quote knows the company’s name and not which specialty code L&I filed it under.

Why does the construction register load differently from the others?

Because it is 148,610 registrations, and sending all of them to a phone to search four thousand of them is 3.8 MB of somebody’s data allowance.

So it is split by first letter, and your browser fetches the letters your search needs — usually one. The answer is the same either way: the split is arranged so that a record the whole file would find is always in a letter the search asks for, and the check that says so is run against every record in the register rather than a sample of it.

Does an expiry date in the future mean the registration is good?

Not in Washington, and this is the clearest reason these pages repeat L&I’s word instead of computing one.

Licenses in the electrical register are recorded SUSPENDED, OUT OF BUSINESS or INACTIVE with an expiry date still ahead — the register page counts how many carry such a word, for the file it was built from, rather than this page asserting a figure nobody can check against it. A site that reads standing from the expiry date alone calls every one of those current — and that combination is precisely the case someone checking a contractor is checking for. The register page counts them for the file it is built from, which is the only count that is true on the day you read it.

What does this copy not carry?

Bonds, insurance, addresses and phone numbers. L&I publishes a contractor bond file and a contractor insurance file alongside the registration file, and this copy holds neither — so it answers whether someone is registered, which in Washington is one of the three things you are told to check. L&I’s own tool shows all three, and for the other two you have to finish there.

It also does not carry the name of the natural person behind a business, which L&I publishes in a separate principals file. None of these fields are requested from L&I at all, so none of them reach this site, its build, or anything it stores.

Do not have the number? What a contractor registration number is, and what one looks like — including the shapes counted off Washington State Department of Labor & Industries’s own file.

Going to the board