Contractor License Lookup: Bond and Complaints Too

The license number printed on a bid is a claim the contractor makes about themselves. It gets typed into a template, next to a logo, by the same person who typed the price. Nothing about it has been checked at the point it reaches your kitchen table.

So the first thing I do with any bid is put that number into the state registrar's own search box and compare what comes back against the letterhead, line by line. Not to catch anyone out. Usually the record matches and the whole thing takes four minutes. What I am looking for is the four separate documents hiding behind the phrase licensed, bonded and insured, because they are four different instruments, filed with different agencies, protecting different people. A bid that satisfies one of them can be entirely silent on the other three.

I hold no license and I inspect nothing. All I am doing here is opening records that are already public and saying which field on the screen answers which question.

The number on the letterhead is a claim, not a record

Start at the registrar, not at a review site. California's CSLB Check a License takes a license number, a business name, or a person's name. Washington runs Verify a Contractor at L&I, which the department also fronts with a plain-language Protect My Home page. Florida uses the DBPR licensee search. Texas licenses trades through the TDLR license search, and Arizona through the Registrar of Contractors at roc.az.gov.

Three fields on the result page do most of the work, and none of them is the number itself.

The first is the business name attached to the license, read character for character against the name on the bid and on the contract signature line. A borrowed or stale number surfaces here as a name that is close but not identical. The second is the personnel of record, meaning the qualifying individual or the responsible managing officer, because that is the person whose experience the license rests on, and that person can leave without the number changing. The third is the pair of dates, status and expiration, which describe today. Your job will take six weeks. An expiration that lands inside that window is a date to write into the contract, not a detail to notice afterwards.

Texas breaks the assumption sitting under all of this. Open the TDLR search and read the list of license types it will search before you type anything into it: air conditioning and refrigeration contractors, electricians, elevator contractors, mold remediation, water well drillers, and on down a list of trades. General contractor is not one of the entries, and plumbers sit with the Texas State Board of Plumbing Examiners rather than with TDLR. Whatever a Texas remodeler is registered with, then, is not a state license of the kind California and Washington issue, and the general work is tracked instead by the city that will issue the permit. A bid there that says "licensed" may be pointing at a city registration, at a trade license held by a subcontractor, or at nothing in particular. Ask which, and pull the city's own contractor registration list while you are asking.

Class is not a formality, and it decides what they may contract for

A license is not a general permission slip. It carries a classification, and the classification has a scope written into statute.

California draws the line in Business and Professions Code §7057(b). A general building contractor may take a prime contract for a framing or carpentry project, but "shall not take a prime contract for any project involving trades other than framing or carpentry unless the prime contract requires at least two unrelated building trades or crafts other than framing or carpentry, or unless the general building contractor holds the appropriate license classification or subcontracts with an appropriately licensed contractor to perform the work." Read on 20 August 2026. A furnace and coil changeout is one trade. A bid for that job on a bare B classification is therefore a question rather than a violation you have caught. The answer may well be that a C-20 subcontractor is doing the work, in which case that party's name belongs on your contract too.

Florida makes the same point with a different mechanism, and it comes with a number you can check against the equipment on your own bid. Under Florida Statutes §489.105, a Class A air-conditioning contractor is unlimited, while a Class B air-conditioning contractor is limited to 25 tons of cooling and 500,000 Btu of heating in any one system. The same section separates a certified contractor, who holds a certificate of competency from the department and may contract anywhere in the state, from a registered contractor, who met the competency requirements of one jurisdiction and "may contract only in such jurisdictions." Read on 20 August 2026. Certified and registered look nearly identical on a lookup screen. They are not the same permission.

One California threshold moved recently and is easy to get wrong from older articles. §7048 exempts work where "the aggregate contract price for labor, materials, and all other items is less than one thousand dollars ($1,000)," and the current text adds that the work must not require a building permit. That figure was $500 for decades; it was raised by AB 1170, effective 1 January 2026. Anything needing a permit falls outside the exemption no matter how small the price, which ties this straight into the permit line people get talked out of.

The bond is not insurance, and it is not queued up for you

The bond, the liability policy and the workers' compensation line get collapsed into a single phrase on the letterhead, and a fourth thing most people have never heard of sits behind all three. Pulling them apart is most of the value of the whole exercise.

California's bond has been $25,000 since 1 January 2023, when SB 607 raised it, and CSLB states the bond is filed "for the benefit of consumers who may be damaged as a result of defective construction or other license law violations, and for the benefit of employees who have not been paid wages that are due to them" (Bond Requirements, read on 20 August 2026).

Washington raised its numbers on 1 July 2024: $30,000 for general construction contractors, up from $12,000, and $15,000 for specialty contractors, up from $6,000. Electrical and plumbing contractors, licensed under separate statutes, were not affected. L&I's own announcement spells out the two things that surprise people most. Half the bond is reserved for consumers while workers, suppliers and taxing agencies may collect from the other half. And to collect at all, "consumers must file a lawsuit against their contractor and the bond, and then win a court judgment." Read on 20 August 2026.

That second sentence is the one to sit with. The bond is not a deposit held against your job. It is a limited pool, shared with everyone else that contractor damaged, reached through litigation.

Washington's recovery fund opened in July 2026, Arizona's has run for years

When the bond runs out, a few states have a second layer. Washington's opened on 1 July 2026, recently enough that most of what has been written about Washington contractors predates it.

Under RCW 18.27.410, beginning 1 July 2026 a homeowner may recover from the homeowner recovery program if every one of these holds: a final judgment against a registered contractor on their primary residence, a judgment specifying actual damages, prior recovery attempted against any existing bond, a judgment still unsatisfied, and an application filed within 90 days after the civil action concludes. Payment is capped at $25,000 per contractor per parcel, or the unpaid balance, whichever is less. Attorneys' fees, court costs and punitive damages are excluded by statute. "Residential property" is defined as a single-family dwelling or a multifamily dwelling of four or fewer units, and the section says plainly that it "does not include a condominium." Even then the money is not guaranteed: determinations "must be made by the department in its sole discretion," total payments in a fiscal year may not exceed 80 percent of the previous year's closing account balance, and eligible applications left unpaid when the account runs short go onto a waitlist that preserves the order in which they arrived. Read on 20 August 2026.

Arizona has run a comparable fund far longer, and it repays reading for how narrow the door is. A.R.S. §32-1132 does not open the residential contractors' recovery fund to everyone a contractor damages. Subsection (B) sets out a closed list of five eligible claimants: an individual who owns the damaged residential property and actually occupies or intends to occupy it as a primary residence; an LLC that owns it where at least one member lives there; a revocable living trust that owns it where all the trustors live there; a planned community or unit owners' association after the builder or developer transferred control, for damage to the common elements; and a lessee who contracted directly with the contractor or with one of its subcontractors and occupies the place as a primary residence. An investor who never moves in is not on that list.

Subsection (C) sets the second condition, and it reads more forgivingly than people expect. The contractor must have been appropriately licensed at one of three moments: the date the underlying contract was signed, the date the first payment was made, or the date the work first commenced. Subsection (D) defines that as a valid residential contractor license that was not canceled, in inactive status, expired, suspended or revoked. Read on 20 August 2026. Three chances, not one, which is more forgiving than the usual advice about lapsed licences suggests. It is still the reason to save the lookup with a date on it instead of glancing at it and closing the tab: if the only qualifying moment turns out to be the day you signed, the printout from that day is what shows the license was live.

The workers' comp box, and the exemption two of these trades cannot claim

On a California license record, workers' compensation appears either as a policy or as an exemption certificate. The exemption is narrower than most homeowners assume, and it is narrowest for exactly the trades this site spends its time on.

Section 7125 of the Business and Professions Code, as amended by SB 1455, allows a no-employee exemption only where the licensee does not also hold a C-8, C-20, C-22 or C-39 license. The statute identifies each of those by its own section of Title 16 of the California Code of Regulations — §832.08, §832.20, §832.22 and §832.39 — rather than by trade name, and adds a D-49 license, which it describes as "a subcategory of a C-61 license." Matched against CSLB's own classification list, those numbers read C-8 Concrete, C-20 Warm-Air Heating, Ventilating and Air-Conditioning, C-22 Asbestos Abatement, C-39 Roofing, and C-61 Limited Specialty. They carry coverage regardless of headcount. The same bill pushed the date on which every licensee must carry workers' compensation from 1 January 2026 out to 1 January 2028, and added section 7125.7, which gives CSLB until 1 January 2027 to establish a process for verifying that a licensee claiming no employees is eligible for the exemption (SB 1455 text, read on 20 August 2026).

The practical consequence is small and sharp, and checking it does not require knowing what any of the codes stand for. If the license record shows one of those classifications on the same screen as a workers' compensation exemption, the record contradicts the statute, and that earns one direct question before you sign. An HVAC or roofing bid is where you are most likely to meet it. In other states, ask for the certificate and verify it with the carrier named on it, not with the contractor who handed it to you.

The check I used to get wrong: the number without the name

For a long time I treated a green Active as the end of the lookup. It is not even the middle of it. The failure mode is rarely an invalid number. It is a valid number attached to a different legal entity than the one on your contract, or one whose qualifying individual left months ago, or one whose classification does not cover the single trade you are buying. All three of those come back Active.

So the comparison runs the other way around. Print the bid, open the record beside it, and check the record's business name against the bid's, the record's classification against the scope of work, and the record's licensee against whoever will sign. When those diverge you are not looking at a bad contractor by default. You are looking at a contract that needs a different name on it, which is a far cheaper problem to fix before signing than after. Same logic as an unpriced change-order clause: argue about the wording on day one, when it still costs nothing.

Reading the complaint file for what it actually says

The last record is the one most people misread, because "no disclosable complaints" sounds like "no complaints."

Business and Professions Code §7124.6 sets the filter, and reading the statute changes what the screen means.

• Only complaints referred for accusation, or referred for investigation after enforcement staff found a probable violation, a supervisor reviewed it, and the allegations would justify suspension, revocation or criminal prosecution, are disclosed at all.
• A complaint resolved in favor of the contractor is not disclosed.
• A letter of admonishment is disclosed for either one year or two, depending on statutory factors.
• Citations are disclosed from issuance and for five years after the date of compliance, if no further discipline is filed in that window.
• Accusations that result in suspension, stayed suspension or stayed revocation are disclosed from the date of filing and for seven years after settlement, on the same condition.
• Revocations that are not stayed are disclosed indefinitely.
• If additional discipline lands during either window, everything stays visible for as long as the newest item remains disclosable.

Read on 20 August 2026. A clean California record therefore means this and only this: nothing crossed those thresholds, inside those windows, in this state. It does not mean nobody was ever unhappy, and it is silent about work done under a different entity or across a state line. Run the person's name as well as the business name, which is what the personnel search is there for, and check the civil court index for the county the business operates in. Court records run on their own schedule and on no disclosure window at all.

Twenty minutes, four records, one page of notes. Do it before the deposit rather than after, and carry the classification question into the contract itself, where the line items on a complete bid can name the licensed party responsible for each piece of the work. Every state names these records differently and enforces them differently, so confirm the specifics with your own state's licensing agency rather than with any of the figures above, which belong to the states they came from and to the day they were read.