Contractor License Lookup & Verification API

Verify a US contractor license by number or business name and get one normalized JSON record back — status, classifications, expiration, bond and insurance where the state publishes them. Sourced directly from the licensing boards themselves: CSLB, DBPR, IDFPR, DCWP, CCB, TDLR, L&I.

Try a free lookup — no signup, right here on this page. For programmatic access, take a free API key — 250 requests a month, no card. Also on RapidAPI and, if you would rather not write code at all, the Apify Store.

Example

curl "https://contractor-license-verification2.p.rapidapi.com/v1/licenses/OR/259240" \
  -H "X-RapidAPI-Key: YOUR_KEY" \
  -H "X-RapidAPI-Host: contractor-license-verification2.p.rapidapi.com"

259240 is a real Oregon CCB license. Full per-state examples and coverage caveats are on the coverage pages.

Verifying once is the easy half

A license check is true on the day you make it and quietly wrong three months later. Contractors let licenses lapse, boards suspend them, bonds are cancelled — and nobody tells the marketplace, the lender or the property manager who onboarded them.

So hand a license to the monitoring endpoint and it watches the record for you: you are told when the status or the expiry date changes, and again 30 and 7 days before it runs out. Signed webhook, email, or polling. The daily checks do not count against your request quota, and every plan including the free one can monitor something, because a trial that cannot show you the part worth paying for is not a trial.

Who this is for

• Lenders and insurers verifying a contractor before extending credit or writing a policy
• Marketplaces vetting contractors at signup instead of trusting a self-reported number
• Property managers and GCs checking a sub is still licensed before work starts
• Compliance teams who need provenance on every check, which is why source_url and retrieved_at are on every record rather than available on request

How do I check if a contractor is licensed?

Give this API the license number if you have it, or the business name if you don't. Both return the same normalized record, so nothing downstream needs to know which one you used.

Can I look up a contractor license by company name instead of a number?

Yes — the search endpoint does a partial, case-insensitive match and can return multiple matching licenses per name.

Does this include contractor complaints or disciplinary actions?

Colorado, Illinois and California. Their feeds carry the case number, action and date — Illinois adds IDFPR's own reason — and when the state has nothing on a license you get an empty list rather than a null, so you can tell 'clean' from 'unknown'. For the other six the field is null, meaning this source does not report it — not that the contractor is clean. Oregon CCB, Washington L&I and Connecticut eLicense all publish disciplinary history on the record's own page; it just isn't in the extract they publish for bulk use, so follow source_url for those three.

Is there a free way to try contractor license verification?

Yes — the free lookup page needs no signup at all, and a free API key gives you 100 requests a month with no card. The API also has a free tier on RapidAPI.

Which states does this cover?

CA, CO (electrical and plumbing trades only), CT, FL, IL (roofing contractors only), NYC, OR (general contractors from the CCB, plus electricians, plumbers and the boiler and elevator trades from the Building Codes Division), TX, and WA. New York is New York City only; New York State itself issues no statewide contractor license.