What we check

Where the information comes from

Everything on a contractor's page comes from five datasets that Washington State publishes on its open data portal, data.wa.gov. We do not collect information from contractors, customers, or any other source.

• L&I Contractor License Data - General (m8qx-ubtq), Washington State Department of Labor & Industries.Used for: business name, license number, UBI, type and specialty, status, dates, address, phone.
• L&I Contractor License Data - Bond (bzff-4fmt), Washington State Department of Labor & Industries.Used for: bond company, bond number, amount, and dates.
• L&I Contractor License Data - Insurance (ciwg-agsx), Washington State Department of Labor & Industries.Used for: liability insurance carrier, policy number, coverage amount, and dates.
• L&I Contractor License - Principal Data (4xk5-x9j6), Washington State Department of Labor & Industries.Used for: the people L&I lists as principals of the business.
• Attorney General Consumer Complaints (gpri-47xz), Washington State Attorney General's Office.Used for: consumer complaints in the "Contractors", "Duct Cleaning, Heating and Air-Conditioning", and "Landscaping Services" categories, matched by business name and city.

These datasets are published by Washington State as public records; see each dataset's page for its license terms. We show the records as published. We do not change them, and a contractor cannot change or remove them either.

How often it is updated

We read each dataset again every night, in the early morning Pacific time. Each section of a contractor's page shows when its dataset was last synced. The state updates its datasets on its own schedule, so a change made at L&I can take a day or two to appear here.

Record history

The state's lookup tools show a contractor's current status only. We keep what the records said each time we read them, so a contractor's page can also show what changed and when: a status that moved from active to suspended, a bond that was canceled, a change of insurance carrier. The page says the date our records began for that contractor; changes before that date are not known to us.

Bond, insurance, and principal records that the state stops publishing stay on the page, marked with the date they were last published.

How names are matched

License, bond, insurance, and principal records are joined by the contractor's license number, so they always belong to the right contractor. Attorney General complaints do not include a license number. A complaint is shown on a contractor's page only when the business name and the city on the complaint both match the contractor's registration. Names are compared after removing punctuation and endings such as LLC or Inc. A complaint filed under a different spelling, a trade name, or a different city will not be shown, and a complaint about a different business with the same name in the same city could be.

Search works on business names and license numbers. The people listed as principals are shown on a contractor's page but are not searchable.

What a complaint record means

The Attorney General's Consumer Protection Division records complaints that consumers file. A complaint record shows that someone filed a complaint. It does not establish that the business violated the law, that the complaint was justified, or how it was resolved. The same is true of a bond marked impaired by L&I. We state counts and dates and never draw a conclusion from them.

How to read the page

• Status wording is the state's own, except that "PASSED AWAY" is shown as "Registration closed".
• "Registered in Washington for N years" is stated only for an active registration. For any other status the page gives the date the registration first took effect.
• A bond or insurance policy counts as current when its dates cover today and it has not been canceled. L&I does not publish bond or insurance records for contractors whose registration has expired or been suspended, or principal records for relicensed, out-of-business or inactive registrations, and the page says so rather than reporting "none found". Records we captured before the state stopped publishing them stay on the page, marked with the date they left L&I's records.
• A missing record is reported only where the license type's law calls for one. Electrical contractors are licensed under chapter 19.28 RCW, which requires a bond and does not require liability insurance, so an electrical contractor's page says that instead of "none located" when no policy is on file. L&I's bond and insurance datasets carry no rows for elevator contractors (chapter 70.87 RCW), and their pages say so. A bond or policy that is on file is shown whatever the license type.
• "Related licenses" lists other license numbers registered under the same UBI, the state's identifier for one business entity. The page links to them and states their status and dates; it does not say why the business holds more than one license.
• L&I accepts an assignment of a savings account in place of a surety bond. Those assignments are not in the state's open data, so a page that reports no bond record may belong to a contractor who has posted savings instead. L&I's Verify a Contractor tool shows them; we do not.
• "Not on record" means the state's dataset has no value for that field. A date the state published that cannot be right (a year before 1900 or more than ten years ahead) is treated as not on record.
• The "Current verification" list is produced by fixed rules from the records on the page. It is not a score.

How directory numbers are computed

The state, city and trade pages under Washington contractors show counts of L&I registration records. They are computed once a night, after the state's datasets have been synced, and each page shows the date. A city page counts registrations whose L&I address is in that city in Washington; a trade page counts registrations in a trade group, which is derived from the L&I license type and specialty code, wherever the business is based. Active means the state's record shows ACTIVE status; every other status is counted as not active. "Suspension on record" counts registrations with SUSPENDED status plus active or re-licensed registrations that carry a suspension date. "Complaint records matched" counts contractors with at least one Attorney General complaint record under the same business name and city, with the limits described above. Years registered are counted from each registration's effective date. A city gets a page when it has at least 10 active registrations, and a city and trade page when it has at least 5. The lists on these pages name businesses by registered name and license number only; no owner or principal appears on any list. Numbers are stated as they are and are never used to compare one city or trade with another.

What is not included

Secretary of State filings, court records, permits, L&I citations and violations, workers' compensation status, and anything from the Department of Revenue are not part of these pages.

Reporting an error

If a page shows something different from the state's own record, emailstephanie.contractorhistory@gmail.com with the license number and what you found. If the state's record itself is wrong, the correction has to be made with the agency that publishes it; our page will update after the state's dataset does.

What this site is

This site presents public-record information. It is not a recommendation for or against any contractor, and it is not a consumer report. Before hiring, check the contractor's current status directly with the Washington State Department of Labor & Industries.