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The disappearing license
When a contractor’s license is revoked, what happens to its record? In some states it gets marked. In others it is simply removed — and a search that finds nothing starts to look like a clean answer, when it may be the opposite.
Arizona, measured
The Arizona Registrar of Contractors publishes a list of current contractor licenses: 58,335 records, and every one of them is recorded as Active — the only status the list carries. The Registrar also publishes the discipline it has imposed: 483 actions naming 212 licenses, of which 376 record a revocation and 107 a suspension.
Put the two side by side and the overlap is 2 licenses. Those two still-current licenses carry 6 of the 483 actions between them; the Registrar’s own note cautions that some discipline is temporary or may be remedied, and its pages here carry that caution with the actions. The other 210 disciplined licenses are not in the current list at all. They were not marked revoked — a revoked license has no record to mark. They are gone.
So in Arizona, a search of current licenses that finds nothing for a contractor is consistent with three very different stories: the contractor was never licensed, the contractor’s license ended quietly — or the contractor’s license was revoked, which is precisely the case where the silence sounds most reassuring. Nothing in the list itself tells you which story you are in.
California shows the other design
The Contractors State License Board keeps suspended licenses in its published records: 11,693 of 244,107 records carry one of 20 suspension wordings instead of CLEAR, so a California license under suspension still shows up, labeled, where a homeowner can find it — as on California’s hub page and its record pages. But California’s records are still a picture of the present: not one of the 244,107 records carries an expiration date that has passed. When a California license ends for good, it leaves the records too — the disappearance is quieter there, not absent.
Florida sits between the two
Florida’s Department of Business and Professional Regulation publishes more than the currently-working set: 11,753 licenses recorded as Current — Inactive, 186 on Probation, 127 Suspended. A disciplined Florida contractor often remains visible — browse Florida’s records and the statuses are printed on every row. But the board’s ended categories never appear at all, and the join shows the cost: of the 370 licenses named in the department’s discipline publications, 143 are absent from the license records — their actions exist in one publication and their licenses in no other.
All thirteen states
The thirteen states covered here fall into three designs — current-only lists where ended licenses vanish, records that keep suspensions labeled, and records that keep full history, dead licenses and all — plus Texas, which publishes no status word for most of its contractors and so can neither mark nor remove them:
| State | What the board’s published records hold | Measured |
|---|---|---|
| Arizona | Current licenses only | 58,335 records, every one recorded Active. The 483 recorded disciplinary actions match 2 of them. |
| California | Current licenses, suspensions shown | 11,693 records carry one of 20 suspension wordings beside CLEAR — and not one record in 244,107 carries an expiration date that has passed. |
| Florida | Current, inactive, probation and suspended licenses; ended licenses removed | 11,753 records are Current — Inactive, 186 are on Probation and 127 Suspended — yet 143 of the 370 licenses named in the discipline publications are absent entirely. |
| Washington | Full history kept | Of 161,362 records, 61,217 are recorded EXPIRED. Dead licenses stay on the record, labeled. |
| Minnesota | Full history kept | Of 259,888 records, 123,117 carry an Issued status. The rest is history, and it is published alongside the current licenses. |
| Connecticut | Full history kept | Of 340,609 contractor credential records, 70,159 — 20.6% — are in the current set. The remainder are inactive, lapsed, revoked, denied and otherwise ended credentials, kept on the record. |
| Illinois | Full history kept | The roofing records hold 21,195 business licenses; 4,834 — 22.8% — are ACTIVE. |
| Delaware | Full history kept | Of 31,319 records, 22,361 — 71.4% — are Expired. |
| District of Columbia | Full history kept | Of 20,588 contractor records, 5,880 — 28.6% — are Active; the rest are closed, cancelled, expired and otherwise ended, kept on the record. |
| Ohio | Current licenses only | The roster carries only its two current status words — though 61 of its rows carry expiration dates that have passed (see “Active” is a word, not a fact). |
| Vermont | Current licenses only | A list of current plumbing and electrical licensees — 1,883 of its 11,524 records carry expiration dates that have passed (see “Active” is a word, not a fact). |
| Oregon | Current licenses only | The Construction Contractors Board publishes a list of current licenses and no status word at all; a license that ends leaves the list. |
| Virginia | Current licenses only | Current lists by trade, with no status word; a license that ends leaves the list. |
| Texas | No status word (TDLR); labeled Current and Expired (TSBPE) | TDLR publishes no status at all, and 3,258 of 36,019 contractor records — 9% — carry expiration dates that have passed, mixed in unlabeled: the opposite failure, where ended licenses linger instead of disappearing. The plumbing board’s records label 851 of 9,406 master plumber records Expired. |
Washington is the clearest history-keeper: a Washington contractor whose credential expired years ago is still in the records, recorded EXPIRED, next to the current ones — the Washington pages publish the active and suspended sets, with the record’s status printed either way. In the current-only states, by contrast, the record set is a picture of who holds a license today, and the past is simply not in it.
What a missing record means
A search here that finds a business establishes something real: the board’s records hold that license, with the status, dates and bond the board records. A search that finds nothing establishes only that the business is not in that board’s published records as of their date — and in the current-only states above, that silence covers the revoked along with the never-licensed. The honest reading of an empty result is “not in these records,” never “nothing to find.” Check a license and the result will tell you which board, which records, and which date the answer came from.
Methodology
Sources: the published records of the Arizona Registrar of Contractors (dated November 2, 2026) and of the California Contractors State License Board, the Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation, the Washington Department of Labor & Industries, the Minnesota Department of Labor and Industry, the Connecticut Department of Consumer Protection, the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation, the Delaware Division of Professional Regulation, the District Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs, the Ohio Construction Industry Licensing Board, the Vermont Division of Fire Safety, the Oregon Construction Contractors Board, the Virginia Department of Professional and Occupational Regulation, and the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation with the Texas State Board of Plumbing Examiners (each dated November 3, 2026).
Counts were made directly from those records. A license is counted as matching between two of a board’s publications when the same license number appears in both. “Current-only” describes what a board’s published records contain — a license recorded with a non-current status, or an expiration date in the past, would show it — not a claim about how the board keeps its internal records. For states whose records are not yet published on this site, the counts describe the boards’ published records named above.
More studies
- “Active” is a word, not a factRecords whose status word says current while their own expiration date has already passed — counted state by state, word and date side by side.
- Licensed, or just registered?Most Washington contractor records are registrations, Minnesota keeps a register literally named “Registered Unlicensed,” and the two words do not mean the same thing.
- The discipline mapWhere discipline is published with the license records, where it lives somewhere else entirely, and where it cannot be had at any price — and what each case means for a search.
- Licensed since whenHow long the current licenses in each state's records have been held: medians, the share held 25 years or more, and the oldest license still current in California — issued in 1950.