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Licensed, or just registered?

“Licensed contractor” is the phrase every homeowner is told to look for. But in several states the credential most contractors actually hold is a registration — a different thing, recorded in the same records, under the same licensing roof. The counts below are the boards’ own.

Washington: the license word, the registration reality

Washington’s Department of Labor & Industries publishes its contractor records as licensing data, and a contractor who has completed the process will tell you they are licensed. The records themselves say something more specific. Of the 76,308 credentials L&I records as ACTIVE, 68,454 — 89.7% — are Construction Contractor registrations, and 7,854 are licenses: the electrical, plumbing and elevator contractor licenses. Count every record L&I publishes, current and historical, and registrations are 148,874 of 161,362 — 92.3%. On this site the published Washington set runs 77,569 registrations to 8,128 licenses.

A Washington registration is not nothing: it is recorded with L&I, and it carries a bond and insurance that the record shows. What it does not involve is a trade examination — nobody at the state tested the registrant’s craft. The license words and the registration words sit side by side in the same records, and the difference is exactly the difference between “the state examined this trade” and “the state registered this business.” Every Washington record here — start at the Washington hub — labels which of the two the credential is, in plain words, because the board’s own type descriptions draw the line.

Minnesota: a register that says the quiet part

Minnesota’s Department of Labor and Industry is unusually candid. Its records include whole classes named Registered Unlicensed — and they are not a handful: 101,897 records, 39.2% of everything in the department’s published records:

Registration there means the department knows who these workers are — it is a real regulatory act with real requirements — and it is explicitly not a license; the name says so. The same records hold 5,503 Certificates of Exemption, which document the opposite of licensure: a recorded statement that the holder is exempt from it. None of these publish here as licenses. The Minnesota records on this site are the 11,580 licensed residential contractors — the register and the exemptions are counted in this study because they are part of what the word “licensed” has to be distinguished from, and for no other purpose.

Connecticut and Florida: the quieter versions

Connecticut’s Home Improvement Contractor credential is a registration with the Department of Consumer Protection — no examination — and it is the state’s largest contractor credential: 135,727 records in the department’s published data, and 65.9% of the Connecticut records published here are registrations rather than licenses. Florida draws the same line inside one word family: a Certified license is state-examined and valid statewide, while a Registered license rests on a local examination, is registered with the state, and authorizes work only in the locality that granted it — 3,885 of the Florida records here are the registered kind, against 104,735 certified licenses, and every Florida record page states which scope its license carries.

The thirteen states, side by side

In nine of the thirteen states, the contractor records are licenses all the way down, and the question answers itself. In the other four, “are you licensed?” is the wrong question — not because the answer is no, but because the state offers two different credentials and the honest answer names one of them. The follow-up that works everywhere: which credential, from which board, under which number — and then check the number. The record will say what the credential is, in the board’s words and in plain ones.

More studies

• The disappearing license
  In some states a revoked license isn't marked — it leaves the published records entirely, and a search that finds nothing starts to look like a clean answer.
• “Active” is a word, not a fact
  Records whose status word says current while their own expiration date has already passed — counted state by state, word and date side by side.
• The discipline map
  Where 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 when
  How 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.