How to run South Carolina Contractor Directory & Leads Scraper (LLR)

You want a list of South Carolina commercial contractors with phone numbers: every Building (BD) contractor in Columbia, or every electrician in one ZIP, or the whole state. The South Carolina Department of Labor, Licensing and Regulation (LLR) has the data, but its contractor lookup answers one name or city at a time, puts a reCAPTCHA in front of every search, and shows the phone and street address only on each licence’s own detail page. Columbia’s Building contractors alone are 228 Active licences, so that is 228 detail pages to open after the search. This actor returns those rows, detail fields included, from one run.

What you’ll need

Nothing but an Apify account. You don’t need an API key, a proxy or a CAPTCHA solver. We solve LLR’s reCAPTCHA once a month, in our own sweep of every search and every detail page (693 solves for the 2026-10-24 roster), and your run only filters that statewide snapshot. You pay $0.002 per contractor returned, plus Apify’s own platform usage.

Step 1 — Open the actor

Open South Carolina Contractor Directory & Leads Scraper (LLR) on the Apify Store and press Try for free. The actor’s own page on this site lists its live health and pricing.

Step 2 — Fill in the input

Field	Type	Required	What it does
listOptionsOnly	boolean	no	If true, return every city and every classification (with its code) on the roster, each with its count of licences. Free, not charged.
city	string	no	The city on the licence’s address, e.g. ‘Columbia’, ‘Greenville’, ‘Myrtle Beach’. Exact match; case and punctuation are ignored. A city with no matching licence returns a free…
cities	array	no	Several cities in ONE run, each searched separately. Combined with ‘City’ if you fill both. (default [])
zip	string	no	A 5-digit ZIP code, matched against the licence’s address ZIP, e.g. ‘29209’.
zips	array	no	Several ZIP codes in ONE run, each searched separately. (default [])
classification	string	no	An SC LLR classification, by code (‘BD’, ‘AC’, ‘EL’, ‘PB’) or by a word from its name (‘Building’, ‘Air Conditioning’, ‘Electrical’, ‘plumb’). Leave empty for every…
classifications	array	no	Several classifications in ONE run. A contractor holding two of them is returned (and billed) once. (default [])
licenseType	string	no	Filter by licence type, e.g. ‘General Contractor’, ‘Mechanical Contractor’, ‘Construction Manager’. A word from the type is enough.
licenseTypes	array	no	Several licence types; a licence matching any of them is kept. (default [])
statuses	array	no	Licence statuses to include, e.g. Active, Lapsed, Suspended, Closed. Default: Active only. Empty list = every status (the roster keeps every licence ever issued, and only about… (default ['Active'])
statewide	boolean	no	Return every licence that passes the status, licence-type and state filters, with no city, ZIP or classification. Without it, a run with no city, ZIP, classification or licence…
inSouthCarolinaOnly	boolean	no	Keep only licences with a South Carolina address. Many commercial licences are held by out-of-state firms (most often North Carolina and Georgia); turn this off to include them. (default True)
maxResults	integer	no	Cap on the contractors returned PER city/ZIP + classification search, not per run. Leave empty to return every match.

Two fields trip people up. city is an exact match on the city in the licence’s address, so “Columbia” does not include West Columbia, Irmo or Lexington; list them in cities if you want the metro (those five together were 408 Building contractors). A misspelt city returns one free row saying so, and Discovery Mode (listOptionsOnly) lists all 424 cities and 152 classifications on the roster. The other is statuses. It defaults to Active, because the roster keeps every licence LLR ever issued: 45,025 in all, 20,556 of them Active. Clear the list to get every status: Columbia BD goes from 228 to 497.

A working input:

{
  "city": "Columbia",
  "classification": "BD",
  "maxResults": 200
}

Step 3 — Run it

Press Start. Rows are pushed to the dataset as they’re found, so the run log fills in as it works.

Most of a run is downloading the snapshot. Filtering it took about a second locally for Columbia BD, which returned all 228 matches. With maxResults: 200 you get the first 200, and the log says “228 match(es); returning 200”. The default statewide export, Active licences with a South Carolina address, was 11,476 rows on the 2026-10-24 roster. If a run returns only city and classification names, nothing you entered was a search filter, and those rows are free. If the monthly snapshot cannot be loaded you get one free row with a notice, never a silent empty dataset.

Step 4 — Read the output

Each run returns a labelled table, not raw JSON:

Every row looks like this — a real row from a real run:

{
  "business_name": "RUMSEY CONSTRUCTION & RENOVATION LLC — DBA: RUMSEY CONSTRUCTION & RESTORATION",
  "phone": "(803) 764-0222",
  "address": "2630 SHOP RD",
  "city": "COLUMBIA",
  "address_state": "SC",
  "zip_code": "29209-4600",
  "license_number": "100101",
  "license_type": "GENERAL CONTRACTOR",
  "status": "ACTIVE",
  "classifications": [
    "Building-BD5"
  ],
  "issue_date": "09/15/1999",
  "expiration_date": "10/31/2028",
  "officers": [
    {
      "role": "President / Owner",
      "name": "BRENDON RUMSEY"
    },
    {
      "role": "Vice President",
      "name": "TONY RUMSEY"
    }
  ],
  "qualifiers": [
    "RUMSEY TONY (CQG)"
  ],
  "qualified_by": "Financial Statement",
  "source_url": "https://verify.llronline.com/LicLookup/Contractors/Contractor.aspx?div=69"
}

Field	Example value	Meaning
business_name	RUMSEY CONSTRUCTION & RENOVATION LLC — DBA: RUMSEY CONSTRUCTION & RESTORATION	Licensed business name, with any DBA after it
phone	(803) 764-0222	Phone number on the licence’s LLR detail page
address	2630 SHOP RD	Street address on file with LLR
city	COLUMBIA	City of that address
address_state	SC	State of that address (SC unless you turn off ‘South Carolina addresses only’)
zip_code	29209-4600	ZIP or ZIP+4
license_number	100101	SC LLR licence number
license_type	GENERAL CONTRACTOR	General Contractor, Mechanical Contractor, or a Construction Manager type

phone is why most people come, and it is filled on 99.1% of Active South Carolina licences (226 of the 228 Columbia BD rows). There is no email column, because LLR publishes none. Phone formats are as LLR shows them, so you will see both “(803) 764-0222” and “843-856-4477”. The digit after a classification code is its licence-limit group, so “Building-BD5” and “Building-BD2” are different sizes of firm. One firm can hold two licences: a General Contractor licence and a General Construction Manager licence have different numbers and come back as two rows. That is why Columbia BD is 228 rows but 172 distinct business names. officers lists the people on file, and on 151 of those 228 rows one of them is the President / Owner.

Step 5 — Export it

Open the Dataset tab and export to CSV, JSON, or Excel — or pull the same rows from the API, which is what you want if this is going to run on a schedule.

What it costs

$0.002 per contractor returned, plus Apify’s own platform usage. Columbia BD is 228 rows, so $0.456. The five-city Columbia metro on BD is 408 rows, $0.816. The default statewide export was 11,476 rows on the 2026-10-24 roster, about $22.95. Discovery lists, unknown-city notices and the unavailable notice are free, and a contractor found by two of your searches is charged once.

Where the data comes from

This reads SC LLR. The target is ASP.NET WebForms (__VIEWSTATE / __EVENTVALIDATION), swept once a month into a statewide snapshot; runs filter the snapshot and never touch the portal. Twice a day our checks run this actor against the latest snapshot and fail if Columbia BD stops returning 50 rows with addresses and phones — what “verified” means.

LLR’s lookup has no export and no bulk file. Every search needs a solved reCAPTCHA, the result list stops at name, city and status, and a search’s detail links expire about two minutes after it runs. Reading all 45,025 licences with their detail pages took our sweep about three hours. The run log states the date of the sweep, so you always know how old the data is. Residential builders are licensed by a separate LLR board and are not in this roster.

See it used

Columbia, SC Building Contractor List with Phone Numbers runs the Columbia BD search for a supplier building a call list, 228 rows for $0.456.

For the same commercial-contractor list with phone in Alabama, use Alabama Commercial Contractor Directory & Leads (LBGC).