Which states are covered?

Seventeen: AL, AR, CA, CT, FL, MA, MI, MN, NC, NM, NV, OR, SC, TN, TX, VA and WA. Any other state returns verdict 'unverifiable_state_not_covered', which means no check was performed - it is not a finding about the contractor.

Does 'not_found' mean the contractor is unlicensed?

No, and this is the most important line in the whole listing. It means the state registry returned no match for what was searched. A typo, a DBA that differs from the licensed entity, or a licence held under a parent company all produce 'not_found'. If your agent reports that as 'unlicensed' to an end user, it has made a false and damaging claim about a real business. Treat it as 'go and check', never as a finding.

Measured on 2026-08-06: median 13.3 seconds, fastest around 10.6s (Florida, California, Washington), slowest 30.8s for South Carolina, whose board puts a reCAPTCHA on the search itself and so costs a solve per check. New Mexico is 19.6s for the same reason. Set an agent timeout above 35 seconds.

What is 'verdict_basis' for?

It tells you what the verdict is standing on, because the boards do not all publish the same fields. Alabama, Texas and Virginia publish no status field, so a verdict there rests on the expiration date alone. North Carolina and South Carolina publish no expiration date, so those rest on status alone. Everywhere else you get both.

Can I check several contractors at once?

Yes - use 'companies' or 'licenseNumbers' with a list, all in the same state. Billing is per verdict returned, so a batch costs the same as separate runs and is much faster. The single-value fields exist for the agent case, where one question is the whole point.

Can I search Virginia by license number?

No. Virginia's DPOR data is a name-filtered roster with no license-number search axis, so a number-only request there returns 'check_failed' telling you to supply the company name. Reporting 'not_found' would imply the licence does not exist, which we cannot know from a search that was never possible.

Is this personal data?

It is public professional-licence data as the state boards publish it. Some boards license individuals rather than companies, so a licensed person's name can appear where the board publishes it that way. No personal or PII enrichment is added.

Use case

Give an AI agent the ability to verify a contractor licence

Q: Why is there an 'inactive' verdict as well as 'revoked'?

Because the boards publish both, and conflating them would be defamatory. 'Revoked' and 'suspended' are disciplinary actions. 'Lapsed', 'Voluntary Surrender', 'Archived' and 'Voluntary Termination' are administrative or the licensee's own choice - all real strings from real boards. Those map to 'inactive', and the reason field says so explicitly.

Wiring a 17-state licence check into an LLM tool-calling loop - and the three verdicts your prompt has to handle before you ship it.

Ask any general-purpose AI agent whether a contractor is licensed and you will get one of two bad answers: a confident hallucination, or “I can’t check that.” Neither is wrong by accident. There is no public API for US contractor licensing. Every state runs its own board, and the boards are web portals built for humans — California’s is ASP.NET WebForms, South Carolina’s puts a reCAPTCHA on the search itself, Virginia publishes a bulk roster with no search at all.

So a vendor-onboarding agent, a procurement assistant or a CRM intake flow simply cannot close that loop today. It collects the contractor’s details and then hands off to a person.

What the tool call looks like

Contractor License Verify is shaped for exactly one question. One state, one contractor, one flat object:

{ "state": "CA", "licenseNumber": "22726" }

{
  "verdict": "active",
  "verdict_reason": "status 'This license is current and active.', expires 2027-10-31",
  "verdict_basis": "status+expiry_date",
  "entity_name": "RANSOME COMPANY",
  "status_raw": "This license is current and active.",
  "expiry_date": "10/31/2027",
  "source_portal": "CSLB",
  "checked_at": "2026-08-06T19:20:11+00:00"
}

Flat on purpose — an agent should never have to walk a nested object to find the answer. And every row carries source_portal and checked_at, so the agent can cite where the answer came from and when, which is the difference between a useful assistant and a confident one.

The three verdicts your prompt must handle

This is the part to get right before you ship. Five verdicts are findings about the licence: active, expired, revoked, suspended, inactive. Three are statements about the check, and an agent that treats them as findings will say something false about a real business.

not_found is not “unlicensed.” It means the registry returned no match for what was searched. A typo, a DBA that differs from the licensed entity name, a licence held under a parent company — all produce not_found. An agent that reports “this contractor is not licensed” on the back of it has published a false and damaging claim about a real company. Branch it to “I couldn’t find a matching licence — the name may differ from the registered entity. Worth checking manually.”

unverifiable_state_not_covered is not silence. Seventeen states are covered. The other thirty-three return this, explicitly, rather than nothing — because an empty response gets summarised as “no problems found.”

check_failed is never a pass. A board that is down, a name matching two licences, a record missing a field that board normally publishes. On 2026-08-06, Florida’s DBPR went into scheduled maintenance and served a normal-looking page saying so; before that was caught, it parsed to zero results and would have reported every Florida contractor as not_found. It now returns check_failed. Fail closed, always.

And one distinction the boards force

inactive exists because “Lapsed”, “Voluntary Surrender”, “Archived” and “Voluntary Termination” are all real strings from real boards, and none of them is a disciplinary action. revoked and suspended are. An agent repeats whichever word you hand it, so those are kept apart at the source rather than left to the model’s judgement. If your prompt paraphrases, make sure it does not collapse them.

What it can and cannot stand on

Boards do not publish the same fields, so verdict_basis reports what each answer rests on:

Board publishes	States	Verdict rests on
Status and expiry	AR, CA, CT, FL, MA, MI, MN, NM, NV, OR, TN, WA	`status+expiry_date`
Expiry only (no status field)	AL, TX, VA	`expiry_date` — a revocation would not be seen
Status only (no expiry date)	NC, SC	`status` — expiry cannot be checked

Virginia additionally cannot be searched by licence number at all; a number-only request there returns check_failed telling you to supply the name.

Latency, because agents time out

Measured 2026-08-06, one lookup per state: median 13.3s, fastest 10.6s, slowest 30.8s for South Carolina, whose board costs a CAPTCHA solve per check. New Mexico is 19.6s for the same reason. Set your tool timeout above 35 seconds. If you are verifying a list, use the licenseNumbers array — one run for the batch, billed identically, and far faster than a run each.

Cost

$0.004 per verdict resolved, plus the underlying state lookup — about $0.008 per check in the open-data states and $0.034 in New Mexico and South Carolina. Verdicts that describe the check rather than the contractor (not_found, unverifiable_state_not_covered, check_failed) are free.

Start with the how-to guide for the full input and output reference, or call Contractor License Verify on the Apify Store. Watching a whole roster instead of answering one question? Contractor License Expiration Monitor re-checks a watchlist on a schedule and delivers alerts to Notion.

Last updated 2026-08-06