Catch a lapsed subcontractor licence before the claim does

Everybody verifies licences at onboarding. Almost nobody verifies them again.

That gap is where the loss lives. A subcontractor’s licence expires in March; you find out in September, when the carrier denies a claim on a job they worked in June, or when an inspector walks a site and pulls the permit. By then the exposure is already priced in — the work is done, the invoice is paid, and the question is who eats it.

The reason nobody re-checks is not that people are lazy. It is that re-checking is genuinely tedious: eight state portals with eight different search forms, one name at a time, and a results page you have to read carefully because “Null and Void” and “Expired” and “Inactive” mean different things. For a roster of a hundred subs that is an afternoon. Doing it monthly is a part-time job nobody has budget for.

What a weekly run actually surfaces

Point Contractor License Expiration Monitor at your roster once and put it on a weekly schedule. Here is a real run against a 93-contractor book across all eight covered states, on 2026-08-06:

Result	Count	What it means for you
current	59	Verified fine this week. Nothing to do.
expired	26	Licence lapsed. Some are years stale.
status_change	5	The board marked it revoked, suspended or null-and-void.
expiring	3	Lapses inside your warning window — chase the renewal now.

Thirty-four rows that needed a human, out of ninety-three, found in four minutes for $1.40. The status_change rows are the ones that matter most and are hardest to catch by eye: a licence can be voided by the board while its expiry date still sits comfortably in the future, so an expiry-only check would have called all five of those fine.

The three answers that are not “unlicensed”

Compliance data is dangerous in a specific way: the cost of a false positive is not symmetrical with the cost of a false negative. Telling a client “your sub is unlicensed” when they are not is a different category of mistake from missing a lapse, and this monitor is built around that asymmetry.

not_found is not unlicensed. It means the registry returned no match for what you searched — a typo, a DBA that differs from the licensed entity, a licence held under the parent company. It is a prompt to look, never a finding.

unverifiable_state_not_covered is not unlicensed either. Eight states are covered; a contractor in the other 42 comes back explicitly labelled as unchecked rather than being dropped from the table. A dropped row reads as a clean bill of health, which is exactly the failure this avoids.

check_failed is never a pass. A board that was down, a name that matched two licences, a record missing a field that board normally publishes — all of it fails closed and asks for a human. A name that resolves ambiguously is reported as ambiguous rather than resolved to the closest guess, because billing you for a confident verdict about the wrong company is worse than returning nothing.

Why “no alerts” is the result you are paying for

Most weeks the honest answer is that everything is fine, and a monitor that says nothing when everything is fine is indistinguishable from a monitor that has silently broken. So a zero-alert run still writes a line to your Notion page:

No alerts. Checked 93 licence(s), all current — 2026-08-06 17:11 UTC.

That timestamp is the product. It is the difference between “we checked and it’s fine” and “nothing has appeared in this channel for six weeks and nobody noticed the integration died.”

Where it lands

Results go into your own Notion workspace over an Apify MCP connector — one page, upserted in place by title, so a weekly schedule leaves you with a single living compliance record rather than 52 copies of the same table. The alert digest sits at the top, worst tier first; the full roster sits underneath.

The credential handling is worth a sentence because it is unusual: the actor never holds your Notion token. Apify’s proxy injects your credentials server-side and permits only the page search, create and update tools the actor declared in its schema. If you are the person who has to sign off on giving a third-party tool access to an internal system, that distinction is the whole conversation.

What it costs to run

Measured, not estimated. A 100-contractor book checked weekly is 433 checks a month:

• A book with no New Mexico or South Carolina contractors: about $3.46/month.
• At the 27% NM/SC mix of the run above: about $6.51/month.

The spread is because New Mexico and South Carolina put a CAPTCHA on the search itself, so each licence there costs a solve — in that run they were 27% of the book and 73% of the lookup cost. The full breakdown is in the how-to guide.

Either number is less than the hourly rate of the person who would otherwise not be doing this.

Two honest limits

Texas publishes no licence status — expiry monitoring works there, a revocation would not be seen. South Carolina publishes no expiration date, even on an exact license-number lookup — so status monitoring works there and expiry does not. Both are properties of the state boards, not of the actor, and both are labelled in the output rather than smoothed over. The other six states support the full set of alerts.

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Start with the how-to guide for the exact input format, or run Contractor License Expiration Monitor on the Apify Store. If you only need to verify one contractor right now rather than watch a roster, the single-state lookups — like California Contractor License Lookup — answer on demand.