Verify Colorado Electrical and Plumbing Contractor Licences

Say you run vendor compliance for a property manager with buildings along the Front Range, and your approved-vendor list has 40 electrical and plumbing subcontractors on it. Before a sub goes on a work order you need to know their Colorado licence is still good. Colorado’s Department of Regulatory Agencies (DORA) licenses electrical and plumbing work at state level, and a contractor licence (EC for electrical, PC for plumbing) can read Active, Expired, Revoked, Suspended or “Need Master Hire - Cannot Practice”. Only the first lets them work. Colorado has no state general-contractor licence, so for those two trades the DORA licence is the check that exists.

The manual way, and what it costs

For one sub, use DORA’s own online licence lookup in a browser. It is free, it is the official answer, and for a single check before a single job it is all you need. At 40 subs it is 40 searches, each one ending on a detail page you read and copy by hand.

The other free route is the open-data file in the screenshot. You can export it, but it mixes nurses, accountants and barbers in with the trades, and it repeats a licence once per disciplinary case: across the eight electrical and plumbing types it has 95,109 rows for 94,281 licences. You can filter that yourself in a spreadsheet; it is just a job you would redo each quarter. And DORA’s licence-detail pages answered a script with an HTTP 405 human-verification page when we measured on 2026-10-12, so you cannot automate the browser route either.

The faster way

Colorado Electrical & Plumbing License Lookup & List Scraper takes your whole list in one run.

{
  "queries": [
    "EC.0102804",
    "EC 100097",
    "4176"
  ],
  "maxResults": 50
}

queries takes one licence number or name per line. Type the number the way DORA prints it (EC.0102804), with a space (EC 100097), or as bare digits. Bare digits search all eight licence types, and that matters: 4176 is four different licences. A name works too, as LAST, FIRST or as a business name, but a common surname such as Smith matched 737 licences in the build’s own test, so use numbers wherever your paperwork has them. Lookups return every status, not just active ones. Run locally on 2026-10-12, this three-line batch took 1.9 seconds.

What comes back

The two prefixed numbers returned one licence each. The bare 4176 returned four:

license_number	license_type	status	expiration_date
EC.0102804	Electrical Contractor	Active	2029-09-30
EC.0100097	Electrical Contractor	Need Master Hire - Cannot Practice	2026-09-30
EC.0004176	Electrical Contractor	Expired	2003-02-28
JW.0004176	Journeyman Electrician	Expired	1999-02-28
ME.0004176	Master Electrician	Active	2029-09-30
PC.0004176	Plumbing Contractor	Active	2027-02-28

EC.0100097 is the row this whole exercise is for. The licence exists and has not expired or been revoked, but the firm cannot practise until it hires a master electrician. A check that only asks “is there a licence?” passes it. In Denver alone, 48 contractor licences carried that status on 2026-10-12.

The 4176 rows show why a bare number is risky: an expired electrical contractor, an expired journeyman and two active licences share the digits. Always keep the two-letter prefix.

Each row also carries business_name (or person_name on an individual licence), issue_date, last_renewed_date, the mailing city, address_state and zip_code, and public_actions, the licence’s disciplinary history as a list of case number, action and dates. None of these six rows had one; statewide, 418 of the 7,841 active contractor licences did.

What you’d do with it

Export to CSV and join it to your vendor list on license_number. Anything whose status is not Active goes to whoever owns that vendor. Anything with a non-empty public_actions goes to a second look: the action names run from “CLS Letter of Admonition” to “CLS Stipulation” and “CLS Revocation”, and a 2018 admonition is a different conversation from a 2025 stipulation with no completion date. Re-run the batch before each quarter’s work orders. At $0.004 a licence, 40 subs cost $0.16.

Worth knowing

This reads DORA’s open-data copy on data.colorado.gov, refreshed every day after midnight (last on 2026-10-12), not DORA’s live lookup, so a status that changed this morning may not be here until tomorrow. verify_url links each licence to DORA’s own detail page, but that page asks a browser to pass a human-verification check first, and the actor never fetches it. There is no street address, phone or email on any row: DORA publishes mailing city, state and ZIP only. And it covers only the licences the State of Colorado issues for electrical and plumbing work. A general contractor or roofer is licensed by the city or county, not by DORA.

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Run it yourself: How to run Colorado Electrical & Plumbing License Lookup & List Scraper covers lookups and exports step by step.

To screen a whole city’s contractors for disciplinary history instead of checking a list you already have, Screen Denver’s Electrical and Plumbing Contractors for Disciplinary Actions exports all 593 of them. If some of your subs also work in Arizona, Arizona Contractor License Lookup & Leads Scraper (ROC) checks their ROC licences the same way.