Find Arkansas Contractors by Name

Say you are assembling a bid list for a distribution-centre fit-out outside Little Rock. You have forty company names — some off a trade-association roster, some off a Google search, some scrawled on a card at a jobsite — and not a single licence number. Before any of them gets an invitation you need to know which are actually licensed in Arkansas, what type of licence they hold, and whether it outlives the schedule. Forty names, no numbers, one afternoon.

The manual way, and what it costs

The board’s contractor search is public and free: type a name, submit, read the results table. It works. If you are checking three companies, just use it — nothing here beats a free form for three lookups.

Forty is a different shape of problem, and not only because it is forty. The results are an HTML table with no export, so each name costs a search, a squint and a copy-paste. The host is old and slow — the state box serves plain HTTP and refuses HTTPS altogether — so each round trip takes noticeably longer than a modern site. And a broad word like “CONSTRUCTION” matches thousands of licensees, which the page will render and which you will not read.

The faster way

Arkansas Contractor License Lookup & Verify (ACLB) does the same search once and hands back every row at once.

{
  "query": "CONSTRUCTION",
  "maxResults": 50
}

The query is matched as a substring against the board’s business/DBA-name index, so CONSTRUCTION returns every licensee carrying that word — which is what you want when you are building a list from a keyword rather than checking one company. maxResults: 50 is the guardrail: a broad word on this registry matches far more than fifty, and the cap is what stops a run from returning (and charging for) a list nobody reads. When you’re verifying rather than prospecting, narrow to the distinctive part of the name — BELL CONSTRUCTION, not CONSTRUCTION. An all-digits query is treated as a licence-number lookup instead, and rows are deduped by licence number either way.

What comes back

{
  "state": "AR",
  "license_number": "0014780227",
  "business_name": "BELL CONSTRUCTION CO., INC.",
  "license_type": "Commercial",
  "status": "Yes",
  "expiration_date": "02/28/2027",
  "city": "NORTH LITTLE ROCK",
  "county": "Pulaski",
  "address": "PO BOX 9041",
  "zip_code": "72119",
  "phone": "501-375-3325",
  "matched_by": "business_name",
  "source_url": "http://aclb2.arkansas.gov/clbsearch.php"
}

Field	Example value	Meaning
state	AR	Always ‘AR’ for this actor
license_number	0014780227	ACLB license/registration number
business_name	BELL CONSTRUCTION CO., INC.	Licensed business or DBA name
license_type	Commercial	ACLB license type (e.g. Commercial, Residential)
status	Yes	Validity flag (e.g. Yes, No, Expired, Inactive, Extended)
expiration_date	02/28/2027	License expiration date

For a bid list, license_type is the first filter that matters: a Residential licence is not a qualification for a distribution centre, and that is the distinction keyword lists usually get wrong. status and expiration_date are read together — see the caveat below on what status actually is. county is the field that turns a list into a routing decision, because a Pulaski County licensee is a different logistics story from one four hours away.

What you’d do with it

Export the run to CSV, filter to license_type = Commercial with a valid, unexpired licence, and that is your invitation list — with the phone number already attached, so it drops into a mail merge or a CRM import without a second pass. Keep license_number as the join key: it is what you re-verify against before award, when the names stop mattering.

Worth knowing

status is a validity flag, not a rich status. The board’s column is labelled “Valid”, so the value is Yes or No, with occasional variants like Expired, Inactive or Extended. It is not a status vocabulary, and a Yes on its own is not a full standing check — read it next to expiration_date, and confirm with the board when the answer carries contractual weight.

ACLB-licensed contractors only. Arkansas requires this licence for projects of $50,000 or more, so smaller residential work may simply not be in the registry at all.

Bond, insurance and issue date are not published by ACLB. Those fields exist in the output for consistency with the rest of the suite and come back null here. Absence is not a finding.

The source is HTTP-only and slow. The state’s server refuses HTTPS, so the fetch is plain HTTP, and a large run takes longer than you’d expect from a modern API. That’s the registry, not the actor.

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Run it yourself: How to run Arkansas Contractor License Lookup & Verify (ACLB) walks the whole thing step by step.

Running the same keyword sweep one state over, Find South Carolina Contractors by Name covers the SC LLR registry the same way. If you’d rather start from a whole roster than from a keyword, Louisiana Contractor License Lookup pulls 50,000+ licences as bulk data.