Find Every New Mexico Contractor License by Name

Say you run compliance for a construction marketplace, and a contractor has applied to join under the name “Smith”. That’s all you have — a name typed into a signup form, no license number, and a support ticket asking why they haven’t been approved yet.

A name is a slippery thing to verify. It might be filed with the state as SMITH & SONS, or SMITH BROTHERS CONSTRUCTION, or it might turn up inside a longer name you’d never have guessed at. The applicant might hold several licenses, or one that lapsed last year and a live one filed under a slightly different entity. You cannot approve them until you know which licenses actually exist under that name and which of them are current — and you can’t get there by asking the applicant, because the whole point is to check what they told you.

The manual way, and what it costs

Here’s the free option, in full. New Mexico’s contractor registry is hosted by PSI rather than the state itself. You select Search Company, choose Contractor as the company type, type Smith into Business Name — and then, before it will show you a single result, you read the distorted word in the image at the bottom of the form and type it into the Enter Captcha box. The form is picky, too: it wants at least three characters, and at least the first word of the business name including any punctuation, so an entity filed as 3J'S needs the apostrophe or the search goes nowhere.

One name, once? Do it by hand. It’s free and it’s the same data. There is no version of this where paying for one lookup makes sense.

The costs show up when the job repeats. The results page has no export, so every approval decision ends in copy-paste. Every search is a fresh CAPTCHA — including the searches that come back empty, which in name-matching is most of them, because you’re guessing at spellings. And if your marketplace onboards contractors continuously, “check the state registry” is a task a person does over and over, by reading pictures of words. Twenty applicants a week is twenty CAPTCHAs a week that produce a spreadsheet nobody trusts, because it was typed by hand.

The faster way

New Mexico Contractor License Lookup & Verify (NM CID) does the same search once and hands back every row at once.

{
  "businessName": "Smith",
  "maxResults": 20
}

businessName is a partial match, so Smith is deliberately loose — it pulls back every contractor whose filed name contains it, including ADAMS & SMITH, INC., which nobody would have thought to search for. That’s the behaviour you want when you’re checking an applicant’s claim rather than confirming a known company: cast wide, then read the list. maxResults: 20 isn’t a budget choice, it’s the ceiling — the portal serves 20 records per page and this actor reads the first page.

The CAPTCHA is solved inside the run. You don’t see it, and you don’t hold an account with a solving service; it’s covered by the actor’s per-search fee, which is charged once whether the name returns twenty licenses or none.

What comes back

{
  "state": "NM",
  "license_number": "396966",
  "business_name": "ADAMS & SMITH, INC.",
  "person_name": null,
  "license_type": "Contractor",
  "status": "Active",
  "issue_date": null,
  "expiration_date": "12/31/2027",
  "city": "LINDON",
  "county": null,
  "address": "1380 W CENTER ST",
  "zip_code": "84042",
  "phone": null,
  "bond_amount": null,
  "bond_company": null,
  "insurance_company": null,
  "matched_by": "business_name",
  "source_url": "https://public.psiexams.com/search.jsp"
}

Field	Example value	Meaning
state	NM	Always ‘NM’ for this actor
license_number	396966	NM CID contractor license number
status	Active	License status (e.g. Active, Cancelled)
license_type	Contractor	Always ‘Contractor’ (NM CID’s contractor company category)
business_name	ADAMS & SMITH, INC.	Licensed business/company name
address	1380 W CENTER ST	Principal place of business street address

business_name is what resolves the ambiguity you started with — it’s the state’s own spelling, so you can finally see whether your applicant is SMITH BROTHERS or the SMITH buried inside ADAMS & SMITH, INC., and whether they hold one license or several. license_number is what you store afterwards, because it’s the identifier that survives a rebrand. status and expiration_date are what turn a match into an approval: a name that exists in the registry but whose license expired in 2023 is a rejection, not a match. Rows are deduplicated by license number, so a contractor holding one license appears once.

What you’d do with it

Wire it into the signup flow. The name from the application goes in, the matching licenses come back as rows, and a human sees a short list with statuses and expiry dates attached instead of a portal tab and a CAPTCHA. Where there is exactly one active match, the approval is mechanical. Where there are three, or zero, or one that expired, you have a specific question to put to the applicant — and you have the license_number to key their record on from then on, so the next check is an exact-match lookup rather than another guess at a spelling.

Worth knowing

A name search only reads the first page: 20 records, maximum. That is the portal’s page size, not a limit we chose, and it means a common word like Smith may well have more matches behind it that you never see. This is a lookup and verification tool, not a way to harvest the New Mexico roster — if a search feels truncated, narrow it with a city, a ZIP, or a longer piece of the name rather than expecting a bigger page.

Coverage stops at the Contractor company-license category on public.psiexams.com. RLD’s separate Boards and Commissions Division search isn’t included, and neither are individual or personal licenses — so an applicant licensed as a person rather than a company won’t appear here at all, and a 0 results run is not proof they’re unlicensed.

The rows are also thinner than the portal’s detail view. County, phone, bond, and insurance come back null because they’re not on the results page — they sit behind a JavaScript-triggered detail view with no URL, which is also why source_url points at the search portal rather than the individual record.

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Run it yourself: How to run New Mexico Contractor License Lookup & Verify (NM CID) walks the whole thing step by step.

Once the applicant hands over an actual number, Verify a New Mexico Contractor by License Number is the exact-match version of this check. If you onboard contractors in more than one state, South Carolina Contractor License Lookup & Verify (SC LLR) does the same job against South Carolina’s registry — the other CAPTCHA-walled portal in the suite, and priced the same way for the same reason.