Find Texas Electricians by Company Name

Say you are pulling together a bid list for an electrical retrofit across a handful of Gregg County sites, and the incumbent’s price has stopped being competitive. You need a shortlist of licensed electrical shops to invite — not “electricians in Longview” off a maps scrape, where half the results are handymen and one is a lighting showroom, but businesses that hold a current TDLR licence for the trade.

That is a different question from the one people usually ask a licence register. You are not verifying a name you already have, you are trying to find the names. TDLR’s name index takes a fragment — everything with ELECTRIC in the business name — and hands back the licence type alongside it, which is how you tell an electrical contractor from an A/C tech trading under a similar name.

The manual way, and what it costs

TDLR’s licence search is free, official, and will happily take a name fragment. If you are checking one shop, use it — you get the authoritative answer in a minute and there is nothing to pay for.

Where it stops being reasonable is the shortlist. A fragment search returns a paged screen you read and copy, there is no export, and the result set for a word like ELECTRIC in a state this size is long. You end up transcribing licence numbers, types and counties by hand — fine once, and quietly abandoned by the third time.

Worth saying plainly: TDLR publishes this as an official Socrata open-data API — public, documented, free. Write the SoQL yourself and you pay nobody. This actor is not access to Texas’s data; it is the query written for you, deduped into the same row shape the other state actors here return.

The faster way

Texas Contractor & Trade License Lookup (TDLR) does the same search once and hands back every row at once.

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

query: "ELECTRIC" is a substring match against TDLR’s business-name index, which is exactly what you want when you are building a list rather than confirming one: it pulls every licensee whose registered name contains those letters. Case does not matter. The same field is also matched exactly against the licence number, so once you have picked three shops off the shortlist you can re-run with a number and get the single row back. maxResults: 50 is the spend cap — a fragment this common matches a lot of Texas businesses and you pay per row returned, so start narrow (LONGVIEW ELECTRIC before ELECTRIC) and widen only if the list comes back too short.

What comes back

{
  "state": "TX",
  "license_number": "11484",
  "business_name": "SEAY, DANIEL",
  "person_name": "SEAY, DANIEL",
  "license_type": "A/C Technician",
  "expiration_date": "09/02/2026",
  "county": "GREGG",
  "matched_by": "business_name",
  "source_url": "https://www.tdlr.texas.gov/LicenseSearch/"
}

Field	Example value	Meaning
state	TX	Always ‘TX’ for this actor
license_number	11484	TDLR license number
business_name	SEAY, DANIEL	Licensed business or licensee name
person_name	SEAY, DANIEL	Owner name
license_type	A/C Technician	TDLR license type (e.g. A/C Technician, Master Electrician)
expiration_date	09/02/2026	License expiration date

license_type is the column that turns a name list into a bid list. The sample row above makes the point: the name search matched, but the licence is A/C Technician — a real TDLR licence, for the wrong trade. Filter on the type before anyone gets an invitation. county is the only location Texas publishes here, and it is enough to cut a statewide fragment search down to the shops actually near your sites. expiration_date tells you whether the licence survives the project window, person_name is TDLR’s owner name — how you separate two similarly named outfits — and matched_by says whether a row landed on an exact licence-number hit or merely because the name contained your string.

What you’d do with it

Export to CSV, filter to the licence types you actually want and the counties you actually work in, and what is left is your invite list — with the licence number already recorded against each name, so the compliance box is ticked before the bid arrives rather than after. The rows carry no phone number (see below), so the next step is usually one enrichment pass to attach contact details, then the shortlist goes out. Keep the export: at the next retrofit you re-run the same query and diff it, and new licensees in your counties are new shops to invite.

Worth knowing

There is no status column, and no address or phone. TDLR’s dataset does not publish them, so those fields come back null and the actor does not invent them. You cannot read “suspended” off a Texas row. What you can read is that the licence exists, its type, and whether it is in date. And because there is no address or phone, this is a shortlist, not a call sheet — you will need a separate enrichment step to contact anyone on it.

Only the business name is searchable. The owner name is returned on the row, but it is not an index you can query. A shop trading under a DBA that differs from the licensed name will not turn up on a name fragment, so a missing match is not evidence of an unlicensed business.

maxResults now bounds the run honestly — it used to cap at 50 whatever you set. A short fragment like ELECTRIC matches a great many Texas licences, so set the cap deliberately: it is the number of rows you will be charged for.

Texas licenses trades, not general contractors. There is no statewide GC licence to look up here, and plumbers sit with a different board (TSBPE) this actor does not cover — so a builder with no TDLR record may simply not need one. What you are reading is the published open-data snapshot rather than TDLR’s live screen, so it can lag; for a formal decision, confirm against the board.

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Run it yourself: How to run Texas Contractor & Trade License Lookup (TDLR) walks the whole thing step by step.

• Texas Contractor Directory & Leads Scraper (TDLR) — the better tool when you want a lead list with contact details rather than a licence shortlist.
• Multi-State Contractor & Trade License Lookup — same TDLR rows, worth it when the shortlist crosses into Washington, Oregon or Connecticut too; its Verify a Texas Trade License walkthrough covers the single-vendor verification job instead of list-building.