Build a Birmingham-Area Building Contractor Call List

Say you run a commercial drywall and framing subcontractor out of Birmingham, and this quarter you want onto more general contractors’ bid lists. That means phoning every licensed commercial building contractor in Jefferson and Shelby counties, asking who handles their bid invitations, and getting your company on the list. In Alabama that set of firms is defined by one licence: Building Construction (BC) from the Alabama Licensing Board for General Contractors (LBGC). You need their names and phone numbers before Monday, and you would rather not spend Friday afternoon in a spreadsheet.

The manual way, and what it costs

LBGC is unusually generous here, so take the free route seriously. The page above links the entire roster as a CSV, 8,917 licensees when we pulled it on 2026-10-06, and the search box filters on city, state and specialty. If your territory is “anyone whose mailing city says BIRMINGHAM”, filter the CSV on that column and you are done for nothing.

It gets slower once the territory is two counties. The file has no county column, so Hoover, Vestavia Hills, Pelham, Alabaster and every other suburb has to be added by hand, and a city like Hoover sits in both counties. More than half the rows, 4,729, are firms mailing from outside Alabama. The Specialty cell holds every classification a firm has, comma-joined, and because the descriptions contain commas themselves, splitting it out breaks 1,890 rows. None of that is hard. It is an afternoon, and it is the same afternoon again next quarter.

The faster way

Alabama Commercial Contractor Directory & Leads (LBGC) does the same search once and hands back every row at once.

{
  "counties": ["Jefferson", "Shelby"],
  "trade": "BC"
}

counties covers Birmingham proper and the Shelby County suburbs to the south in one run, and the actor assigns each licensee a county from its mailing ZIP or city. trade: "BC" is an exact code match, so you get Building Construction licence holders and not the firms holding only a BC-S subclassification. Out-of-state firms are left out because a county is set. On 2026-10-06 this returned 164 contractors: 123 in Jefferson and 41 in Shelby.

What comes back

{
  "business_name": "A G GASTON CONSTRUCTION CO INC",
  "phone": "(205) 328-0376",
  "fax": "(205) 876-1138",
  "address": "1820 3RD AVE N SUITE 400",
  "is_po_box": false,
  "city": "BIRMINGHAM",
  "zip_code": "35203",
  "county": "Jefferson",
  "county_method": "zip",
  "address_state": "AL",
  "state": "AL",
  "license_number": "14788",
  "status": "Active",
  "expiration_date": "8/31/2027",
  "extension_date": null,
  "classifications": "BC: BUILDING CONSTRUCTION, HS: HIGHWAYS AND STREETS, MU: MUNICIPAL AND UTILITY",
  "classification_codes": [
    "BC",
    "HS",
    "MU"
  ],
  "bid_limit": "Unlimited",
  "requested_county": "Jefferson",
  "requested_trade": "BC",
  "source_url": "https://licensesearch.alabama.gov/genconbd"
}

Field	Example value	Meaning
business_name	A G GASTON CONSTRUCTION CO INC	Licensee name as LBGC lists it
phone	(205) 328-0376	Phone number on file with LBGC
fax	(205) 876-1138	Fax number, when listed
address	1820 3RD AVE N SUITE 400	Mailing street address as filed (may be a PO box)
is_po_box	False	True when the mailing address is a PO box or drawer
city	BIRMINGHAM	Mailing city

For a calling campaign, phone closes the loop, and all 164 rows had one. bid_limit is the column that sorts the list: 141 of the 164 are “Unlimited”, the GCs who can carry a large commercial job, and the other 23 are capped between $100,000 and $3,000,000. If your sweet spot is smaller tenant-improvement work, those 23 may be the better first calls.

What you’d do with it

Export the dataset to CSV, sort by bid_limit and then city, and load it into whatever you dial from. Add two columns of your own for “estimator name” and “on bid list (Y/N)”. The run cost $0.328 (164 rows at $0.002), so re-running it next quarter and diffing license_number against your sheet is the cheap way to spot new BC licensees in the two counties.

Worth knowing

There is no email on any row; LBGC’s roster carries none, so this is a phone and fax list. LBGC licenses commercial work only, so residential home builders are not here: they sit with the Alabama Home Builders Licensure Board. The county comes from the mailing address, so a Birmingham GC with a Huntsville office appears only under its mailing county, and 16 of the 164 rows list a PO box. On 28 of the 164 the ZIP straddles a county line and the actor took the larger side, which county_method: "zip_majority" tells you. Across all of Alabama, 4% of licensees get no county at all.

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Run it yourself: How to run Alabama Commercial Contractor Directory & Leads (LBGC) walks the whole thing step by step.

Before you sign a subcontract, Alabama Contractor License Lookup & Verify checks one GC’s LBGC licence by name or number. Working across the state line as well, Arkansas Contractor Directory & Leads Scraper builds the same county list for Arkansas, with email.