Verify New Jersey Contractor Licenses (DCA)

Say you manage maintenance vendors for a portfolio of rental buildings in New Jersey, and your insurer wants proof, once a year, that every contractor on the approved list holds a current licence from the Division of Consumer Affairs (DCA). The list has 60 vendors. Most are home improvement contractors with a 13VH registration number on file, a few are master plumbers with a 36BI licence, and some older entries carry only a name.

The manual way, and what it costs

DCA’s verification site is free and it is the official answer. Pick the profession, type the licence number, press Search, then click into the licence to read its expiry date. For one contractor that takes a minute, and if you check a vendor or two a month, keep doing exactly that.

At 60 vendors it is two searches and a click each, and it splits across two forms: home improvement and electrical businesses are on the Business Search, while master plumbers and HVACR contractors are licensed as people and live on the Person Search. A name search returns every licence ever issued under that name, not just the current one. “John Smith” returns 5 licences, 2 of them Expired and 1 Retired, so a hurried reader can easily confirm the wrong one.

The faster way

New Jersey Contractor License Lookup & List Scraper (DCA) takes the whole vendor list in one run and searches the right form for each line.

{
  "queries": [
    "13VH13621300",
    "36BI00990600",
    "John Smith"
  ],
  "maxResults": 50
}

queries takes one licence number or name per line. A full licence number such as 13VH13621300 is matched exactly. A business name is matched anywhere in the name, and a person’s name is matched on the last name and the start of the first. maxResults caps each line at 50 licences, so a common name cannot run up the bill. On a local run on 2026-10-12 this three-line input returned 7 licences in 14.4 seconds, detail pages included.

What comes back

The home improvement number returned its one registration, with street address and owner from the detail page:

{
  "license_number": "13VH13621300",
  "business_name": "VISTA FENCING LLC",
  "dba_name": null,
  "person_name": "Olsen Tafa",
  "trade": "home_improvement",
  "profession": "Home Improvement Contractors",
  "license_type": "Home Improvement Business Contr",
  "status": "Active",
  "status_change_reason": "License Issuance",
  "address": "154 Charles St Rear",
  "city": "Garfield",
  "address_state": "NJ",
  "zip_code": "07026",
  "issue_date": "2025-04-25",
  "expiration_date": "2027-03-31",
  "matched_by": "license_number",
  "state": "NJ",
  "source_url": "https://newjersey.mylicense.com/verification/Search.aspx?facility=Y"
}

Field	Example value	Meaning
license_number	13VH13621300	DCA licence number
status	Active	Active, Expired, Closed, Suspended, Revoked…
status_change_reason	License Issuance	DCA’s reason for the latest status change
expiration_date	2027-03-31	Expiry date, from the detail page
matched_by	license_number	Whether the row came from a number or a name

status is the column your insurer cares about, and unlike some state boards DCA keeps lapsed licences on file, so a vendor whose registration ran out comes back as Expired rather than vanishing. The plumber, 36BI00990600, came back Active with an expiry of 2027-06-30, licensed since 1993, but with city and state only: DCA shows no street address for master plumbers. The “John Smith” line returned 5 licences across two trades. JOHN SMITH DRYWALL in Newton and a master plumber in Trenton are Active, while one home improvement registration in Haddon Township shows Expired on 2024-03-31 with the reason “Failure to Renew”.

What you’d do with it

Export to CSV and join it to the vendor list on license_number. Any vendor whose row is not Active goes back to the property manager before the next work order, and status_change_reason tells you whether it lapsed for failure to renew or something heavier. Every active home improvement registration we exported on 2026-10-12 expires on 2027-03-31, DCA’s common renewal date, so plan the next check for April 2027. For the vendors you only had a name for, read the name rows once, write the right licence number into your list, and verify by number from then on. At $0.004 a licence, all 60 vendors cost about $0.24.

Worth knowing

DCA publishes no phone and no email, so the output has neither. Street address, ZIP and owner exist only for home improvement registrations; electrical permits, master plumbers and HVACR contractors carry city and state only. A licence number can appear twice when DCA lists it under two statuses, such as Expired and Reinstatement Pending, so read every row for a number rather than the first one. The actor covers four licence types: home improvement, electrical business permits, master plumbers and master HVACR. A journeyman’s licence will not match. A line that matches nothing adds no row, so check the run log for which lines came back empty.

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Run it yourself: How to run New Jersey Contractor License Lookup & List Scraper (DCA) covers lookups and exports step by step.

To find new contractors rather than check the ones you have, Export Newark, New Jersey Home Improvement Contractors lists every active registration in one city. If some of your vendors are based across the Delaware River, Delaware Contractor License Lookup & List Scraper (DOR + DPR) checks their Delaware licences.