Verify West Virginia Contractor Licenses

Say you manage vendors for a property management company with buildings in Morgantown and Charleston, and before the next round of work orders you have to confirm that every contractor on the approved list still holds a West Virginia Contractor Licensing Board (WVCLB) licence. The list is a spreadsheet: a WV licence number for most vendors, copied off a bid or an invoice, and only a company or trade name for the rest. On 2026-10-12 the board listed 17,495 current licences, and every number starts with WV.

The manual way, and what it costs

The board’s search at wvclboard.wv.gov/verify/ is free and is the official answer. Type the number, for example WV038157, and the result shows the company, phone, classifications and expiry date. For a list of 15 vendors that is a quarter of an hour, and it is the right way to do it.

It stops being reasonable when the list is long or half of it has no number. A name search matches anywhere in the company name and, separately, in the DBA field, so you have to run each name twice and then work out which of the hits is your vendor: on 2026-10-12, “Almost Heaven” was in 4 company names and 6 DBAs. And the board lists current licences only, with no status column, so a lapsed licence does not show as “expired”: it simply is not there, which looks the same as a typo.

The faster way

West Virginia Contractor License Lookup & Leads Scraper (WVCLB) runs every line of your list against the same search in one run.

{
  "queries": [
    "WV038157",
    "Almost Heaven"
  ],
  "maxResults": 50
}

queries takes one licence number or name per line, as many as you have. A full WV number returns that licence; a name is searched in both the company and the DBA field, and the two result sets are merged. maxResults caps each line at 50 licences, so a one-word name cannot run away with the bill. On Apify on 2026-10-12 this two-line input took 6 seconds and returned 11 licences.

What comes back

The number returned the one licence it names. The name returned 10, from two different fields:

matched_by	Rows	Example
license_number	1	WV038157, ACME ENTERPRISES INC, Roseville MI, expires 2027-04-27
business_name	4	WV042628, ALMOST HEAVEN CONTRACTING LLC, Morgantown
dba_name	6	WV042229, ACME VENTURES COMPANY LLC, trading as ALMOST HEAVEN CUSTOM BUILDERS

Those 10 name matches are 10 different firms spread across seven counties, from Monongalia to Raleigh, which is the reason to verify by number wherever you have one. Every row carries expiration_date, phone, the mailing address and the full class list, and matched_by tells you at a glance which lines of a 200-line batch were exact and which were name matches to read by hand. Notice the first row too: a West Virginia licence held by a firm with a Michigan mailing address, which the board files under OUT OF STATE.

What you’d do with it

Export to CSV and join it back to your vendor sheet on license_number. A vendor number that comes back with no row is not current with the board and goes to whoever owns that vendor. Then sort on expiration_date: 2 of the 11 licences in this run expire before the end of 2026 (2026-11-20 and 2026-12-08), which is worth a reminder email before their next job. For vendors you only have a name for, read the name rows once, record the right WV number, and verify by number from then on. Re-run before each quarter; at $0.004 a licence, 200 vendors cost $0.80.

Worth knowing

The board publishes no status, so the actor cannot tell you that a licence was revoked or why; it can only tell you whether the licence is in the current list and when it expires (17,494 of the 17,495 listed on 2026-10-12 expired after that day). There is no issue date, no owner or qualifier name and no email: the board publishes none of them. A line that matches nothing adds no row and is logged, so check the run log for which lines of a batch came back empty. Insurance, bonding and complaint history are not on the search either.

---

Run it yourself: How to run West Virginia Contractor License Lookup & Leads Scraper (WVCLB) covers lookups and exports step by step.

To build a list of new contractors rather than check existing ones, Export Kanawha County, West Virginia Roofing Contractors exports every roofer the board files under Kanawha with a phone. If some of your vendors also work across the line in Virginia, Virginia Contractor License Lookup (DPOR Bulk) pulls Virginia’s DPOR licences filtered by business name; 993 WV licence holders have a Virginia mailing address.