How Many Licensed Contractors Are There? State-by-State 2026 Data
Data as of August 5, 2026 | Source: Echelon Reports Database, 2,161,547 trade license records across 18 states, re-counted weekly from state licensing board files. This page is updated each Monday.
There are 1,190,134 active contractor licenses across the 18 states currently tracked in the Echelon Reports Database, based on official state licensing board records as of August 5, 2026. That figure counts live credentials in active status, drawn from a total archive of 2,161,547 license records including expired, revoked, suspended, and historical licenses.
Most published contractor counts are estimates built from federal occupational survey data or industry reports that model the market from the top down. The numbers on this page are counted from the bottom up, license by license, directly from the government records each state maintains. They are re-counted every week when the Echelon diff pipeline processes the latest state files. If a license went inactive last Tuesday, it is out of this count by Monday morning.
The weekly re-count is also what separates this from a directory. Because every pull is retained and compared against the one before it, the database records not just who holds a license today but what changed: licenses issued, licenses gone inactive, status changes, and qualifier movements, week over week. A current roster can be scraped. A history of changes has to be accumulated, one week at a time.
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Active Contractor Licenses by State
What Changed in the Last 30 Days
Contractors Versus Licensed Tradesmen
Counts by Trade: General, Electrical, Plumbing, HVAC, Roofing
The Headline Numbers
As of August 5, 2026, the Echelon Reports Database shows 1,190,134 active contractor licenses across 18 states: Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Idaho, Kentucky, Louisiana, Minnesota, Mississippi, Nevada, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, Washington, and Wisconsin. Coverage expands as new state boards are brought into the pipeline.
A note on what one license means here, because definitions are where every published count goes wrong. A license in this count is one active credential in a state’s official records. Some states license only businesses. Others, including Colorado, Idaho, Kentucky, Minnesota, Oklahoma, Texas, and Wisconsin, also license individual tradespeople such as master electricians and journeyman plumbers, and those individual credentials are counted where the state issues them. What is never counted: expired, suspended, or revoked licenses, unlicensed operators, building inspectors and inspection agencies, continuing education courses and providers, or estimates of any kind. The full detail is in the methodology section.
Active Contractor Licenses by State
| State | Active Licenses | Licensing Authority |
|---|---|---|
| Arizona | 58,419 | AZ Registrar of Contractors |
| California | 232,894 | Contractors State License Board (CSLB) |
| Colorado | 63,170 | DORA State Electrical and Plumbing Boards * |
| Florida | 132,055 | DBPR Construction and Electrical Licensing Boards |
| Idaho | 42,427 | ID Division of Occupational and Professional Licenses (DOPL) * |
| Kentucky | 36,414 | KY Dept. of Housing, Buildings and Construction * |
| Louisiana | 28,084 | LA State Licensing Board for Contractors |
| Minnesota | 135,898 | MN Dept. of Labor and Industry * |
| Mississippi | 13,581 | MS State Board of Contractors |
| Nevada | 18,930 | NV State Contractors Board |
| Ohio | 10,596 | OH Construction Industry Licensing Board (OCILB) |
| Oklahoma | 41,715 | OK Construction Industries Board (CIB) * |
| Oregon | 45,223 | OR Construction Contractors Board (CCB) |
| Tennessee | 34,087 | TN Board for Licensing Contractors |
| Texas | 54,216 | TDLR (state-licensed trades; no statewide GC license) * |
| Virginia | 90,100 | VA Board for Contractors (DPOR) |
| Washington | 75,497 | WA Dept. of Labor and Industries (L&I) |
| Wisconsin | 76,828 | WI Dept. of Safety and Professional Services * |
| TOTAL (18 states) | 1,190,134 |
* These states license individual tradespeople (journeymen, masters, apprentices) in addition to or instead of contracting businesses, so their totals are not directly comparable to business-only states. See the next section for the contractor-only figures where they are separable.
State-to-state comparisons deserve caution beyond that footnote. States license differently. California licenses nearly every trade at the state level through one board. Texas has no statewide general contractor license at all, so its count reflects state-licensed trades such as air conditioning and electrical rather than the full contractor population. Ohio licenses only five commercial trades at the state level, which is why its count is small relative to its population. Idaho and Oklahoma license the mechanical trades but not general contracting. A smaller number does not always mean fewer contractors. Often it means the state pushes licensing down to cities and counties, where no unified record exists.
What Changed in the Last 30 Days
A license count is a photograph. The more useful question, and the one no static directory can answer, is what moved. Because every weekly pull is retained and compared against the one before it, the database records change as it happens rather than reconstructing it after the fact.
Across the nine states whose records expose change classes cleanly, the 30 days ending August 6, 2026 produced 3,050 newly issued licenses and 1,136 licenses removed from active rosters.
| State | New | Removed | Status changes | Qualifier changes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Arizona | 469 | 226 | 602 | 308 |
| Colorado | 648 | 5 | n/a | n/a |
| Idaho | 153 | 179 | 1,192 | n/a |
| Kentucky | 188 | n/a | n/a | n/a |
| Minnesota | 382 | 269 | 1,762 | n/a |
| Mississippi | 43 | n/a | n/a | n/a |
| Oklahoma | 433 | 419 | 95 | n/a |
| Tennessee | 326 | 38 | n/a | n/a |
| Wisconsin | 408 | n/a | 1,121 | n/a |
“n/a” means the state’s records do not expose that change class separately, not that the change count was zero. States differ in what their files reveal: some publish a status field that can be compared week to week, others only reveal that a record changed without saying which field moved.
The qualifier column is the one worth pausing on. A qualifying party is the licensed individual whose credential allows a company to hold its license and pull permits. Arizona is currently the only tracked state that exposes qualifier changes as a discrete, comparable field, and it recorded 308 qualifier changes in 30 days. When a long-tenured qualifier comes off a company’s license, something has happened at that company: a retirement, a departure, a sale, or a problem. It is among the earliest signals available in public records that a business is changing hands, and it appears in the licensing file well before it appears anywhere else.
Two states are deliberately excluded from the table. Virginia’s status history is currently re-stamping records in a way that makes its change counts unusable, and it is held back rather than published with a caveat. Mississippi’s expiration flag moves in both directions, pooling lapses with reinstatements, so only its newly issued licenses are shown; a pooled figure would imply distress where reinstatement may be the cause. Florida, Texas, and Ohio movement is computed from snapshot pairs rather than a change log and is not included in this table.
Contractors Versus Licensed Tradesmen
The single most common error in published contractor counts is treating a license as a company. In roughly a third of tracked states it is not. A state that licenses journeyman plumbers individually will show tens of thousands of credentials that belong to employees, not businesses.
Where a state’s records separate the two, both figures are reported here:
| State | All active licenses | Licensed contractor businesses | Individually licensed tradesmen |
|---|---|---|---|
| Idaho | 42,427 | 5,059 | 37,368 |
| Oklahoma | 41,715 | 6,005 | 35,710 |
Idaho is the clearest illustration. The state has 42,427 active trade licenses, but only 5,059 of them are held by contracting businesses. Anyone reading the raw license count as a market size overstates Idaho’s contractor population by a factor of eight. Colorado, Kentucky, Minnesota, Texas, and Wisconsin carry the same structure; separating their contractor and tradesman tiers is in progress and will appear here as each is validated.
Standing footnote: the national total counts all active licenses; per-state contractor figures exclude individually licensed tradesmen (journeymen, masters, apprentices) where a state licenses them separately. The two are different bases and should not be added together.
Counts by Trade: General, Electrical, Plumbing, HVAC, Roofing
Across the tracked states, active licenses map to major trades as follows. Every trade count is matched against each state’s own classification codes: CSLB class codes in California, DBPR license prefixes in Florida, OCILB trade codes in Ohio, TDLR license types in Texas, DOPL boards in Idaho, and the equivalent in each remaining state. A single license can carry multiple classifications, and states that do not license a given trade at the state level contribute zero to that trade, so trade counts do not sum to the license total.
| Trade | Active licenses | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| General and building | 334,566 | Excludes states with no statewide general license |
| Electrical | 292,755 | Heavily weighted by individual-license states |
| Plumbing | 118,806 | |
| HVAC and mechanical | 115,669 | Includes refrigeration where separately classified |
| Roofing | 21,862 | Separately licensed in 7 of 18 states only |
General and Building Contractors: 334,566
The largest trade bucket. General and building licenses concentrate in the states that run a unified statewide licensing system, led by California, Florida, and Washington. Not counted here: states with no statewide general license, which includes Texas, Ohio, Colorado, Kentucky, Idaho, and Oklahoma. In those states general contracting is licensed municipally or not at all, so the true general contractor population is materially larger than any state-level record can show.
Electrical: 292,755
Electrical is the most-licensed specific trade, and the clearest example of the individual-license effect. Colorado, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Idaho, and Oklahoma all license electricians at the individual level from apprentice through master, which is why the electrical count runs so far above the plumbing and HVAC counts despite comparable business populations. Idaho alone carries 2,475 licensed electrical contracting businesses against tens of thousands of individual electrical credentials. Inspectors and inspection agencies are excluded throughout.
Plumbing: 118,806
Plumbing follows the same individual-license pattern as electrical, with Colorado, Minnesota, Idaho, and Oklahoma contributing large journeyman and apprentice populations alongside their contracting businesses. Texas plumbing is licensed by a separate state board whose records are not yet in the tracked dataset, so Texas contributes zero to this figure and the national plumbing count is understated by a full large state.
HVAC and Mechanical: 115,669
Active HVAC, air conditioning, refrigeration, and mechanical licenses. Texas is among the largest single contributors through its licensed A/C contractor population, alongside Kentucky, Florida, and Virginia. Tennessee licenses mechanical work as a classification inside its general contractor license, so it contributes zero at this level of detail. This is the trade where private equity consolidation has been most aggressive, and where the gap between the licensed population and branded market presence is widest.
Roofing: 21,862
Roofing is separately licensed in only seven of the eighteen tracked states: Arizona, California, Florida, Nevada, Oregon, Virginia, and Washington. Florida and California carry most of the volume. Everywhere else, roofing sits inside a general or building classification and cannot be separated from it in state records. That absence is itself a finding: in eleven of eighteen states there is no way to count roofing companies from licensing data at all, which is why roofing market sizing published elsewhere is almost always modeled rather than counted.
Two exclusions worth stating plainly. Louisiana’s licenses are counted in the state total but excluded from every trade bucket, because its statewide records classify licenses as commercial, residential, home improvement, or mold remediation rather than by trade. Mississippi is counted in the state total but excluded from the trade buckets pending classification enrichment, so the trade figures above cover 16 of the 18 states.
Why These Numbers Differ From Other Published Figures
Search this question and you will find figures ranging from 700,000 to 3.8 million contractors in the United States. The spread exists because sources count different things.
Federal occupational data counts people employed in construction occupations, including every employee on every crew. That measures the workforce, not licensed operators.
Census establishment data counts business establishments with construction NAICS codes, licensed or not, active or barely.
Industry market reports model the market from revenue estimates and extrapolation, then get cited and re-cited until the estimate hardens into a fact.
Contractor list vendors publish record counts drawn from the same state boards, which is the closest comparison to this page. The difference is time. A list is a snapshot of who holds a credential on the day it was assembled. These figures come from an archive where every weekly pull is retained and compared to the one before it, so the count is not only current, it is reconcilable against last week’s.
This page counts active license records held by state governments, re-counted weekly. It is the narrowest definition on the list, and the only one where every unit traces to a specific license number in a specific government file. Where the other measures answer how big the industry is, this one answers how many live credentials exist right now, which is the number that matters for market sizing, competitive analysis, and acquisition diligence.
Methodology and Sources
Source records. All counts derive from official license files published by the state licensing authorities listed in the state table. No survey data, no modeling, no third-party aggregation.
What counts as one unit. One active license record, deduplicated on the state’s own license number or record identifier, never on business name. Where a state licenses individual tradespeople as well as businesses, individual credentials are counted in the state total and separated out where the records allow. Building officials, inspectors, and inspection agencies are excluded. Florida financially responsible officers, continuing education courses, and course providers are excluded, as are Mississippi unlicensed-status records and Idaho non-license tracking classes.
Active means active. Only licenses in an active status as of the pull date are counted, using each state’s own status vocabulary: California’s CLEAR, Ohio’s ACTIVE and ACTIVE IN RENEWAL, Florida’s active status codes, Mississippi’s Licensed status excluding expired records, and the equivalent elsewhere. Expired, suspended, revoked, terminated, and inactive licenses are retained in the archive for historical analysis but excluded from these counts.
Trade classification. Trade counts are matched against each state’s native classification system: CSLB class codes, Florida DBPR prefixes, Ohio OCILB codes, Texas TDLR license types, Nevada NSCB classifications, Idaho DOPL boards, Oklahoma CIB license types, and the equivalent in each remaining state. Generic substring matching is never used.
Refresh cadence. The pipeline pulls updated state files and runs a full diff every weekend. This page is updated each Monday. The data-as-of date at the top reflects the most recent completed cycle, not the publication date.
Known limitations. These counts cover 18 states, not fifty, and additional states are added as their boards are brought into the pipeline. Unlicensed operators are not counted anywhere, by anyone, including here. States that license primarily at the municipal level, with Texas general contracting the clearest example, are undercounted relative to their true contractor population. Texas plumbing is licensed by a separate state board not yet in the dataset. Nevada and Texas publish active-only rosters, so no expired or historical breakdown is available for those two states. Mississippi is excluded from trade counts pending classification enrichment. Multi-state operators holding licenses in several tracked states appear once per state, because the license, not the company, is the counting unit.
What a weekly diff can and cannot see. The comparison is between two endpoints, one week apart. A license that changes status and changes back inside the same week is invisible to it. Counts and changes reported here describe what differed between two pulls, not everything that happened between them.
Citing This Data
This page may be cited freely with attribution. Suggested citation: “Echelon Reports Database, 2.16 million state trade license records across 18 states, echelonreports.com, accessed August 2026.”
For custom pulls, market-specific counts, historical trend data, or license verification at diligence depth, see the Quality of License Report or contact Echelon Reports directly.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many licensed contractors are there in the United States?
There is no single national registry, because contractor licensing is a state function. Across the 18 states tracked in the Echelon Reports Database, there are 1,190,134 active contractor licenses as of August 5, 2026. National figures published elsewhere are estimates that count employees or business establishments rather than active licenses.
Which state has the most licensed contractors?
Among tracked states, California leads with 232,894 active licenses. Its Contractors State License Board is the largest single unified contractor licensing system in the country.
How many HVAC companies are there in the US?
Across the 18 states tracked, there are 115,669 active HVAC, air conditioning, refrigeration, and mechanical licenses. License records are the most direct available measure of active HVAC operators, though state licensing definitions differ and several states fold mechanical work into a general contractor license rather than licensing it separately.
What is the difference between a licensed contractor and a licensed tradesman?
Some states license only contracting businesses. Others also license individual tradespeople such as master electricians and journeyman plumbers. Idaho has 5,059 licensed contractor businesses but roughly 37,000 additional individually licensed tradesmen. Reading the raw license count as a company count overstates the market by a wide margin in those states, which is why both figures are reported separately here.
How often is this data updated?
Weekly. The pipeline pulls updated files from each state licensing board and runs a full diff every weekend, and this page is refreshed each Monday with the new counts. The data-as-of date at the top reflects the most recent completed cycle.
Can you tell how many contractors went out of business?
Not directly, and any source claiming otherwise is inferring. What licensing records show is that a license left active status, which can mean closure, retirement, a sale, a lapse in insurance or bonding, or simply a missed renewal. Across nine tracked states, 1,136 licenses came off active rosters in the 30 days ending August 6, 2026. Distinguishing a closure from a renewal lapse requires looking at what happened to that specific record afterward, which is why the removal count is reported as a removal count and not as a business failure rate.
Do these counts include unlicensed contractors?
No. Unlicensed operators exist in every market and no dataset can reliably count them. These figures count only active credentials in official state records, which makes them a conservative floor for total market participants and a precise measure of the credentialed market.
The Layer Behind These Numbers
Everything on this page is a count of the present. The database it comes from is a record of change: which licenses went inactive, which qualifiers moved, which long-tenured operators crossed a threshold that usually precedes an exit. That weekly movement is what subscribers receive, filtered to their states and trades, in the Deal Ledger.
Related reading: how trades roll-ups are built, the ERDI methodology behind the residential demand index, and the Quality of License Report for license due diligence in an acquisition.
Public-records intelligence. Not accounting, legal, or investment advice.
mike@echelonreports.com | linkedin.com/in/jmichaelwarner | x.com/_Mike_Warner