Data
Delaware contractor and mover licences
Last updated October 26, 2026
Next update November 2026
Delaware asks every business that works in the state to hold a business licence from its Division of Revenue. That includes a builder from Maryland who takes a job in Delaware. The state publishes the licences as an open file, updated daily. We collected the contractor and mover categories on 26 October 2026: 14,532 licences, 13,467 for contractors and 1,065 for movers. This page counts them by category, by where the holder is based and by how long the current licence runs. Then it shows what our pipeline did with them.
One thing the file doesn’t carry is the year a business was first licensed. Each row shows the current term only. So unlike our licence age table, this one can’t say how long each holder has been in business. The term length gives a small clue, and we come to it below.
Alaska’s licence layer does carry an issue date; see Alaska business licences by age and trade.
Licences by category
Six of the file’s business categories cover contractors and movers. Each row counts licence numbers, once each, split by the state of the address on the licence.
| Category | Licences | Delaware address | Out of state |
|---|---|---|---|
| Resident contractor | 8,618 | 8,404 | 214 |
| Non-resident contractor | 4,697 | 730 | 3,967 |
| Construction manager | 81 | 62 | 19 |
| Construction transportation contractor | 57 | 53 | 4 |
| Non-resident construction transport contr. | 14 | 3 | 11 |
| Drayperson or mover | 1,065 | 973 | 92 |
| All six categories | 14,532 | 10,225 | 4,307 |
The five contractor rows add up to 13,467. Of those, 9,252 carry a Delaware address and 4,215 an address in another state.
The category and the address don’t always agree. 730 non-resident contractor licences carry a Delaware address today, and 214 resident ones carry an address elsewhere. We count the address as the file shows it now, not the category’s label.
Where the licence holders are
Close to three in ten licences belong to a business based outside Delaware. Most of those sit next door.
| Address state | Licences | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Delaware | 10,225 | 70.4% |
| Maryland | 1,469 | 10.1% |
| Pennsylvania | 1,440 | 9.9% |
| New Jersey | 496 | 3.4% |
| 43 other states and DC | 902 | 6.2% |
| All | 14,532 | 100% |
Maryland and Pennsylvania together hold 2,909 licences, more than New Jersey and the other 44 places combined. Virginia comes next with 105. A contractor in Maryland or Pennsylvania who takes a job across the line needs this licence too. In our reading, the Delaware file may be a second record of a business its home state also registers.
How long the current licence runs
Delaware’s Division of Revenue says most business licences run one year and expire on 31 December. After the first year, a business may take a three-year licence instead. It pays three times the yearly fee and gets one licence document.
| Term | Contractors | Movers | All |
|---|---|---|---|
| One calendar year | 7,625 | 582 | 8,207 |
| Three calendar years | 5,836 | 483 | 6,319 |
| Four calendar years | 2 | – | 2 |
| No end date in the file | 4 | – | 4 |
| All | 13,467 | 1,065 | 14,532 |
That gives the clue we promised. A three-year term is only open to a business past its first licensed year. So the 6,319 holders on one have been licensed in Delaware for more than a year. That’s 43.5% of the file. Of them, 2,107 started their current term in 2024, 2,286 in 2025, 1,921 in 2026, and 5 have a term that starts in 2027. One-year holders could be in their first year or their thirtieth. The file doesn’t say.
As of the read, 10,314 licences expire on or before 31 December 2026, and 14,528 had not expired. The year-end date is the state’s rule. Its FAQ says: “Business Licenses for the forthcoming year are required to be renewed no later than December 31st of the proceeding year.”
What our pipeline did with them
Each licence was matched against the companies we already hold, by name and place. 14,532 licences became 14,477 companies, because some companies hold two Delaware licences in the same city.
| Into the database | Licences | Companies |
|---|---|---|
| New companies | 13,121 | 13,073 |
| Matched to a company we held | 1,411 | 1,404 |
| All | 14,532 | 14,477 |
Of the 13,073 new companies, 12,072 are contractors and 1,001 are movers. 10,032 are based in Delaware.
The 1,404 matched companies came in first from another public file. That’s a business with two independent records of its trade.
| First source of the matched company | Companies |
|---|---|
| Virginia, Department of Professional and Occupational Regulation | 707 |
| New Jersey, Division of Consumer Affairs | 319 |
| New York City, Department of Buildings | 93 |
| FMCSA Company Census, moving companies | 64 |
| Iowa, contractor registrations | 52 |
| Florida, Department of Business and Professional Regulation | 44 |
| District of Columbia, basic business licences | 40 |
| Texas, Department of Licensing and Regulation | 36 |
| Connecticut, Department of Consumer Protection | 23 |
| Ohio, construction industry licensing board | 12 |
| Six other state files | 14 |
| All | 1,404 |
The matched companies keep the trade their first record gave them: 1,062 general, 155 electrical, 64 moving, 51 roofing, 36 plumbing and 36 HVAC. For the boards behind several of those files, see licensed trade contractors by state board. The DC licences have a page of their own, DC trade licences and company dissolutions, with the year each was first issued.
Status by lane
Our pipeline puts every company in one lane, by headcount. Lane C is every company under 30 people or with no headcount on record, and Polyshares is its buyer.
| Lane and status | New | Matched | Total |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lane C, qualified | 13,042 | 1,370 | 14,412 |
| Lane C, held for a name check | 28 | 2 | 30 |
| Lane C, already contacted | – | 26 | 26 |
| 30 or more people on record, qualified | 1 | 4 | 5 |
| 30 or more people on record, contacted | – | 2 | 2 |
| Excluded | 2 | – | 2 |
| All | 13,073 | 1,404 | 14,477 |
99.9% of the companies sit in lane C as qualified, held or contacted. The 30 held rows have a word in a name that our risk check stops on, such as “medical” or “lab”. A person clears them or they stay out of outreach. The 26 contacted ones were already in our outreach from their first source. Seven companies show 30 or more people in some other record, so they belong to our programme for larger companies, not to this page’s buyer.
At the read, none of the 13,073 new companies had been looked up yet. No website, no contact.
What a Delaware licence says about the record
A business licence says a company is licensed to work in Delaware and has paid its fee. It says nothing about trade skill, and nothing about the paperwork. A non-resident contractor from Maryland may run a dozen Delaware jobs a year, or one.
What Polyshares looks at is the record itself. Its home page says “the length and texture of the record matter more than headcount or revenue.” It names construction among the sectors it takes, and logistics too. It takes “any company with real operating history, in any sector.”
Polyshares publishes a few of its deals. One is a general contractor at $300,000 (indicative, not an offer), on a “perpetual exclusive license to the operational record,” “anonymized before delivery.” Another is a roofing company at $450,000 (indicative, not an offer). A published deal is one company’s price. It doesn’t predict anyone else’s.
In our reading, the records that count for a Delaware contractor are the bid sheets and takeoffs, the subcontract agreements, change orders, inspection results, punch lists and closeout files. For a mover, it’s the surveys, the estimates that became bookings, the bills of lading and the claims notes. Our explainer on what data buyers actually want from a trade business goes through those one by one. For movers with bigger fleets, see household goods carriers by state.
Before any of it is used, the record is de-identified. Customer names and payments are never what a buyer wants. What it wants is how the work was done: how a bid became a job, how a change order was agreed, how a move was surveyed and priced. Polyshares counts “spreadsheets, CRM history, support tickets” and “accounting and ERP exports” as operational data. On price, it says: “Depth of operating history and how much visible reasoning the record contains move the number far more than raw volume does.” The licence shows none of that. The files behind it do.
How far back do yours go? Our estimate takes two minutes and asks exactly that.
What is never included
This page holds counts only. It names no company and shows no licence number, address or person.
In a licence of records, the customer’s own information stays out. Polyshares says its licence “does not cover what you hold on behalf of your own clients.” It also says identifying fields, customer names, emails and account numbers are “stripped by a specialist PII partner before Polyshares or any lab sees the record.” Our advice: payment card numbers, bank statements and payroll should never be in an export at all. How it’s safe walks through what leaves your systems, and when.
Methodology
The file. The Delaware Business Licenses dataset on the Delaware Open Data Portal, published by the Department of Finance, Division of Revenue, under a public domain licence and updated daily. Its rows are current licences of every category, about 70,000. The column we call category is the file’s “Business Activity”.
What was collected. Our collector downloads six categories: resident contractor, non-resident contractor, construction manager, construction transportation contractor, non-resident construction transport contractor, and drayperson or mover. The file repeats a licence once per trade name, so we keep one row per licence number. A row with no business name is skipped, and so is an address in a Canadian province. The run on 26 October 2026 skipped 6 rows. It wrote 14,532 licences into the database at 10:19 UTC.
When we read it. We read the host database read-only on 26 October 2026 between 11:27 and 11:31 UTC. The category, address state and licence term dates of each of the 14,532 licences come from the same file, read through its open API at 11:28 UTC and joined to the database on the licence number. Every licence number in the database was found in that read.
Address. Delaware or out of state follows the state on the licence’s address. A row with no state counts as Delaware, as our collector reads it. The file’s country column is not used: it marks some Delaware addresses as unknown or another country.
Term. The term is the calendar years from the current licence’s valid-from date to its valid-to date, counted inclusive: a term from 2025 to 31 December 2027 is three years. Two licences span four calendar years and four have no valid-to date. Those four open-ended terms fall outside the temporal coverage, which counts complete terms only. “Not expired” means a valid-to date on or after the read date. Only the Division of Revenue’s FAQ tells us three-year terms come after a first year; the file itself has no first-issue date.
Companies. A company is a row in our database. A licence matched to a company we already held adds a source record to that company and changes neither its trade nor its lane. Two companies with the same name in different cities are different companies. The lane and status are the pipeline’s own at the read, set by our qualification step.
Left out. The file’s other 79 categories are not collected. Delaware’s Division of Professional Regulation publishes the licences of persons in a separate file; it is not on this page.
Refresh. The tables are rebuilt monthly from a fresh download and a new read of the database. The next update is due 26 November 2026.
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Sources
- Delaware Open Data Portal, Delaware Business Licenses (Department of Finance, Division of Revenue; dataset 5zy2-grhr, public domain, updated daily)
- The same dataset through its open API, as read for this table
- Delaware Division of Revenue, business licence FAQs: who needs a licence, one-year and three-year terms
- Polyshares, home page: who qualifies, the length and texture of the record, anonymisation, what the licence does not cover (polyshares.com)
- Polyshares, case studies: the general contractor at $300,000 and the roofing company at $450,000 (polyshares.com)