Data

Illinois roofers and Colorado contractors

Last updated October 29, 2026

Next update November 2026

Illinois licenses roofing contractors at state level. Colorado’s licensing agency lists its electrical and plumbing contractor licences in one open file. Both states publish the date each licence was first issued. We read our sourcing database on 29 October 2026. It held 4,818 Illinois roofing licences on 4,815 companies, and 7,866 Colorado electrical and plumbing contractor licences on 7,718 companies. This page counts them by class, by place and by how long they’ve been held, then shows what our pipeline did with them.

Illinois roofing licences by class and age

The Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation, IDFPR, issues two roofing licences. Its application instructions describe a Limited licence for contractors “whose roofing business is limited to residential roofing, including residential properties consisting of 8 units or less”. The Unlimited licence covers “residential, commercial and industrial properties.” Every licence must designate a qualifying party, who must pass the state’s exam.

4,816 of our 4,818 licences were in the file when we read it. We counted the years from each original issue date to the day of our read.

ClassLicencesUnder 22–45–910–1920+10+ share
Unlimited3,02667450667854862038.6%
Limited (residential)1,68336818033742637247.4%
No qualifier on file107244042010.9%
All roofing licences4,8161,0667261,05797499340.8%

1,967 licences, 40.8%, were first issued ten or more years ago. 993 have passed twenty. Every licence carries an issue date. The earliest is from 1985, and 105 licences show that year, more than any single year until 2011.

The residential licences are the older group. Half of the Limited holders have been licensed 9.4 years or more; for Unlimited holders the middle is 7.3 years. The 107 licences with no qualifier on file are almost all young.

The other end is busy too. 1,380 licences were first issued in 2024 or later, 490 of them in 2026 so far. Every licence in the file expires on 31 December 2027, which matches IDFPR’s rule: a roofing licence expires “on December 31st of each odd numbered year regardless of when it is issued.”

Illinois roofing licences by county

The file gives each licence a county. We kept the seven counties with the most licences and grouped the rest.

CountyLicencesUnlimitedLimited10+ share
Cook1,24480241336.0%
DuPage32221110238.5%
Kane2301527131.7%
Lake2291428341.9%
Will2101218539.0%
McHenry1631075144.8%
Winnebago1511054029.1%
88 other counties1,42780460047.0%
Illinois, no county28116311245.2%
Outside Illinois55941912641.0%
All4,8163,0261,68340.8%

Where a row’s two classes fall short of its total, the gap is the licences with no qualifier on file.

Cook County alone holds 1,244 licences, a quarter of the file. With DuPage, Kane, Lake, Will and McHenry, six of the Chicago area’s counties hold 2,398, or 49.8%. Yet the licences outside the seven counties with the most licences run older. In the 88 other counties, 47.0% were first issued ten or more years ago, against 36.0% in Cook.

559 licences, 11.6%, have an address outside Illinois, spread over 32 states. Missouri leads with 144 and Indiana follows with 95. Most of them, 419, hold the Unlimited class.

Colorado electrical and plumbing contractors by age

The Colorado Department of Regulatory Agencies, DORA, publishes one file for every profession it licenses. Our collector takes the active contractor licences of two kinds: Electrical Contractor and Plumbing Contractor. Every one of them in the file carries a business name.

TradeLicencesUnder 22–45–910–1920+10+ share
Electrical4,7596868578409921,38449.9%
Plumbing3,1075556455671,340043.1%
Both7,8661,2411,5021,4072,3321,38447.2%

All 7,866 licences were in the file at our read. 3,716 of them, 47.2%, were first issued ten or more years ago.

The electrical contractors run long. 1,384 have held their licence twenty years or more, and 621 thirty years or more. The earliest date is from 1965. Almost half of all electrical contractors, 49.9%, have been licensed ten years or more.

The plumbing row needs a caution. No plumbing contractor licence shows a first issue date before 1 January 2008. 445 show exactly that day, and 775 show 2008. The file doesn’t say why its dates start there. So read a Colorado plumbing contractor’s age as a floor: the 1,340 in the 10 to 19 column include every one that may be older.

130 companies hold both an electrical and a plumbing contractor licence.

Colorado contractors by city

The file gives the city of the mailing address. We kept the eight cities with the most licences.

CityLicencesElectricalPlumbing10+ share
Denver60234525744.0%
Colorado Springs53726527241.5%
Aurora38620917737.3%
Littleton2151496647.0%
Arvada1891147555.6%
Lakewood1831196442.6%
Fort Collins1671066149.7%
Grand Junction160798159.4%
302 other cities, and 2 licences with no city4,5932,7011,89250.9%
Outside Colorado83467216233.8%
All7,8664,7593,10747.2%

The pattern is Illinois’s. The cities with the most licences don’t have the highest ten-year shares. Grand Junction has the highest ten-year share of the eight, at 59.4%. It and Colorado Springs are the two of the eight where plumbing contractors outnumber electrical ones.

834 licences have an address outside Colorado, in 45 states. Texas leads with 144, then Utah with 80. Most of them, 672, are electrical. Their ten-year share is the lowest in the table, 33.8%.

What our pipeline did with the licences

Each licence was matched against the companies we already held, by name and place.

FileLicencesCompaniesNewMatched
Illinois, roofing4,8184,8154,589226
Colorado, electrical and plumbing7,8667,7187,214504

Three companies hold a licence in both files. The matched ones came in first from another public file. In Illinois, 112 came from Iowa’s contractor registrations, 55 from Florida and 43 from Virginia. In Colorado, 237 came from the two Texas licence boards, 119 from Florida, 40 from Virginia and 32 from California.

Lane and statusIllinoisColorado
Lane C, qualified4,7367,600
Lane C, already contacted6954
Lane C, held for a name check810
Lane C, opted out1–
30 or more people on record18
Excluded–46
All4,8157,718

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. The licence files carry no headcount. So 4,814 Illinois companies and 7,664 Colorado ones sit in lane C. Nine show 30 or more people in another record of the same business and belong to our programme for larger companies. The held ones have a word in the name our risk check stops on, such as “lab” or “health”. The 46 excluded Colorado companies have a name our check reads as a school, a university, a hospital, a government body or a staffing firm, which are not the businesses this page is about.

What a long licence says about the records

A licence date is the day the state first let a company do the work under that number. It is not the day the paperwork started, but it is a fair floor on it.

A roofer licensed in Illinois in 1996 has had thirty roofing seasons to write estimates in. IDFPR’s consumer brochure says a licensed roofer must put the licence number and name on “all of his or her contracts, bids, each application for a building permit”. Since 2012, state law has required it, so later bids and contracts carry the licence number. A Colorado electrical contractor licensed for twenty years has had twenty years of bids, takeoffs, inspection results and service calls. A plumbing contractor licensed as long has had twenty years of job notes, callbacks and quotes that went out twice before a yes.

Those files are what a buyer reads. The records are de-identified before use. Customer names and payments are never what’s wanted. What’s wanted is how the work was done: how an estimate became a job, how a change order was settled, how a repair was diagnosed. Our explainer on what data buyers actually want from a trade business puts the records in order. The pages for roofing companies and plumbing companies go file by file.

Polyshares names construction among the sectors it takes and says “the length and texture of the record matter more than headcount or revenue.” On price it says depth of operating history and “how much visible reasoning the record contains” move the number far more than volume. Its published deals include a roofing company at $450,000 (indicative, not an offer), on a “perpetual exclusive license to the operational record,” “anonymized before delivery.” One published deal doesn’t predict another company’s price.

How far back can your own job files go?

What the tables do not prove

A licence date is when the state first issued that licence number. A business may be older, and may have worked under another licence. For Colorado plumbing contractors, as above, the dates stop at 2008.

An active licence shows a company still licensed, not one still busy, and not one that kept its files. Our lane is the pipeline’s reading of the records we hold, not a buyer’s decision. Polyshares decides on its own review; it says “we read a sample of the record.”

For the age of trade licences in eight other state files, see how long trade licences have been held. For the counts by licensing board, see licensed trade contractors by state board.

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 says identifying fields, customer names, emails and account numbers are “stripped by a specialist PII partner before Polyshares or any lab sees the record.” Payment card numbers, bank statements and payroll shouldn’t be in an export at all. How it’s safe walks through what leaves your systems, and when.

Methodology

The Illinois file. IDFPR’s Professional Licensing dataset on the Illinois Data Portal, 4,177,299 rows of every profession at our read; the portal last updated its rows on 28 October 2026. Our collector takes the rows of licence type Roofing Contractor, description Licensed Roofing Contractor and status Active. The qualifying party licences are a person’s and are not taken. At our read the file held 5,046 such rows on 4,827 licence numbers: it repeats some rows whole. The collector keeps one row per licence number and skips a row with no name. The class is the file’s specialty qualifier.

The Colorado file. DORA’s Professional and Occupational Licenses dataset on the Colorado Information Marketplace, 1,616,076 rows at our read; the portal last updated its rows at 10:26 UTC on 29 October 2026. Our collector takes licence types EC and PC with the status Active or Active - With Conditions; 5 of our licences carry the second. At our read that was 8,039 rows on 7,873 licence numbers, because the file repeats a licence once per discipline case. A licence counts once per type and number. The journeyman, master and residential licences are a person’s and are not taken. We tried to fetch DORA’s electrical and plumbing board pages to cite them here; they refused our requests, so this page cites the file only.

When we read it. We read the host database read-only on 29 October 2026 between 11:10 and 11:13 UTC, and again between 11:17 and 11:19 UTC to check each figure; both reads gave the same counts. The Illinois rows were collected on 24 October and the Colorado rows on 25 October. The class, county, city and dates of each licence come from the two files, read through their open SODA API at 11:11 UTC and joined to the database on the licence number. Of our 4,818 Illinois licence numbers, 4,816 were still in the active list; the other two are left out of the class, county and age tables. All 7,866 Colorado numbers were in the read. The files’ own totals are count queries at 11:11 UTC.

Years. Licence age is the days from the original or first issue date to 29 October 2026, divided by 365.25. The bands are under 2, 2 to 4, 5 to 9, 10 to 19, and 20 or more. Shares are of each row’s total, rounded to one decimal. Place is the county or city the file gives for the licence address; an address in another state counts as outside. City names are compared without regard to case.

Companies. A company is a row in our database. A licence matched to a company we already held adds a source record to it and changes neither its trade nor its lane. The 4,818 Illinois numbers sit on 4,815 companies: three companies hold two. The 7,866 Colorado numbers sit on 7,718 companies: 143 hold more than one, 130 of them an electrical and a plumbing licence. The lane and status are the pipeline’s own at the read, set by our qualification step.

Left out. Every licence with a status other than Active; in Colorado, other than Active or Active - With Conditions. In Illinois that includes 10,487 roofing contractor licences (10,605 rows) with the status Not Renewed, counted at 11:29 UTC.

Refresh. The tables are rebuilt monthly from a fresh download and a new read of the database. The next update is due 29 November 2026.

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