Data

New Hampshire trade business licences by age

Last updated November 1, 2026

Next update November 2026

New Hampshire licenses its electricians and its plumbers one by one. It also licenses the businesses that employ them. The state’s licensing office publishes every licence it holds, outside real estate, in one spreadsheet of 198,312 rows. We read the copy dated 16 August 2026 and kept the businesses: 309 electrical corporations and 808 mechanical business entities.

Every one of those 1,117 licences carries an issue date. So this page can say how long each one has been held, and how that differs between the two trades. Then it shows what our pipeline did with them, which so far is less than you’d think.

What the licence is

There are two licences on this page, one per board.

The electrical one comes from RSA 319-C, the electricians’ chapter. Section 10 says the state “may issue a license to corporations and partnerships engaged in the business of making electrical installations”. There’s a condition. Someone “directly in charge of the business affairs” must be “a licensed master electrician”. A second clause covers firms that work on “high or medium voltage distribution systems operating over 600 volts”. The roster calls those Electrical Corporation HMV. Four hold one.

The mechanical one belongs to the Mechanical Licensing Board. RSA 153:27-a, added in 2013, sets it up as a unit within the licensing office. Its members include licensed plumbers, a fuel gas fitter and a certified heating equipment installer. The same year, the old plumbers’ chapter, RSA 329-A, was repealed. Plumbing and gas fitting now sit under one board.

The board’s licences for people are listed in RSA 153:29: master, journeyman and apprentice plumber, the fuel gas fitters and technicians, the hearth and domestic appliance technicians. The business licence has its own section, RSA 153:29-a, which dates from 2008. It says the office “may issue a business entity a license” to firms “engaged in fuel gas fitting and/or plumbing”. The condition is like the electricians’: an officer, member or designee must hold a licence such as master plumber or one of the fuel gas licences. Each business licence expires every two years. The roster calls it the Mechanical Business Entity, and lists it under the same profession, “Mechanical”, as the plumbers and gas fitters.

Neither licence is about paperwork. Each says a firm may do the work, under a licensed person. The paperwork piles up anyway.

The file we read

The licensing office, OPLC for short, keeps the page “List of OPLC Licensees and their License Types”. It links two spreadsheets: one for real estate and one “for all other boards”. The page is candid about freshness. The list “is updated on a regular basis but is not real-time information; therefore, a licensee’s status may have changed since the list was created.”

The state’s site refuses scripted requests. So our collector reads the newest copy of the same spreadsheet in the Internet Archive. That copy was captured on 21 August 2026. Its file name dates the roster to 16 August 2026. We downloaded it again on 31 October 2026 and checked it against the archive’s own fingerprint; it’s the same file.

The roster has 198,312 rows across 55 professions. Nursing is the largest, with 42,876. The two trade boards sit well down the list.

Board and licenceLicences
Electricians, master6,151
Electricians, journeyman5,261
Electricians, apprentice2,273
Electricians, high and medium voltage, and trainees201
Electrical Corporation305
Electrical Corporation HMV4
Electricians, other8
Mechanical, master plumber2,448
Mechanical, journeyman plumber1,134
Mechanical, apprentice plumber794
Mechanical, gas fitters, technicians and trainees7,288
Mechanical, oil heating, appliance and teaching384
Mechanical Business Entity808
All rows of the two boards27,059

The businesses are the rows in bold: 1,117 of the 27,059. Everything else is a person’s licence, and we don’t collect people.

One gap is plain from the table. There are 6,151 master electricians and only 309 electrical corporations. The statute speaks of “corporations and partnerships”. An electrician who trades under their own licence shows up on the roster as a person, not a business. This page can’t count those firms.

The roster also carries no address, phone or email for a business. It has the name, the licence, its dates and its status. Its 55 professions include no general contractor and no roofer. That’s a fact about this roster, not about every licence in the state. Other trades may be licensed elsewhere, or by towns; this page doesn’t count them.

How long the licences have been held

We counted the years from each issue date to 31 October 2026, the day we read the database.

Years since issueElectricalMechanicalAllShare
Under 28521630126.9%
2 to 46418424822.2%
5 to 96113019117.1%
10 to 195921026924.1%
20 to 294047877.8%
30 or more–21211.9%
All3098081,117100%

377 licences, 33.8%, were issued ten or more years ago. 108 have passed twenty. The middle licence is about 5.2 years old.

This table and the next count licences, one row per licence on the spreadsheet. The two trades sit close together. 32.0% of the electrical licences have passed ten years, and 34.4% of the mechanical ones. Only the mechanical board reaches past thirty years. No electrical corporation licence on the roster is older than September 2000.

Issue yearElectricalMechanicalAll
1990 to 1999–3131
2000 to 200952101153
2010 to 201978216294
2020 to 2024101271372
202545128173
2026, to 14 Aug336194
All3098081,117

639 licences, 57.2%, were issued in 2020 or later. A quarter of the electrical ones, 78, came in 2025 or 2026. For mechanical it’s 189, 23.4%.

Two dates bunch. 23 electrical corporation licences carry the same issue date, 27 September 2000. And 70 mechanical business licences were issued in December 2009 and January 2010, against a handful in the months around them. One span runs early, too: 75 mechanical business licences carry issue dates before 2008, the year RSA 153:29-a was enacted. The roster doesn’t say why for any of them. Read these dates as the first date the state’s file holds, not as the day the business began.

When the licences run out

Counted per licence again:

Expiry yearElectricalMechanicalAll
2026168197
2027240376616
202853351404
All3098081,117

Every licence was active on the roster’s date. Two mechanical licences had passed their expiry date by then, one in April and one on 14 August. Our collector judges a licence on the roster’s own date, so it records those two as inactive. The roster lists both as active, and a renewal may simply not show yet.

What our pipeline did with them

From here the tables count companies in our database, not licences. Each licence was matched against the licence records we already held, by business name, state and town. The 1,117 licences became 1,083 companies.

Into the databaseLicencesCompanies
One licence per company1,0491,049
An electrical and a mechanical licence6834
All1,1171,083

34 businesses hold both licences, so each became one company with two licence records. All 1,083 were new to us. None matched a company another source had given us, and none could have. The roster has no town, and the 301 New Hampshire licence records we already held all carry one, so there was nothing to match on. Before this file, our database held 395 New Hampshire companies from other sources.

Our database gives each company a records age, counted here per company: the years since its oldest licence was issued. For the 34 with both licences, that’s the older of the two.

Records ageOne licenceBoth licencesAll
Under 22844288
2 to 42421243
5 to 91787185
10 to 1924517262
20 to 2981384
30 or more19221
All1,049341,083

367 companies, 33.9%, reach ten years or more. The firms that hold both licences run older in this file: 22 of the 34, 64.7%, against 32.9% for the rest. Thirty-four firms is a small group, so read that gap as this roster’s, not as a rule.

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. The roster has no headcount, so every company from it starts in lane C.

Lane and statusCompanies
Lane C, qualified1,079
Lane C, held for a name check1
Excluded3
All1,083

1,079 companies, 99.6%, sit in lane C as qualified. One is held because its name carries a word our risk check stops on, “health”. A person clears it or it stays out of outreach. Three are excluded because their names fall under our rules: a hospital, a university and a staffing firm. All three hold an electrical corporation licence.

Qualified isn’t the same as contacted. Before any message goes out, a company needs a website we can confirm and an address we’ve checked. The roster gives neither. At our read, none of the 1,083 companies had been looked up yet: no website, no contact. So this page makes no promise about when, or whether, a New Hampshire firm hears from us.

What a licence date says about the record

An electrical corporation licence says a master electrician runs the electrical side of a firm. A mechanical business licence says a firm does plumbing or gas work under the board. Neither says anything about the files behind the work. A licence from 2004 could sit on twenty years of job folders, or on a shoebox.

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.” Under “Who qualifies” it puts “Any company with real operating history, in any sector.” Construction is among the sectors it names. 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.”

Polyshares publishes a few of its deals. One is a roofing company at $450,000 (indicative, not an offer). Another is a general contractor at $300,000 (indicative, not an offer), on a “Perpetual exclusive license to the operational record,” “Anonymized before delivery.” A published deal is one company’s price. It doesn’t predict anyone else’s.

A licence date gives the depth a starting line, and a cautious one. For the same count in other states’ contractor files, see our trade licence age table. Colorado’s electrical and plumbing contractors are counted the same way in Illinois roofers and Colorado contractors. New Jersey’s four contractor lists are counted by age in New Jersey contractor licences by age.

What this means for a New Hampshire trade company

In our reading, the records that count are the ones that show how a job was worked out.

For a plumbing and heating firm, that’s the service history. A no-heat call in January, what the technician found, what was replaced, and what the second visit fixed. It’s the quotes for a boiler swap, the revised quote after the old chimney liner turned out to be shot, and the change order that settled it. Our page for plumbing companies walks through those records. A gas fitting crew keeps the same kind of trail: the pressure tests, the inspection notes and the reasons a job waited.

For an electrical contractor, it’s the takeoffs and bids, the panel schedules, the inspection reports and the punch lists. It’s the notes on why a service upgrade took two visits instead of one. Our page on job files and work orders covers them, and the one on estimates and quotes covers the bids that became jobs and the ones that didn’t.

Polyshares counts “spreadsheets, CRM history, support tickets” and “accounting and ERP exports” as operational data. Our explainer on what data buyers actually want from a trade business puts them in order.

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 an estimate became a job, how a change order was settled, how a repair was diagnosed.

How many years of yours can you still open? Our estimate takes two minutes and asks exactly that.

What the tables do not prove

An issue date is the date the state’s file gives for the licence. It isn’t when the business started. The electrical dates stop at September 2000 and bunch on one day there. The mechanical dates go back to 1990, older than the 2008 section that provides the business licence, and bunch around the turn of 2010. A business that changed form may hold a young licence on an old record.

The roster is a snapshot. It’s dated 16 August 2026, about eleven weeks before our read, and the state says a status “may have changed since the list was created.” Licences issued since then aren’t here. Neither are the electricians who trade under their own name, nor trades the roster doesn’t license.

Our matching keeps one company per business name in the state. Two firms with the same name would become one company; one firm under two names would stay two. The roster has no address to tell them apart.

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.”

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. Nor should a homeowner’s alarm codes or the key-safe numbers written on a work order. How it’s safe walks through what leaves your systems, and when.

For licensed contractors counted by board in other states, without the ages, see licensed trade contractors by state board.

Methodology

The file. The spreadsheet linked from the OPLC page “List of OPLC Licensees and their License Types” as the roster “for all other boards” than real estate, as of 16 August 2026 (verification_data_08162026.xlsx). The state’s site answers scripted requests with a refusal, so the file was read from the Internet Archive, captured on 21 August 2026, as the bytes the state served. Its columns are the profession, licence type, licence number, issue date, expiration date, licence status, first and last name and full or business name. It has 198,312 rows across 55 professions.

What was collected. Our collector (nh-oplc) keeps the licences of three types, Electrical Corporation, Electrical Corporation HMV and Mechanical Business Entity, whose status starts with “Active”, one row per licence number. Every other row is a person’s licence or another profession’s. The host run on 31 October 2026 kept 1,117 rows, skipped none, and wrote them into the database at 10:24 UTC. A licence whose expiry date had passed by the roster’s date is recorded as inactive; two were.

When we read it. We read the host database read-only on 31 October 2026 between about 11:00 and 11:20 UTC. We downloaded the same archived spreadsheet at 11:12 UTC, confirmed its fingerprint matched the archive’s record, and read the issue and expiry dates of the 1,117 licences from it with the collector’s own reader. Its counts by licence type and status match the database. The OPLC page (archived copy), the statutes (archived copies, because the General Court’s site refused our requests too) and the Polyshares pages were read between 11:12 and 11:18 UTC.

Dates. The spreadsheet stores dates as day numbers; we read each as a calendar date. Years since issue are the days from the issue date to 31 October 2026, divided by 365.25. The licence tables use the spreadsheet’s dates, one row per licence. The records age table uses the database’s own field, set at ingest from the same dates, one row per company. The bands are under 2, 2 to 4, 5 to 9, 10 to 19, 20 to 29, and 30 or more. Shares are rounded to one decimal. The temporal coverage runs from the oldest issue year, 1990, to the latest expiry year, 2028.

Companies. A company is a row in our database. A licence record matches another by business name, state and town; with no town on the roster, two licences with the same business name in New Hampshire become one company, and none can match a record that carries a town. The lane and status are the pipeline’s own at the read, set by our qualification step: an excluded name (hospital, school, staffing and the like) is excluded, and a name with a risk word is held for a person to check. “Looked up” means our website search has run for the company; “contact” means a checked address on file.

Left out. Real estate, which has its own roster; every licence held by a person; the professions outside the two trade boards; and anything licensed by towns or other agencies.

Refresh. The tables are rebuilt monthly from the newest roster the archive holds and a new read of the database. The next update is due 30 November 2026.

TrustPast

Apply & License Your Data

*Purchases are made by Polyshares under its data licensing programme. TrustPast is an independent referral partner of Polyshares.

Sources