Data
New Jersey contractor licences by age
Last updated November 1, 2026
Next update December 2026
New Jersey keeps one public list for every licence its consumer affairs division issues. Four of those lists are contractors: home improvement businesses, electrical businesses, master HVACR contractors and master plumbers. We downloaded all four on 20 October 2026 and kept the active licences: 64,706 of them, which became 62,594 companies in our database.
The file is the largest contractor licence file we hold. Most of its licences carry an issue date. So this page counts how long the licences have been held, trade by trade, and where the businesses are. Then it shows what our pipeline did with them in the first twelve days.
What the licences are
There are four licences on this page. Two belong to a business, two to a person.
The home improvement registration is the big one. The division’s FAQ calls the law the “Contractors’ Business Registration Act”. It says the Act “sets forth mandatory registration and other requirements for home improvement contractor businesses … selling or making home improvements in New Jersey.” A home improvement contractor business is “any business organization or entity, including sole proprietorships, that provides home improvements.”
The FAQ’s list of home improvements is long. It names “the remodeling, painting, repairing, renovating of, and making of additions to residential property.” It adds garages, basements, driveways, pools, fences and landscaping, central heating and air conditioning, insulation, siding and flooring. “Construction of a new residence is not considered a home improvement under the Act.” Subcontractors register too. So do firms based outside the state: “regardless of whether the HICB is based in New Jersey or not.”
A registration has to be renewed. The FAQ says it “must be renewed by March 31 of each year.” It also says registration “has been required for almost two decades.”
The electrical business permit comes from the Board of Examiners of Electrical Contractors. Its page names the “Electrical Contractors Licensing Act of 1962”. The board requires “that all electrical contractors be licensed and hold a valid business permit, which is renewed every three years.”
The other two are a person’s licence. The HVACR board licenses “heating, ventilating, air conditioning and refrigeration contractors in New Jersey”. It requires them “to renew their licenses every two years.” The master plumber licence is held by the plumber, too. The state’s bulk download page lists the licences “issued in the name of the business”. Electrical contractor businesses and home improvement contractors are on that list. Plumbers and HVACR contractors aren’t. So in this file, a master plumbing or HVACR firm shows up under its master’s name.
None of the four licences is about paperwork. Each says who may do the work. The paperwork piles up anyway, and the home improvement rules ask for some of it: the FAQ says contractors must “use written contracts for home improvement jobs that cost more than $500”.
The file we read
The division’s bulk download sits on its licence verification site. The site calls itself “a real-time system with access to the most current professional license information.” Our collector asks for one list per licence type, as a pipe-delimited text file. Each list carries every status: active, expired, pending and the rest. We keep the active ones.
The download ran on 20 October 2026. The 64,706 licence records went into the database between 11:12:13 and 11:12:39 UTC that day.
| Licence type | Held by | Licence records |
|---|---|---|
| Home Improvement Business Contractor | A business | 47,381 |
| Master HVACR Contractor | A person | 6,683 |
| Electrical Business Permit | A business | 5,709 |
| Master Plumber | A person | 4,933 |
| All four | 64,706 |
Those records sit on 63,613 companies. 62,594 of them were new, created by this file. The other 1,019 were already in our database from another file, most of them, 601, from New York City’s Department of Buildings. From here on, the tables count the 62,594 companies this file created. Each one is counted under the licence that created it.
| Licence that created the company | Trade we gave it | Companies | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| Home Improvement Business Contractor | General | 46,139 | 73.7% |
| Master HVACR Contractor | HVAC | 6,678 | 10.7% |
| Electrical Business Permit | Electrical | 5,514 | 8.8% |
| Master Plumber | Plumbing | 4,263 | 6.8% |
| All | 62,594 | 100% |
Home improvement registrations are three in four. A roofer, a siding crew, a kitchen remodeller and a deck builder all sit in that one row. The list doesn’t say which they are, so our pipeline files them as general.
How long the licences have been held
The database stores each company’s age as the years since its oldest licence was issued, counted to the day of the download, 20 October 2026.
| Years since issue | Home improvement | HVACR | Electrical | Plumbing | All |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Under 2 | 7,416 | 62 | 380 | 212 | 8,070 |
| 2 to 4 | 8,758 | 213 | 542 | 169 | 9,682 |
| 5 to 9 | 9,416 | 562 | 493 | 123 | 10,594 |
| 10 to 19 | 13,766 | 5,400 | 1,324 | 350 | 20,840 |
| 20 to 29 | 6,780 | 171 | 897 | 534 | 8,382 |
| 30 or more | 3 | 266 | 1,874 | 1,169 | 3,312 |
| No date | – | 4 | 4 | 1,706 | 1,714 |
| All | 46,139 | 6,678 | 5,514 | 4,263 | 62,594 |
60,880 companies carry a date. Of those, 32,534, or 53.4%, hold a licence issued ten or more years ago. 11,694, or 19.2%, have passed twenty.
The four trades sit far apart. Here are the same rows as shares of each trade’s dated companies.
| Trade | Dated companies | 10 years or more | 20 years or more |
|---|---|---|---|
| Electrical | 5,510 | 74.3% | 50.3% |
| Plumbing | 2,557 | 80.3% | 66.6% |
| HVACR | 6,674 | 87.5% | 6.5% |
| Home improvement | 46,139 | 44.5% | 14.7% |
Electrical and plumbing are the old rows. Half the electrical businesses hold a permit issued twenty or more years ago. 1,874 of them passed thirty. Two in three dated master plumbers have held the licence twenty years or more.
HVACR is the odd one. 87.5% have passed ten years, but only 6.5% have passed twenty. The next table shows why.
| Period of issue | Home improvement | HVACR | Electrical | Plumbing |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Before 1990 | – | 151 | 792 | 663 |
| 1990 to 1999 | 6 | 155 | 1,374 | 688 |
| 2000 to 2004 | 15 | 110 | 377 | 283 |
| 2005 to 2009 | 11,212 | 69 | 684 | 162 |
| 2010 to 2019 | 14,928 | 5,862 | 1,144 | 333 |
| 2020 to 2024 | 12,971 | 268 | 789 | 233 |
| 2025 | 3,194 | 29 | 185 | 100 |
| 2026, to 20 Oct | 3,813 | 30 | 165 | 95 |
| All dated | 46,139 | 6,674 | 5,510 | 2,557 |
5,341 of the 6,674 dated HVACR licences, 80.0%, were issued in 2014, 2015 or 2016. 3,352 came in 2015 alone. The board’s own page mentions an “expired grandfather statute”, but the file doesn’t say why the dates bunch. Read them as the date the state’s file gives, not as the day the firm began.
The HVACR licences dated before 2014 mostly aren’t HVACR dates at all. 545 HVACR companies carry one, and 523 of them also hold a master plumber licence. Our database keeps the older of a company’s licences, so those firms carry the plumber’s date.
Home improvement dates start in bulk in 2005. 3,810 registrations are dated 2005 and 3,387 dated 2006: 15.6% of the row in its first two years. The 21 dated earlier all belong to companies that hold another licence too, from New Jersey or from another state’s file.
The young end is busy too. 7,007 home improvement registrations, 15.2% of the row, were issued in 2025 or 2026.
When the licences run out
Every company the file created carries one expiry date per licence type. The whole list renews on the same day.
| Licence type | Expires | Companies |
|---|---|---|
| Home improvement | 31 March 2027 | 46,139 |
| Electrical | 31 March 2027 | 5,514 |
| Plumbing | 30 June 2027 | 4,263 |
| HVACR | 30 June 2028 | 6,678 |
All 62,594 were active at the download, and our database marks every one as an operating company. An active licence says the state hadn’t lapsed it. It doesn’t prove the firm is still working.
Where the businesses are
The file publishes an address for each licence. 57,749 companies, 92.3%, give one in New Jersey. The rest are spread over 36 other states, and one gives no state.
| State of the address | Home improvement | HVACR | Electrical | Plumbing | All |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| New Jersey | 42,754 | 6,076 | 4,960 | 3,959 | 57,749 |
| Pennsylvania | 1,915 | 308 | 296 | 141 | 2,660 |
| New York | 1,133 | 182 | 193 | 81 | 1,589 |
| Delaware | 100 | 25 | 12 | 11 | 148 |
| 33 other states or none | 237 | 87 | 53 | 71 | 448 |
| All | 46,139 | 6,678 | 5,514 | 4,263 | 62,594 |
3,385 home improvement contractors, 7.3% of the row, are based outside New Jersey. That fits the FAQ’s rule that out-of-state firms must register to work on New Jersey homes. The same holds the other way: our page on Delaware’s contractor and mover licences counts the New Jersey firms licensed there.
Inside New Jersey, the file names a county for most addresses.
| County | Companies |
|---|---|
| Bergen | 6,753 |
| Ocean | 5,677 |
| Monmouth | 5,409 |
| Morris | 4,022 |
| Middlesex | 3,675 |
| Essex | 3,597 |
| Passaic | 3,344 |
| Union | 3,118 |
| Burlington | 2,591 |
| Camden | 2,514 |
| Mercer | 2,199 |
| Atlantic | 2,109 |
| Somerset | 2,015 |
| Hudson | 1,888 |
| Gloucester | 1,720 |
| Sussex | 1,628 |
| Hunterdon | 1,429 |
| Cape May | 1,305 |
| Warren | 957 |
| Cumberland | 804 |
| Salem | 354 |
| No county we could match | 641 |
| All in New Jersey | 57,749 |
Bergen leads with 6,753, 11.7% of the New Jersey addresses. Ocean and Monmouth, on the shore, come next. Hudson sits fourteenth. This is where the businesses are registered, not where they work.
What our pipeline did with them
Most licences became a company of their own. 61,544 companies hold one New Jersey licence record, 1,039 hold two and 11 hold three. The commonest pair is a master HVACR licence with a master plumber licence, on 616 companies. Next is a home improvement registration with an electrical permit, on 282.
630 of the companies the file created have since taken a licence record from another state’s file as well. Before this download, our database held 5,590 New Jersey companies from other files; by the read it held 6,250.
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 file has no headcount, so the companies started in lane C.
| Lane and status | Companies |
|---|---|
| Lane C, qualified | 62,407 |
| Lane C, added to a campaign | 86 |
| Lane C, held for a name check | 82 |
| Lane B, 30 or more people | 7 |
| Excluded | 12 |
| All | 62,594 |
62,407 companies, 99.7%, sit in lane C as qualified. 82 are held because their names carry a word our risk check stops on. “Bank”, “health” and “rehab” are the commonest, ten each. A person clears them, or they stay out of outreach. Twelve home improvement registrations are excluded because their names fall under our exclusion rules.
Seven companies left lane C. Each shares its name with a company in another public file that reports 30 or more people. That other file put them in lane B, which isn’t Polyshares’ lane.
The file did one thing most licence lists don’t. It publishes an email address for most licences. 54,403 companies, 86.9%, came in with one. Our pipeline hadn’t looked up a website for any of them at the read.
| Email addresses on file | Addresses |
|---|---|
| Not yet checked | 54,490 |
| Checked and usable | 92 |
| Checked and failed | 28 |
| All | 54,610 |
Only 120 addresses had been checked by 1 November. 90 companies were added to an email campaign: 86 lane C electrical businesses between 20 and 24 October, and four of the seven lane B companies on 23 October. No one had opted out at the read, and no company had been introduced to a buyer. So this page makes no promise about when, or whether, a New Jersey firm hears from us.
What a licence date says about the record
A home improvement registration says a firm may sell and do work on New Jersey homes. An electrical permit says a licensed electrician stands behind a business. A master’s licence says a person has run plumbing or HVACR work under their own name. None of them says anything about the files behind the work. A permit from 1995 could sit on thirty 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, filed under home services, 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 across eight states’ files, see our trade licence age table. New Hampshire’s electrical and plumbing businesses are counted the same way in New Hampshire trade business licences by age.
What this means for a New Jersey trade company
In our reading, the records that count are the ones that show how a job was worked out.
For a home improvement contractor, that starts with the written contracts the state requires above $500. Then the estimates behind them, the revised scope after the old subfloor came up rotten, and the change order that settled it. Our page on estimates and quotes covers the bids that became jobs and the ones that didn’t. Roofers in this row keep the same trail; our page for roofing companies goes file by file.
For a plumbing or HVACR firm, it’s the service history. A no-heat call in January, what the technician found, what was replaced and what the second visit fixed. Our pages for HVAC companies and plumbing companies walk through those records.
For an electrical contractor, it’s the bids, the panel schedules, the inspection reports and the punch lists. Our page on job files and work orders covers them.
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. For master plumbers and HVACR contractors it’s the master’s own licence, which may be older or younger than the firm. A master who publishes a trading name gets no date at all from our collector, so a young firm isn’t aged by its master’s licence. That’s most of the 1,706 undated plumbers.
The dates bunch where the law or the file changed: home improvement in 2005 and 2006, HVACR in 2014 to 2016. A firm that worked before its registration doesn’t show those years here.
A home improvement registration names no trade. We can’t say how many in that row are roofers, remodellers or landscapers.
Our matching keeps one company per business name and town. Two firms with the same name in the same town would become one company; one firm under two names stays two.
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, email 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 lockbox number 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, see licensed trade contractors by state board.
Methodology
The file. The New Jersey Division of Consumer Affairs licence verification bulk download, four lists: Home Improvement Business Contr (profession Home Improvement Contractors), Electrical Business Permit (Electrical Contractors), Master HVACR Contractor (HVACR) and Master Plumber (Master Plumbers). Each list is a pipe-delimited text file carrying the name, licence type, licence number, issue and expiry dates, address, county, email and status of every licence of that type, whatever its status. The site stated the charge for each download as $0.00.
What was collected. Our collector (nj-dca) keeps the licences whose status is “Active”, one row per licence. An active licence whose expiry date had passed would be recorded as inactive; none was. For the two person licences, a master who publishes a trading name on the address line (“T/A”, “DBA”) becomes that business, with no issue date; a master who doesn’t is the business, with the master’s date. The run of 20 October 2026 wrote 64,706 licence records into the database between 11:12:13 and 11:12:39 UTC.
When we read it. We read the host database read-only on 1 November 2026, from about 12:00 to 12:20 UTC. Every query and its raw output is kept with the page’s working files for review. The division’s pages were read the same day from Internet Archive copies, because the state’s site answers scripted requests with a refusal; the bulk download page was read directly. The Polyshares pages were read the same day.
Which companies. The tables count the 62,594 companies the file created: the companies whose first source is the New Jersey file. Each sits in one row, the type of the licence that created it. The 1,019 companies that already existed when their New Jersey licence arrived are left out of the tables, so each company keeps the source that created it. A licence record matches a company by business name, state and town.
Dates. The years since issue are the database’s own field, set at ingest: the days from the issue date of the company’s oldest licence to 20 October 2026, divided by 365.25, rounded to two decimals. A licence matched later, from this file or another, raises the field only if it’s older. The period table turns that figure back into a year by counting the same days back from 20 October 2026; a licence issued within a day or two of New Year may land in the next or previous year. A company with no dated licence carries zero and is shown as “No date”. 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, 1963, to the latest expiry year, 2028.
Places. The state is the one in the published address. The county is the file’s own county field. 641 New Jersey companies have no county we could match: the field was blank, gave the state or “Unknown”, added the word “County”, was misspelled, or couldn’t be separated from the rest of our notes. They’re shown in their own row.
Lane and status. The pipeline’s own at the read, set by our qualification step. An excluded name is excluded; a name with a risk word is held for a person to check; a company sharing its name with a firm of 30 or more people in another public file takes lane B. “Added to a campaign” means at least one email address was handed to the sending tool. “Checked” means our address check ran.
Left out. Every licence that wasn’t active; the professions outside the four lists; the 1,019 companies another file created first; licences issued since 20 October 2026.
Refresh. The tables are rebuilt monthly from a fresh download and a new read of the database. The next update is due 1 December 2026.
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Sources
- New Jersey Division of Consumer Affairs, License Verification System, bulk download: the business licensees, electrical contractor businesses and home improvement contractors among them
- New Jersey Division of Consumer Affairs, Home Improvement Contractors, Frequently Asked Questions (Internet Archive copy of 30 June 2026; the state's site refuses scripted requests)
- New Jersey Board of Examiners of Electrical Contractors, home page (Internet Archive copy of 9 September 2026)
- New Jersey State Board of Examiners of Heating, Ventilating, Air Conditioning and Refrigeration (HVACR) Contractors, home page (Internet Archive copy of 21 October 2026)
- 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 roofing company at $450,000 and the general contractor at $300,000 (polyshares.com)