Data
Ohio trade contractor licences
Last updated November 2, 2026
Next update December 2026
One Ohio board licenses commercial contractors in five trades: electrical, HVAC, plumbing, hydronics and refrigeration. It publishes a roster of the licences that are active or being renewed. We downloaded the roster on 18 October 2026 and kept 12,265 licence records. They made 7,968 new companies in our database.
This page counts those companies. By trade, by how many licences each holds, by when the current licence term started and when it runs out, and by where the businesses are. Then it shows what our pipeline did with them in the first two weeks. One thing it can’t show is how long the licences have been held. The roster doesn’t say, and the section on dates explains why.
What the licences are
The board is the Ohio Construction Industry Licensing Board, part of the state’s Department of Commerce. Its home page says it is “responsible for issuing licenses to qualified Electrical, Heating Ventilating and Air Conditioning (HVAC), Plumbing, Hydronics and Refrigeration Contractors who successfully pass the PSI licensing examination.”
These are commercial licences. The board says it “regulates commercial contractors who perform the above five specialty trades.” It adds: “Licenses issued by the Board are Contractor Licenses and also referred to as Master Licenses.”
Residential work is a local matter. The board’s page says the state law “requires building and health departments who have a registration in place to require the State License before issuing commercial permits.” Then: “All local building and health departments regulate residential contractors.” A local department may still ask a residential contractor for the state licence; the law “allows” it. So a firm that only does houses may not be on this roster at all.
The board has 17 members in four sections: plumbing and hydronics, HVAC and refrigeration, electrical, and administrative.
The file we read
The roster sits on the board’s eLicense Center. The page lists “the OCILB - Ohio Construction Industry Licensing Board Rosters Available for Roster Generation Request” and marks the roster “(No Fee Required)”. It offers six licence types: the five trades and training agencies. Our collector asks for the five trades, every state and every county, as a comma-separated file.
The download ran on 18 October 2026. The 12,265 licence records went into the database between 17:11:14 and 17:11:19 UTC that day.
| Licence type | Licence records |
|---|---|
| Electrical Contractor | 4,418 |
| HVAC Contractor | 3,086 |
| Plumbing Contractor | 3,018 |
| Hydronics Contractor | 936 |
| Refrigeration Contractor | 807 |
| All five | 12,265 |
Those records sit on 8,479 companies. 7,968 of them were new, created by this roster, and they hold 11,521 of the records. The other 511 companies were already in our database from another state’s file, most of them from Florida (160), Texas’s licensing department (147) and Virginia (124). They hold the other 744 records. From here on, the tables count the 7,968 companies the roster created. Each one is counted under the licence that created it.
| Licence that created the company | Trade we gave it | Companies | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| Electrical Contractor | Electrical | 3,567 | 44.8% |
| HVAC Contractor | HVAC | 2,159 | 27.1% |
| Plumbing Contractor | Plumbing | 1,867 | 23.4% |
| Hydronics Contractor | HVAC | 242 | 3.0% |
| Refrigeration Contractor | HVAC | 133 | 1.7% |
| All | 7,968 | 100% |
Electrical leads, with 3,567 companies. Our pipeline files hydronics and refrigeration under HVAC, which makes HVAC 2,534 companies, 31.8%. No single trade holds a majority.
How many licences a company holds
The roster has one row per licence, and each licence names a licensed person. A company with several licensed people, or several trades, carries several rows.
| Licence records per company | Companies | Licence records |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 6,163 | 6,163 |
| 2 | 952 | 1,904 |
| 3 | 410 | 1,230 |
| 4 or 5 | 346 | 1,496 |
| 6 to 9 | 87 | 597 |
| 10 or more | 10 | 131 |
| All | 7,968 | 11,521 |
Most companies, 6,163, hold one licence. 1,805, or 22.7%, hold two or more. The largest holds 24.
The mix of trades says more about the work. Here are the same companies by the trades their licences cover, with hydronics and refrigeration counted as HVAC.
| Trades held | Companies | Licence records |
|---|---|---|
| Electrical only | 3,252 | 3,465 |
| HVAC only | 1,926 | 2,549 |
| Plumbing only | 1,688 | 1,793 |
| Plumbing and HVAC | 640 | 2,050 |
| All three | 236 | 1,110 |
| Electrical and HVAC | 116 | 321 |
| Electrical and plumbing | 110 | 233 |
| All | 7,968 | 11,521 |
1,102 companies, 13.8%, hold more than one trade. The common pairing is plumbing with HVAC: 876 companies hold both, counting the 236 with all three. That’s the mechanical contractor who runs the boiler, the piping and the ductwork under one roof. Electrical firms mostly stay electrical: 3,252 of the 3,714 companies with an electrical licence hold nothing else.
What the dates say, and what they don’t
Our database stores each company’s age as the years since its oldest licence was issued. The roster doesn’t publish an issue date. It publishes the start of the current licence term, which is almost always one or three years before the expiry. A licence first issued in 1995 and renewed this spring shows a 2026 start. So our collector leaves the issue date empty rather than make a thirty-year firm look a year old.
| Years since issue | Companies |
|---|---|
| Under 2 | 5 |
| 2 to 4 | 9 |
| 5 to 9 | 8 |
| 10 to 19 | 5 |
| 20 to 29 | 4 |
| 30 or more | 0 |
| No date | 7,937 |
| All | 7,968 |
7,937 companies, 99.6%, have no date. The 31 that do took it from another state’s licence file, matched after the download: Colorado, New Jersey, Connecticut, the District of Columbia, Delaware and Oregon. These are Ohio firms licensed elsewhere too, and the date is the other state’s.
This is why Ohio is missing from our table of how long trade licences have been held. The term dates are still worth counting, because they show how the board renews.
| Current term started | Companies |
|---|---|
| Before 2023 | 6 |
| 2023 | 55 |
| 2024 | 620 |
| 2025 | 1,765 |
| 2026 | 5,487 |
| 2027 | 35 |
| All | 7,968 |
| Term length | Electrical | HVAC | Plumbing | Hydronics | Refrigeration | All |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| One year | 2,229 | 1,331 | 1,221 | 145 | 79 | 5,005 |
| Three years | 1,334 | 820 | 646 | 96 | 54 | 2,950 |
| Other | 4 | 8 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 13 |
| All | 3,567 | 2,159 | 1,867 | 242 | 133 | 7,968 |
5,005 companies, 62.8%, are on a one-year term. 2,950, 37.0%, are on three years. The split is about the same in every trade, so it isn’t the trade that sets the length. 5,487 terms, 68.9%, started in 2026. 35 carry a start date in 2027, which is the date the file gives.
When the licences run out
Each company carries the expiry date of the licence that created it.
| Expires | Electrical | HVAC | Plumbing | Hydronics | Refrigeration | All |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Before 18 October 2026 | 9 | 11 | 5 | 4 | 3 | 32 |
| 18 October to 31 Dec 2026 | 572 | 347 | 323 | 48 | 14 | 1,304 |
| 2027 | 1,943 | 1,220 | 1,053 | 115 | 72 | 4,403 |
| 2028 | 711 | 394 | 329 | 57 | 29 | 1,520 |
| 2029 | 331 | 186 | 157 | 18 | 15 | 707 |
| 2030 or 2031 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 2 |
| All | 3,567 | 2,159 | 1,867 | 242 | 133 | 7,968 |
5,707 companies, 71.6%, have a licence that runs out between the download and the end of 2027. The dates bunch at the end of a quarter: 1,099 expire in December 2026, 892 in March 2027, 795 in June 2027 and 770 in September 2027.
The roster carries active licences and licences being renewed. The board marked 6,653 of these companies “ACTIVE” and 1,315, or 16.5%, “ACTIVE IN RENEWAL”. 32 carry an expiry date that had already passed at the download. 28 of them are recorded as inactive. The other four hold a second licence record, from Ohio or another state, and our database kept them active. So 7,940 companies are marked as operating. An active licence says the state hadn’t lapsed it. It doesn’t prove the firm is still working.
Where the businesses are
The roster publishes a business address for each licence. 6,963 companies, 87.4%, give one in Ohio.
| State of the address | Companies |
|---|---|
| Ohio | 6,963 |
| Kentucky | 283 |
| Pennsylvania | 118 |
| Indiana | 117 |
| West Virginia | 110 |
| Michigan | 91 |
| 35 other states | 285 |
| No state | 1 |
| All | 7,968 |
The five neighbours come first, with 719 companies between them. Electrical firms come from further afield than plumbers: 525 of the 3,567, 14.7%, give an address outside Ohio, against 156 of the 1,867 plumbing firms, 8.4%. Refrigeration is the highest share, 29 of 133.
Inside Ohio, the business addresses name 813 cities and towns.
| City | Companies |
|---|---|
| Cincinnati | 386 |
| Columbus | 303 |
| Cleveland | 247 |
| Dayton | 177 |
| Toledo | 130 |
| Akron | 110 |
| Hamilton | 85 |
| Canton | 73 |
| Grove City | 60 |
| Youngstown | 58 |
| 803 other cities and towns | 5,319 |
| No city | 15 |
| All in Ohio | 6,963 |
The ten largest hold 1,629 companies, 23.4% of the Ohio addresses. The other 5,319 are spread over 803 more names. This is the town on the business address, not where the work is done.
What our pipeline did with them
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 the companies started in lane C.
| Lane and status | Companies |
|---|---|
| Lane C, qualified | 7,869 |
| Lane C, added to a campaign | 73 |
| Lane C, held for a name check | 9 |
| Lane B, 30 or more people | 1 |
| Excluded | 16 |
| All | 7,968 |
7,869 companies, 98.8%, sit in lane C as qualified. Nine are held because their names carry a word our risk check stops on, such as “health”, “medical” or “academy”. A person clears them, or they stay out of outreach. Sixteen are excluded under our qualification rules. One electrical company sits in lane B, which isn’t Polyshares’ lane: another file puts its headcount at 30 or more.
Few licences come with an email address. The roster gave a company phone for 5,234 of these companies, 65.7%, but our database holds an email from it for only 314, 3.9%. Our pipeline had looked up a website for one of the 7,968 at the read.
| Email addresses on file | Addresses |
|---|---|
| Not yet checked | 195 |
| Checked and usable | 74 |
| Checked and failed | 47 |
| All | 316 |
73 companies were added to an email campaign on 19 and 20 October: 38 electrical, 31 HVAC, two hydronics and two plumbing. By the read, none had replied, none had opted out, and none had asked for an estimate. So this page makes no promise about when, or whether, an Ohio firm hears from us.
What a licence says about the record
An Ohio contractor licence says a qualified person passed the state’s exam in one trade, and the firm can show it for commercial permits. It says nothing about the files behind that work. A licence renewed this year could sit on thirty years of job folders, or on last month’s invoices.
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. Polyshares lists a roofing company, filed under home services, at $450,000 (indicative, not an offer). Polyshares lists a general contractor, filed under construction, at $300,000 (indicative, not an offer). Each is 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.
What this means for an Ohio trade contractor
In our reading, the records that count are the ones that show how a job was worked out. Commercial work leaves a long trail of them.
For an electrical contractor, that’s the bids, the load calculations, the panel schedules, the inspection reports, the punch lists and the change orders. Our page on job files and work orders covers them, and our page on estimates and quotes covers the bids that became jobs and the ones that didn’t.
For an HVAC, hydronics or refrigeration firm, it’s the service history. A no-heat call on a boiler loop in January, what the technician found, what was replaced, and what the second visit fixed. The maintenance contracts and the start-up sheets sit beside it. Our page for HVAC companies walks through those records.
For a plumbing firm, it’s the tickets, the quotes, the permits and the job photos. Our page for plumbing companies goes file by file. The 876 firms that hold both plumbing and HVAC licences keep both trails.
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 moves, Polyshares says identifying fields are stripped. What’s left is how the work was done: how a bid became a job, how a change order was settled, how a fault was found.
How many years of yours can you still open? Our estimate takes two minutes and asks exactly that.
What the tables do not prove
The roster gives the current term, not the first licence. A company on this page could be in its first year or its fortieth; the tables can’t tell them apart.
The roster is commercial. Firms that only do residential work answer to their local building or health department, and may hold no state licence. They aren’t counted here.
Each licence names a licensed person. The tables count companies, not people, and a firm with five licensed people counts once.
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, phone number, 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 building’s access codes or the alarm details written on a service ticket. How it’s safe walks through what leaves your systems, and when.
For the same kind of count in other states, see New Jersey contractor licences by age and licensed trade contractors by state board.
Methodology
The file. The roster of the Ohio Construction Industry Licensing Board, generated on the board’s eLicense Center (Generate Roster(s)) with the OCILB roster ticked, the five contractor licence types selected (Electrical, HVAC, Hydronics, Plumbing and Refrigeration Contractor; Training Agency left out) and state and county left blank, so every state. The site generates the roster on request and serves it as a comma-separated file. Its columns are the licence number, the licensed person’s name, licence type, status, the person’s state and county, the effective and expiration dates, and the company’s name, address, city, state, ZIP code, phone, fax and email. The page marks the roster “(No Fee Required)”.
What was collected. Our collector (oh-ocilb) keeps one row per licence of the five types. The roster carries active and active-in-renewal licences; one whose expiry date had passed is recorded as inactive. A licence with no company name, or one parked in escrow with no business operating under it, is skipped. The run of 18 October 2026 wrote 12,265 licence records into the database between 17:11:14 and 17:11:19 UTC.
When we read it. We read the host database read-only on 2 November 2026, from about 12:09 to 12:19 UTC. The roster page was read directly at 12:12 UTC, and again at 12:25 UTC for review. The board’s home page was read the same day from the Internet Archive’s copy of 17 August 2026, because the Department of Commerce’s site answered our scripted requests with an error page. The Polyshares pages were read at 12:12 UTC and again at 12:25 UTC.
Which companies. The tables count the 7,968 companies the roster created: the companies whose first source is the Ohio file. Each sits in one row, the type of the licence that created it. The 511 companies that already existed when their Ohio 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. The trade mix and licences per company count every Ohio licence record on the company, whenever it was matched.
Dates. The roster’s effective date is the start of the current term, not the first licence, so our collector stores it in the company’s notes and leaves the issue date empty. The years since issue are the database’s own field, set at ingest from the issue date of a company’s oldest dated licence, in years; only licences from other states’ files give one here. The companies with no dated licence hold zero in that field, and the table shows them as no date. Term start is the year of the effective date. Term length is the days from the effective date to the expiry date, divided by 365.25 and rounded to whole years. Expiry is the date on the licence that created the company. Shares are rounded to one decimal. The temporal coverage runs from the oldest term start, 2013, to the latest expiry, 2031.
Places. The state and city are the business address’s. The roster’s own state and county columns belong to the licensed person, not the business, so they aren’t used. City names are counted as written, ignoring capitals; spelling variants of one town would count as two.
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. “Added to a campaign” means at least one email address was handed to the sending tool. “Checked” means our address check ran. Replies, opt-outs and estimates are those our database had recorded for the added addresses by the read.
Left out. Training agencies; every licence the roster doesn’t carry, which is every licence not active or in renewal; residential contractors licensed only by a city or county; the 511 companies another file created first; licences issued since 18 October 2026.
Refresh. The tables are rebuilt monthly from a fresh roster and a new read of the database. The next update is due 2 December 2026.
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Sources
- Ohio Construction Industry Licensing Board, eLicense Center, Generate Roster(s): the OCILB roster and its six licence types
- Ohio Department of Commerce, Ohio Construction Industry Licensing Board, home page: the five trades, the master licence, commercial and residential work (Internet Archive copy of 17 August 2026; the department's site answers scripted requests with an error page)
- 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)