Data
Washington trade contractor licences
Last updated November 5, 2026
Next update December 2026
Washington’s Department of Labor and Industries, L&I for short, keeps one file for every contractor it licenses or registers. Plumbing firms hold a plumbing contractor licence. Roofers and heating and cooling firms register as construction contractors in a specialty, and many HVAC firms also hold an electrical contractor licence for the wiring side. We, TrustPast, downloaded the trade rows of that file on 17 October 2026 and kept 6,758 licence records. They created 6,118 new companies in our database and matched 111 that were already there.
This page counts those 6,118 companies. By licence, by how many each holds, by how long ago the licence took effect, by when it runs out, by status and by where the businesses are. Then it shows what our pipeline did with them. One date in the file has a catch for plumbers, and the section on licence age explains it.
What the licences are
L&I runs three programmes that matter here, and the file mixes all three.
Construction contractors. L&I’s registration page says: “Washington State requires all construction contractors to register with L&I. State law also requires construction contractors to be bonded and insured to protect the public.” There are two kinds. General contractors can do most construction work and hire subcontractors. “Specialty contractors can only perform work in the specialty they are registered in. They cannot hire subcontractors.” L&I says it “regulates 63 specialties that each require contractor registration,” and roofing and HVAC are among them. A specialty contractor buys a continuous surety bond of $15,000; a general contractor’s is $30,000. Both carry general liability insurance of two hundred thousand dollars public liability and fifty thousand property damage, or a quarter of a million combined. Registration costs $150.20, and so does each renewal.
Plumbing contractors. This licence is new. L&I’s page says: “Beginning July 1, 2021, the ‘specialty plumbing’ registration was no longer valid, and general contractors could no longer perform work with a certified plumber. All plumbing contract work must be performed by a new Licensed Plumbing Contractor.” Each firm names a certified plumber as its “dedicated plumber”, an owner or a full-time employee. The bond is $6,000, with the same insurance as a construction contractor. The FAQ says the licence “expires twenty-four calendar months following the day of its issuance.”
Electrical contractors in the HVAC specialty. L&I says: “To engage in the business of the electrical construction trade, you must get an electrical contractor license from L&I.” Specialty electrical contractors work “within a category described in WAC 296-46B-920 (2).” Two of those categories are “HVAC/refrigeration system (06A)” and “HVAC/refrigeration - restricted (6B)”. The firm needs a $4,000 bond and an assigned administrator or master electrician. The licence “expires two years from its effective date.”
Washington has no auto repair licence, so there is no auto repair row on this page. Electrical contractors outside the HVAC specialties, general contractors and every other specialty are left out too.
The file we read
L&I publishes the file itself on the state’s open data site, data.wa.gov, as “L&I Contractor License Data - General”. It has one row per licence. The site’s column notes define each field. The effective date is “The day of which the agency received the correct required documents and payable license fee from an applicant and approved for licensure.” The expiry is the date the licence “became expired due to the license not being renewed,” or will.
Our collector asked the site for one filtered download: every Plumbing Contractor row, plus every row whose specialty is roofing (code CD), HVAC/R (SM), commercial/industrial/refrigeration (AB), or electrical HVAC/refrigeration (6A and 6B). The download ran on 17 October 2026. The 6,758 records went into the database between 14:54:42 and 14:54:45 UTC that day. The same filter on the live file returned 6,766 rows on 5 November.
Those records sit on 6,229 companies. 6,118 were new, created by this file, and hold 6,638 of the records. The other 111 were already in our database from another file, most from California (29), Florida (26) and Virginia (18). They hold the other 120. From here on, the tables count the 6,118 companies the Washington file created.
| Licence and specialty on the company | Trade we gave it | Companies | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| Plumbing Contractor, journey level | Plumbing | 1,859 | 30.4% |
| Plumbing Contractor, residential | Plumbing | 799 | 13.1% |
| Plumbing Contractor, pump and irrigation | Plumbing | 99 | 1.6% |
| Plumbing Contractor, backflow specialty | Plumbing | 82 | 1.3% |
| Plumbing Contractor, domestic pump | Plumbing | 35 | 0.6% |
| Plumbing Contractor, residential service | Plumbing | 8 | 0.1% |
| Construction Contractor, HVAC/R | HVAC | 1,241 | 20.3% |
| Construction Contractor, commercial/industrial/refrigeration | HVAC | 65 | 1.1% |
| Electrical Contractor, HVAC/refrigeration | HVAC | 645 | 10.5% |
| Electrical Contractor, HVAC/refrigeration restricted | HVAC | 23 | 0.4% |
| Electrical Contractor, other first specialty | HVAC | 122 | 2.0% |
| Construction Contractor, roofing | Roofing | 1,140 | 18.6% |
| All | 6,118 | 100% |
Plumbing leads with 2,882 companies, 47.1%. HVAC follows with 2,096, 34.3%, and roofing has 1,140, 18.6%. The plumbing rows carry a specialty too. They follow the certificates L&I issues to plumbers: journey level, residential, residential service, pump and irrigation, domestic well and backflow. The 122 electrical firms in the “other” row list limited energy (111), residential (7) or maintenance (4) first, and an HVAC specialty second.
Our collector gives each row one trade. The plumbing licence comes first, then the first specialty that names one of our trades. A firm with a plumbing licence and an HVAC registration under one name is filed under plumbing. The file publishes no trade mix beyond that, so this page doesn’t count one.
How many licences a company holds
Most companies have one row. A firm that renewed under a new licence number, or holds both a construction registration and an electrical licence, has more.
| Washington licence records per company | Companies | Licence records |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 5,629 | 5,629 |
| 2 | 460 | 920 |
| 3 | 28 | 84 |
| 5 | 1 | 5 |
| All | 6,118 | 6,638 |
5,629 companies, 92.0%, hold one record. 489, 8.0%, hold two or more. On our Minnesota page the share with two or more was 18.4%. The Washington download asks for one licence type and five specialties, so a firm’s other Washington licences aren’t in it.
How long the licences have been held
Our database stores each company’s age as the years from its oldest dated licence to the download, to two decimals. Here the date is L&I’s effective date. Every one of the 6,118 companies has one.
| Years since effective date | Plumbing | HVAC, construction | HVAC, electrical | Roofing | All |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Under 2 | 541 | 224 | 52 | 178 | 995 |
| 2 to 4 | 1,711 | 269 | 90 | 264 | 2,334 |
| 5 to 9 | 565 | 327 | 114 | 379 | 1,385 |
| 10 to 19 | 36 | 294 | 177 | 181 | 688 |
| 20 to 29 | 23 | 118 | 304 | 87 | 532 |
| 30 or more | 6 | 74 | 53 | 51 | 184 |
| All | 2,882 | 1,306 | 790 | 1,140 | 6,118 |
1,404 companies, 22.9%, have a licence that took effect ten or more years ago. 716, 11.7%, reach twenty or more. The oldest is 63.18 years; the average is 7.96.
The columns tell different stories. The electrical HVAC firms are the oldest group: 357 of 790, 45.2%, sit at twenty years or more. Roofing and the construction HVAC firms spread across every band, with 51 roofers past thirty years.
Plumbing stops short, and the reason is the law. The plumbing contractor licence only exists since 1 July 2021. From then to the download is 5.30 years. 2,775 plumbing companies, 96.3%, are dated inside that window, and 523 of them sit between 5.0 and 5.30 years, the first wave of firms that moved over to the new licence. A plumbing firm shown at five years was licensed under the new law by then. It may have been plumbing under a specialty registration for decades before. The other 107 plumbing companies carry an older date; 46 of them hold a second Washington record, and the file doesn’t say why the rest are older.
The date is a floor for every trade. L&I’s electrical page says a firm “may need to re-license” when it changes its business name, its structure or its ownership, and then it must “Apply for a new electrical contractor license.” A new licence gets a new effective date. 190 companies here carry the status “Re-licensed”. For that reason our table of how long trade licences have been held leaves Washington out of its state-by-state ages. This page shows the dates as they are, and reads them as “at least this long.”
When the licences run out
Each company carries the expiry date of its Washington licence. The file keeps lapsed licences as well as current ones, back to 2019.
| Expires | Plumbing | HVAC | Roofing | All |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2019 to 2025 | 367 | 720 | 458 | 1,545 |
| 2026 | 336 | 175 | 86 | 597 |
| 2027 | 1,159 | 608 | 308 | 2,075 |
| 2028 | 1,020 | 593 | 288 | 1,901 |
| All | 2,882 | 2,096 | 1,140 | 6,118 |
The years after 2026 split almost evenly. That fits a two-year term that starts whenever a firm was licensed: L&I gives the plumbing licence 24 months and the electrical licence two years from its effective date. The earliest expiry is 2 October 2019 and the latest 11 December 2028.
1,925 companies, 31.5%, carry an expiry date that had passed by the download. Roofing has the largest share lapsed, 458 of 1,140 before 2026. The table keeps them, because a firm whose licence lapsed may still hold years of job files.
What L&I’s status says
The file has a “current contractor license status” column. Our collector keeps it on each company as a note.
| L&I status | Companies | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Active | 3,784 | 61.9% |
| Expired | 1,555 | 25.4% |
| Suspended | 377 | 6.2% |
| Re-licensed | 190 | 3.1% |
| Out of business | 155 | 2.5% |
| Superceded | 51 | 0.8% |
| Inactive | 4 | 0.1% |
| Passed away | 2 | 0.0% |
| All | 6,118 | 100% |
L&I explains suspension on its registration page: “We suspend a registration when the registration requirements are not met, such as a bond or insurance cancelling or expiring or an unsatisfied judgment.” All 377 suspended companies carry a suspension date, and so do 1,238 of the expired ones. “Superceded” is the file’s own spelling.
Our database turns that into its own field. 3,893 companies are marked active and 2,225 inactive. Every company L&I calls active is active in ours. 109 more are active too, though their first record says otherwise: 53 expired, 20 re-licensed, 16 suspended, 13 superceded and 7 out of business. A company with several licences is active if any of them is, so a newer licence can lift an old one. An active licence says the state hadn’t lapsed it. It doesn’t prove the firm is busy.
The file also gives the business structure. 3,572 companies, 58.4%, are limited liability companies. 1,688, 27.6%, are corporations and 800, 13.1%, are individuals, the sole traders. 38 are partnerships, 19 limited liability partnerships and one a trust.
Where the businesses are
The file publishes the mailing address the contractor gave. 5,323 companies, 87.0%, give one in Washington.
| State of the address | Companies |
|---|---|
| Washington | 5,323 |
| Oregon | 395 |
| Idaho | 222 |
| California | 37 |
| Utah | 21 |
| 28 other states | 119 |
| No state given | 1 |
| All | 6,118 |
Oregon and Idaho, the two neighbours, come next with 617 companies between them. Roofers come from furthest afield: 220 of 1,140, 19.3%, give an address outside Washington. HVAC follows at 349 of 2,096, 16.7%. Plumbers are the most local, 226 of 2,882, 7.8%. Oregon’s own electrical, plumbing and HVAC licences are counted on our Oregon trade contractor licences page.
Inside Washington, the addresses name 336 cities and towns as written.
| City | Companies |
|---|---|
| Spokane | 277 |
| Seattle | 250 |
| Vancouver | 231 |
| Tacoma | 207 |
| Everett | 126 |
| Puyallup | 107 |
| Lynnwood | 99 |
| Kent | 94 |
| Snohomish | 94 |
| Yakima | 93 |
| 326 other names | 3,745 |
| All in Washington | 5,323 |
The ten largest hold 1,578 companies, 29.6% of the Washington addresses. Spokane Valley, with 77, is counted on its own. This is the town on the mailing 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 L&I file carries no headcount, so the companies started in lane C.
| Lane and status | Companies |
|---|---|
| Lane C, qualified | 6,107 |
| Lane C, held for a name check | 6 |
| Lane C, added to a campaign | 1 |
| Lane B, 30 or more people | 2 |
| Excluded | 2 |
| All | 6,118 |
6,107 companies, 99.8%, sit in lane C as qualified. Six are held because their names carry a word our risk check stops on, a word such as “health” or “lab”. A person clears them, or they stay out of outreach. Two are excluded under our qualification rules. Two sit in lane B, which isn’t Polyshares’ lane: another source puts their headcount at 30 or more.
The L&I file has no email column. It gave a phone for 6,116 of these companies. At the read our pipeline had a website for one of them and an email address for two, all plumbing. One address was added to an email campaign on 20 October and another on 27 October. One of the two companies is in lane C; the other is one of the two lane B companies. By the read, neither had replied and neither had opted out. So this page makes no promise about when, or whether, a Washington firm hears from us.
What a licence says about the record
A Washington licence says a firm has a bond, insurance and, for plumbers and electricians, a certified person who answers for the work. It says nothing about the files behind the work. A roofing registration from 1990 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,” and construction is among the sectors it names. On price: “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 a Washington trade contractor
The records that count are the ones that show how a job was worked out. A firm that has held a licence for ten or thirty years has a long trail of them, even if its plumbing licence only says 2021.
For a plumbing contractor, that’s the service tickets, the quotes, the permits, the inspection sign-offs and the job photos. A slab leak found on the second visit, with the notes on how it was traced, is the kind of record that shows reasoning. Our page for plumbing companies goes file by file.
For an HVAC firm, it’s the service history. A no-heat call in a Spokane January, what the technician measured, what was replaced and what the callback fixed. The maintenance agreements, the start-up sheets and the refrigerant logs sit beside it. Our page for HVAC companies walks through those records.
For a roofer, it’s the inspections, the measurements, the storm-claim supplements and the warranty files. Our page for roofing companies covers them.
For all three, the estimates and the change orders carry the most. Our page on estimates and quotes covers the bids that became jobs and the ones that didn’t, and our page on job files and work orders covers what happened after the yes. Polyshares counts “spreadsheets, CRM history, support tickets” and “accounting and ERP exports” as operational data.
Before any of it is used, it’s de-identified. Polyshares says identifying fields are stripped by a specialist partner “before anything moves.” Customer names and payments are never what is wanted. What is 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 those records in order, and how de-identification works shows what gets removed.
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 effective date is a floor. For plumbers it can’t go back before July 2021, whatever the firm’s age. For everyone it resets when a firm re-licenses.
The file covers one licence type and five specialties. General contractors, who can also do roofing and HVAC work, aren’t counted. Neither are electrical contractors outside the HVAC specialties, nor the individual plumbers and electricians L&I certifies.
The file keeps licences that have lapsed. A company on this page may have closed years ago; 155 say “out of business” outright.
Our matching keeps one company per business name, state and town. A firm that trades under two names stays two companies. Two firms with the same name in the same town would become one.
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, UBI number, address, phone number, email address or person. The file names a primary principal for each licence; we keep that out of every table.
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.” Our advice: payment card numbers, bank statements and payroll should never be in an export at all. Nor should a home’s door codes or the alarm details 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 Minnesota trade contractor licences, Ohio trade contractor licences and licensed trade contractors by state board.
Methodology
The file. “L&I Contractor License Data - General” on data.wa.gov (m8qx-ubtq), published by the Washington State Department of Labor and Industries under the Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication. One row per licence or registration, with the business name, licence number and type, mailing address, city, state, ZIP code, phone, effective date, expiry date, business structure, up to two specialty codes, UBI number, primary principal, status and suspension date. The site’s metadata said the rows were last updated at 01:37 UTC on 5 November 2026.
What was collected. Our collector (wa-lni) sends one filtered request to the site’s data API: licence type PC (Plumbing Contractor), or a first or second specialty of CD (roofing), SM (HVAC/R), AB (commercial/industrial/refrigeration), 6A (electrical HVAC/refrigeration) or 6B (restricted). It refuses a file missing any column it reads and stops if the rows reach its 100,000-row limit. A row with no business name is skipped. The trade is plumbing for type PC, else the first specialty that names a trade: CD is roofing; SM, AB, 6A and 6B are HVAC. The licence class is the type and the first specialty, as written. The run of 17 October 2026 wrote 6,758 records between 14:54:42 and 14:54:45 UTC.
Status. The collector keeps L&I’s status in a note on the company and maps it: Active is active unless the expiry date has passed; every other status is inactive. A company with several licences is active if any of them is. The L&I status table reads the note.
When we read it. We read the host database read-only on 5 November 2026 through 33 single read-only statements, counts only. The L&I pages, the data.wa.gov page and metadata, and the Polyshares pages were fetched the same day. A count of the live file under the collector’s filter returned 6,766 rows.
Which companies. The tables count the 6,118 companies whose source is wa-lni, the ones this file created. The 111 that another file created first are left out. Licences per company count every wa-lni record linked to the company. A record matches a company by business name, state and town.
The queries, in plain words. Records and companies per source; companies by first source; companies by licence class and by trade; records per company; companies by band of the age field, by trade and by licence type; the age field’s count, mean and maximum, and its most common values; companies by expiry year and trade, and by expiry before the download; L&I status from the note, alone and against our status field; companies with a suspension date; business structure from the note; companies by state and trade, by Washington city in capitals, and the count of distinct cities; companies by lane and pipeline status, and the held ones by risk word; phones and websites on file; email addresses on file, their check and their campaign additions; opt-outs and replies recorded for them. Each statement and its output are kept with the page’s working files for a reviewer to re-run.
Dates. The years since the effective date are the database’s own field, set at the download from the oldest dated licence on the company, in years to two decimals. The bands are whole years. The temporal coverage runs from the earliest effective date implied by that field, 1963, to the latest expiry, 2028. Shares are rounded to one decimal.
Places. The state and city are the mailing address’s. City names are counted in capitals as written; Spokane and Spokane Valley count separately.
Lane and status. The pipeline’s own at the read, set by our qualification step. “Added to a campaign” means an email address was handed to the sending tool. Replies and opt-outs are those our database had recorded for those addresses by the read.
Left out. General contractors; construction specialties other than CD, SM and AB; electrical contractors outside 6A and 6B; elevator contractors; individual certificates; the 111 companies another file created first; licences issued since 17 October 2026.
Refresh. The tables are rebuilt monthly from a fresh download and a new read of the database. The next update is due 5 December 2026.
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Sources
- Washington State Department of Labor and Industries, L&I Contractor License Data - General (data.wa.gov m8qx-ubtq): the file, its column definitions, the licence types and specialty codes
- Washington State Department of Labor and Industries, Construction contractors must be registered: general and specialty contractors, the 63 specialties, the bond, the insurance, renewal and suspension
- Washington State Department of Labor and Industries, Plumbing licensing requirements: the plumbing contractor licence from 1 July 2021, the dedicated plumber, the $6,000 bond
- Washington State Department of Labor and Industries, Plumbing licensing requirement FAQs: the licence expires 24 months after issue
- Washington State Department of Labor and Industries, Becoming a plumber: the journey level, residential, residential service, pump and irrigation, domestic well and backflow certificates
- Washington State Department of Labor and Industries, Electrical contractor: general and specialty contractors, the $4,000 bond, the administrator, the two-year renewal, re-licensing
- Washington State Department of Labor and Industries, Electrician: the HVAC/refrigeration (06A) and restricted HVAC/refrigeration (6B) specialties
- Polyshares, home page: who qualifies, the length and texture of the record, anonymisation, what the licence does not cover (polyshares.com)
- Polyshares, case studies: a roofing company and a general contractor, with their published deal amounts (polyshares.com)