A contractor's license can expire, lapse, get suspended, or lose its bond or workers'-compensation coverage at any time. None of those events sends you an email. If you checked a license once when you onboarded the sub, you know what was true on that day and nothing since.
What it is
Contractor License Monitor takes the license numbers you care about and verifies each one against the state's own official database — current status, classifications and expiration, plus contractor's bond, workers' compensation and complaint disclosure in California, where CSLB publishes them — then keeps a page that stays current: California is read live from CSLB at check time, and Oregon and Texas come from each state's daily-refreshed open data.
The point is not the lookup. You can do a lookup yourself. The point is that it keeps looking after you have stopped.
The coverage difference, stated plainly
This matters more than anything else on this page, and it is the first thing we will tell you:
- California (CSLB) — includes disciplinary and suspension status. - Oregon (CCB) and Texas (TDLR) — publish active status, classification and expiration, but not disciplinary history.
So a clean Oregon record is not the same claim as a clean California record. In California, "no disciplinary entry" is a finding. In Oregon and Texas, it is the absence of a field. If you treat those as equivalent, you have given yourself false comfort in two states out of three.
We could have hidden that behind one green tick for all three. We would rather you knew which answer you were holding.
Who it is for
Anyone carrying risk on somebody else's license: general contractors with subs, procurement teams approving vendors, and the counsel who get asked after the fact whether the sub was licensed on the day of the work.
What it cannot tell you
- It cannot tell you the work was good. A current license is a regulatory status, not a quality signal. - It cannot tell you about a state we do not cover. Today that is California, Oregon and Texas. A contractor licensed elsewhere is outside it. - It cannot pre-empt the state. If the state's own database has not recorded a suspension yet, neither have we. We verify against their data; we do not have a second source. - It is not a credit check, an insurance verification beyond what the state publishes, or legal advice.
Why verification beats a copied record
Reselling a scraped snapshot is cheap and it ages badly. A license file that was accurate last quarter is a liability dressed as a record. Every field we show is verified against the state's own official data — California read live from CSLB at check time, Oregon and Texas from each state's daily-refreshed open data — so the answer is current rather than remembered.
Start here: Contractor License Monitor.