GetTradeLicense

Open data: US contractor licensing and costs

498 records covering 51 jurisdictions and 5 trades — what each requires, what it costs, whether an exam applies, and who it reciprocates with. Free under CC BY 4.0.

23 of the 51 jurisdictions do not license general contractors at state level at all — Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Missouri, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Texas, Vermont, Washington, Wyoming. In those states general contracting is licensed by city or county, or not licensed at all, and this dataset records that as a fact rather than as a missing value.

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What is in it

  • 498 state × trade × tier records
  • 74 records where the trade needs no state license
  • 354 records naming a specific license tier
  • Verified between 2026-04-02 and 2026-09-14

What is NOT in it

  • No city or county licensing. Many trades are licensed locally and this dataset is state-level only — including general contracting in the 23 jurisdictions listed above.
  • No bond or insurance premiums — the requirement is recorded on-site, the market price is not.
  • No historical series. This is a current snapshot.
  • credential says what kind of statewide credential the trade needs: license-exam, license-no-exam, registration (mandatory, but statute does not call it a license — Washington, New Jersey, Iowa) or none. license_required is true only for the two license kinds; a registration still carries its fee, bond and insurance columns.
  • An empty fee means not applicable, never free. A trade needing no license carries empty fee columns rather than 0.
  • No tier-level fees. Rows are state × trade × tier, but the fee columns are scoped to the state and trade — the underlying data carries no per-tier fee — so the same numbers repeat on every tier row of a trade. Every row states this in its fee_scope column, valued trade. 111 state × trade groups span more than one row, so deduplicate by state + trade before summing or averaging fees, or a four-tier state is counted four times. The tier rows are kept because tiers genuinely differ in required experience and in exam_required.
  • application_fee and initial_fee are separate charges, reported from separate source fields and never substituted for each other. Across the 51 jurisdictions, for general contractors: 11 publish a distinct initial license fee, 17 publish only an application fee, and 23 do not license general contractors at state level at all.
  • No per-fee citation. source_urlis the licensing authority's own page and is identical to license_url on all 498 records. The underlying data carries one authoritative URL per trade record, not a citation per number, and this dataset reports that rather than inventing a second link. Use last_verified on each record for currency.

Embed the cost ranking

Every state that publishes a distinct initial license fee for general contractors — not a top-N slice, the full set of 12. One row per state: fees are trade-scoped, so multi-tier states are deduplicated here exactly as the dataset asks consumers to do. Plain HTML — no iframe, no script. It styles with your CSS and the credit is a normal link.

<table>
  <caption>US general contractor licenses: initial fee, all 12 of 51 jurisdictions publishing one (23 do not license general contractors at state level at all)</caption>
  <tr><th>State</th><th>Initial fee</th></tr>
  <tr><td>Hawaii</td><td>$633</td></tr>
  <tr><td>Nevada</td><td>$600</td></tr>
  <tr><td>Arizona</td><td>$580</td></tr>
  <tr><td>New Mexico</td><td>$300</td></tr>
  <tr><td>California</td><td>$200</td></tr>
  <tr><td>Florida</td><td>$200</td></tr>
  <tr><td>Alabama</td><td>$163</td></tr>
  <tr><td>Massachusetts</td><td>$150</td></tr>
  <tr><td>Utah</td><td>$128</td></tr>
  <tr><td>Wisconsin</td><td>$30</td></tr>
  <tr><td>Georgia</td><td>$25</td></tr>
  <tr><td>Ohio</td><td>$25</td></tr>
</table>
<p>Fees are per state and trade, not per license tier. Verified 2026-04-02 to 2026-07-08. Data: <a href="https://www.gettradelicense.com/data">US Contractor Licensing Dataset</a> by GetTradeLicense, <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY 4.0</a></p>

The snippet is dated with the verification window of the rows it actually contains (2026-04-02 to 2026-07-08). The dataset as a whole was verified 2026-04-02 to 2026-09-14, and it sits at the older end of that window: 455 of 498 records were last verified 2026-04-02. The newest date in the file is never quoted on its own as the file's currency.

Attribution

US Contractor Licensing Dataset by GetTradeLicense, CC BY 4.0

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