Answers, organized by what you are trying to do

Public state licensing registers, published by the boards themselves as bulk downloads. The first one loaded is the California Contractors State License Board. Every listing names the register it came from and the date we read that record. No business submitted itself, and nothing here is copied out of a maps product.

It is the category of work a state license authorizes. In California a C-36 is plumbing, a C-20 is heating and air conditioning, a C-38 is refrigeration, a C-10 is electrical. A business is only returned for a job its classification actually covers, which is why the results are short.

Correct, and this is the most important rule in the matching. A B General Building license is a general contractor. It does not authorize the mechanical trades in California, and a general builder who takes plumbing work is expected to subcontract it. California holds roughly 107,000 B licenses. Counting them as plumbers would push more than 100,000 businesses in front of the roughly 18,000 that hold an actual C-36, and the nearest six results in downtown Los Angeles would come back as five remodeling firms and one plumber. So a B is never offered as a plumbing, HVAC, refrigeration or electrical answer. It appears only against the finish trades a general builder genuinely does in house, and it is labeled when it does.

It means that was the status the register carried on the day we read that record, and the listing prints that date next to it. Registers move between reads, so a license shown as active can lapse the following week. Checking the number against the issuing board takes about a minute, the board's lookup is free, and it is worth doing before money changes hands.

No. We do not inspect, interview, rate or endorse anyone here, and we have never spoken to a single business on this site. What a listing asserts is narrow and checkable: this name, this license number, this classification, this status, on this date, according to this named register. Nothing beyond that is implied and nothing beyond that should be read into it.

A license address is very often a home address, especially for a sole trader. We geocode it so we can measure how far away the business is, and we print the city and the ZIP only. The street line stays out of the page.

None. We hold no reviews of our own, and republishing ratings from a maps or reviews product would break their terms and tell you nothing you could verify. License facts are what we have instead, and every one of them can be checked at the source.

Because distance is the only thing we can honestly measure about a business we have never contacted. There is no quality score, and inventing one would be the dishonest part. Distance runs from the ZIP you type to the location on the license record, then gets converted to an estimated drive time, because five miles across a city is not five miles up an interstate. Where two are equally far, the one where we hold both a phone number and a license row is shown first.

The search starts at 25 miles and steps outward on a fixed ladder, up to 75 miles, until it has at least four results. When it has to widen, the page says so and shows the radius it settled on, so you know a longer drive is in play before you dial. It never quietly pads the list to look fuller.

Usually one of three reasons. Its state register has not been imported yet, in which case nothing from that state is listed and the page tells you so. Or the address on its license sits outside the radius the search ended up using: license addresses are administrative and can be a home two counties from where the crew actually works. Or the business asked us to take its listing down, which we honor without asking why.

Because there were not four to give inside the widest radius. Filling a thin page with businesses who are not licensed for the work, or who are ninety miles away, is the failure this was built to avoid. An empty result says which register would have to be imported to fill it, rather than pretending.

Describe the symptom instead of guessing at a trade. No hot water, walk-in not getting cold, half the lights out on one circuit: each of those resolves to a trade on its own. If it is still ambiguous, search the ZIP by itself and read the classifications on the listings that come back.

No. Nothing you type is sold, shared or passed to a business. There is no lead form, no messaging and no account, so there is nothing to sell even if we wanted to. A ZIP typed into the search box is used to compute distances for that page, and that is the end of it.

There is no messaging and no request form. Where the register publishes a phone number we show it and you dial it yourself. Nothing you do on this site reaches anybody, which is also why nobody can pay to sit at the top of it.

No. Explicitly, and this is worth being blunt about: a listing means a public register lists this business under a license classification that covers the work you searched for. It is not a recommendation, an approval or any statement about quality. Read the license, call two or three of them, and ask for proof of insurance before anyone starts work.

Today it does not. No fee to search, no fee to be listed, no advertising on the results, no leads sold. If that ever changes it gets written on the page it affects, in plain words, rather than folded quietly into the ordering. The ordering is distance.