2,283 Candidates, 445 Confirmed: Active Contractor Licenses Tied to Dissolved Business Entities

State contractor licensing boards and Secretaries of State maintain independent registries. A license board marks a license as active when its renewal requirements are met. A Secretary of State marks a business entity as dissolved when it fails to file required reports or formally winds down. The two agencies do not automatically notify each other when their records diverge.

When a business entity is dissolved, the legal structure behind the contractor’s work — the entity that holds insurance, can be party to a contract, and can be pursued in a dispute — no longer exists in the eyes of the state. A license number that appears valid in a licensing board database may belong to a business whose Secretary of State registration was dissolved months or years ago. RecordGraph surfaced this gap by joining two independent government registries — then went further and independently corroborated every candidate match rather than trusting a shared business name alone.

A shared name between two government databases is not by itself proof of a match — common business names collide across state registries constantly. Of 2,283 name-matched candidates, 445 are confirmed against independent evidence (an exact address match, an exact officer match, or a name too rare to be coincidental), a further 134 are likely matches, 105 are uncertain (evidence too thin to resolve either way), 1,092 are unlikely — coincidental name collisions between unrelated businesses — and 3(all CSLB) had insufficient data to adjudicate either way. That accounts for all 1,779 candidates that had at least one independently checkable signal (see “Data sources & methodology” below for how each tier was determined, and what happened to the remaining candidates).

Check a contractor

Enter a contractor license number or business name to see if it appears in this finding.

Breakdown by board

1,779 candidates independently adjudicated (excludes 175 already-confirmed high-evidence candidates and 329 candidates with no independently checkable signal).

Sample records

10 representative records with a “confirmed” judgment — each independently corroborated by an exact address or officer match, not name matching alone.