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Studies: what the records themselves say

LicenseOfRecord shows contractor license records from state licensing boards. These studies count what those records actually contain — where a disciplined license disappears instead of being marked, where a status word and an expiration date disagree, where the word “license” mostly means registration, where discipline can be found and where it structurally cannot, and how long the licenses in the records have been held. Every figure is computed from the boards’ published records as dated in each study’s methodology, and every study links only to records you can open and check.

• The disappearing license
  In some states a revoked license isn't marked — it leaves the published records entirely, and a search that finds nothing starts to look like a clean answer.
  483 Arizona disciplinary actions match just 2 licenses in the Registrar's current list.
• “Active” is a word, not a fact
  Records whose status word says current while their own expiration date has already passed — counted state by state, word and date side by side.
  1,883 of 11,524 records on Vermont's current list carry expiration dates that have already passed.
• Licensed, or just registered?
  Most Washington contractor records are registrations, Minnesota keeps a register literally named “Registered Unlicensed,” and the two words do not mean the same thing.
  89.7% of Washington's active contractor credentials are registrations, not licenses.
• The discipline map
  Where discipline is published with the license records, where it lives somewhere else entirely, and where it cannot be had at any price — and what each case means for a search.
  Illinois records 418 actions on 199 published licenses; Florida's newest published discipline contains no action entered after May 19, 2026.
• Licensed since when
  How long the current licenses in each state's records have been held: medians, the share held 25 years or more, and the oldest license still current in California — issued in 1950.
  California's oldest current license was issued February 10, 1950 — and a quarter of California's dated licenses have been held 25 years or more.

Start with a record

The studies describe the records; the records themselves are the point. Browse California, Washington, and Florida records, or check a specific license. How records are published here — and what a missing record does and doesn’t mean — is set out in the methodology.