Checking a subcontractor's license — and why the card is not the check

Why an unlicensed sub becomes your problem

You did not issue the license and you do not have to hold it. The exposure still flows uphill, starting with a promise you already made: your subcontract says every tier is properly licensed, and the prime contract above it says the same to the owner.

• Permits usually run on a license number. Where the trade is licensed, an unlicensed sub cannot pull one. Either the work goes uninspected, or you pull the permit and quietly take on the workmanship.
• In several states an unlicensed contractor cannot enforce a contract or perfect a mechanic's lien. That sounds like it favors you. It does not. The person on your site has no legal stake in the agreement you both signed, so a dispute over bad work gets settled outside it.
• The independent-contractor characterisation can collapse. Some states will not treat an unlicensed person doing licensed work as an independent contractor at all. That pushes them toward your payroll and toward your workers' compensation premium audit, which is usually where this surfaces first.
• Your own license number is exposed. In many states, hiring an unlicensed sub is itself a violation by the licensee who hired them. The complaint lands against your number.

Which of those apply where you build is a question for your own counsel and your state's board, not for a software company's website — this one included. What holds everywhere is simpler: the fact underneath is public, free, and two minutes away. Your state's workers' comp exemption rule works the same way. The agency issuing the document is the only source current by definition.

The card is a photograph. The board record is the fact.

If you have read what a certificate of insurance actually proves, you know the shape of this. A license card and a certificate share one defect. Both are printed summaries of a record held somewhere else, and both keep saying what they said long after the record moved.

A card cannot go suspended. The register can. A bond lapses, a comp policy cancels, a complaint is upheld — and the board's status field flips off Active while the PDF in your folder says Active, in the same font, forever. Nobody emails you. The sub may not know either.

What is on the card, and why almost none of it is standard

A contractor license carries roughly the same facts wherever it comes from: a number, the issuing state and authority, a classification or trade, the holder's name and often a separate business name, a printed status, and issue and expiry dates. Some states also publish the bond and whether workers' compensation is on file.

None of it is standardized. There is no national license, no shared numbering scheme, and no classification system that means the same thing in two states. Three examples cover most of the ways people get this wrong.

That last row catches people out constantly. A Texas sub who holds no general-contractor license is describing the law, not dodging you — and a Texas electrician still has a number you can look up in seconds. A search that returns nothing is as often the wrong agency as an unlicensed sub. Write the consequence into your paperwork: a blanket “must be licensed” clause copied from another state can be unenforceable where you build. Name the licenses you need alongside everything else you require before a sub starts.

A license, a registration and a certification are three different things

This conflation produces most of the wrong documents in a compliance file, and it happens in good faith. A sub sends whichever paper they think you meant.

• A state board license is permission. An agency has qualified the holder, usually by examination, and publishes the record in a searchable register. This is what your subcontract means, and the only one of the three with a public status field.
• A local registration is a filing. A city or county contractor registration, or a business-tax receipt, records that someone paid a fee there. It usually tests nothing and travels nowhere.
• A trade certification is competence. A journeyman card, a manufacturer's installer certification, a welding qualification. Real evidence the person can do the work — but not evidence the company may contract for it.
• A safety card is none of the above. An OSHA 10 or 30 card is a training record, not permission to contract — and it carries no expiry date at all.

Ask by name and the confusion evaporates. “Your state contractor license number and the issuing state” gets you something searchable; “proof you're licensed” gets you a photograph of whatever was nearest.

Running the lookup on the board's own site

Do this on the site of the authority that issued the license. Not a search result, and not a lead-generation site mirroring board data. A copy of a register is some unknown number of days behind, which puts it in the same category as the card.

1. 1Identify the issuing authority. It is named on the card; if it is not, the state and the trade together are enough. The boards have their own association of state licensing agencies, and it is the starting point when the card names nobody.
2. 2Search by the number. This confirms a record exists and shows what the register says today, which is the only thing that was ever in question.
3. 3Search by name too, separately. A number can be valid and belong to an entity that is not quite the one on your subcontract — a sibling company, a former name, an individual rather than the LLC. Searching by number alone hides that.
4. 4Read the status field on the board's page. Active is what you want. Expired, suspended, revoked, inactive and pending are all a no. So is a status you do not recognize — call the board rather than interpret it.
5. 5Note the expiry or renewal date somewhere that will remind you. It is the field most likely to bring you back here in ten months.
6. 6Compare the classification against your scope. The next section is about that, because it is the check that survives everything above and still fails.
7. 7Look for disciplinary history. Many boards publish citations, upheld complaints, and any lapse in the bond or comp coverage attached to the license. One more click.
8. 8Save the page, dated. Print the result to PDF with the date visible. The live page will say something else next quarter, and when your carrier's auditor asks, a dated printout is a record where “we checked at the time” is a recollection.

When the classification does not cover the scope you hired for

Here is the failure that gets through everything above. Status Active. Dates clean. Name matches the subcontract exactly. And the classification on the record does not reach the work in your scope. A general building class does not automatically carry every specialty trade beneath it, and a residential qualification does not carry a commercial job.

Do not settle it yourself by reading class descriptions and forming a view. Classification scope is technical, boards differ, and being confidently wrong is how a permit gets refused after the crew has mobilized. Three better moves:

• Ask the sub, in writing, which classification covers the scope. A specific answer you can check is one outcome. A vague one is also an answer, arriving early and cheaply.
• Ask the board. Defining what a classification covers is why the board exists. Most publish the descriptions and will answer about a specific scope.
• Split the scope. Hire the correctly classified trade directly for the part that does not fit, or have your sub subcontract it and hand you that licensee's number — which you look up the same way.

If the disputed portion carries real money, that is a question for your counsel, and better asked before the crew arrives than after the inspector does.

Renewals, re-checks, and where Sealinn fits

Renewal cycles vary by state and trade — one year in some places, two in many. The cadence is not really the point, because the events that make a card wrong rarely wait for a renewal date. A bond lapses. A comp policy cancels. Many boards attach the license to a named qualifying individual who sat the exam. If that person leaves, the license can go inactive while the company, the phone number and the trucks stay the same.

So re-check on events rather than on a calendar you will stop obeying: every new job, every renewal, and before final payment and release of retention. Hang it on your existing certificate verification routine, because the sub's paperwork is already in front of you at that moment.

Sealinn reads the license itself, field by field: number, holder, business name, issuing state and authority, classification, issue and expiry dates, and the status as printed. Three of those are critical — the number, the holder name and the expiry date — and they set the confidence score Sealinn shows you. Routing is a separate test: any field Sealinn reads at under 95% sends the card to your review queue rather than through. How Sealinn decides whether a person has to look works the same way for a license as for a certificate.

A status printing expired, suspended, revoked or inactive is a failure in Sealinn, not a note on the record. An expiry already past is a failure too; inside 30 days it is a warning. Once the card is approved and current, Sealinn emails your sub 90, 60, 30 and 7 days before the date, unless you set a different cadence. Sealinn stores the number and the classification exactly as printed, because there is no national standard to normalize them to.

The rule underneath all of this is the one that governs the certificate too. Prefer the register to the document, and prefer a dated record of what you saw to a memory of having looked.