Washington State publishes every contractor license it issues as open data. I pulled the licenses that took effect this month and broke them down. The goal: show who is getting licensed, where, and how you can use the list if you sell to contractors.
Data window: licenses with an effective date from Oct 1 to Oct 19, 2026. Source: WA Department of Labor & Industries, Contractor License Data - General on data.wa.gov. Filter: businesses only. Sole proprietors and records that look like personal names are removed.
The headline numbers
422 business contractor licenses took effect in the first 19 days of October, and every one lists a business phone number. About 100 more records in the same window were dropped because they are individuals or have no legal-entity marker in the name.
Caveat: the "effective date" marks the start of the current license term, so the list mixes brand-new businesses with renewals. A UBI (state business ID) you haven't seen before is the best signal that a business is new.
| License type | Licenses |
|---|---|
| Construction Contractor | 394 |
| Electrical Contractor | 23 |
| Plumbing Contractor | 5 |
| Business type | Licenses |
|---|---|
| LLC | 395 |
| Corporation | 26 |
| Partnership | 1 |
Specialties
| Primary specialty | Licenses |
|---|---|
| General | 322 |
| Residential | 11 |
| Painting/Wallcovering | 10 |
| Landscaping | 8 |
| Floor Covering And Counter Tops | 5 |
| Concrete | 4 |
| Roofing | 4 |
| Heating/Vent/Air-Conditioning And Refrig (Hvac/R) | 4 |
| Tile, Ceramic, Mosaic, Natural And Mfg Stone | 4 |
| Pressure Washing | 4 |
Most construction contractors register as "General". To find trade-specific leads such as roofers, HVAC or concrete, also check the second specialty and the business name.
Where they are
| Business city | Licenses |
|---|---|
| Spokane | 29 |
| Vancouver | 28 |
| Seattle | 19 |
| Everett | 18 |
| Lynnwood | 16 |
| Tacoma | 15 |
| Bothell | 13 |
| Auburn | 11 |
| Renton | 8 |
| Olympia | 7 |
| Puyallup | 7 |
| Spokane Valley | 7 |
| Business address state | Licenses |
|---|---|
| WA | 369 |
| OR | 21 |
| ID | 15 |
| CO | 3 |
About 1 in 8 licensees has an out-of-state address, mostly in Oregon (the Portland–Vancouver metro) and Idaho (the Spokane–Coeur d'Alene area).
Who this list is useful for
- Insurance, bonding and surety agents. A WA contractor license requires a bond and liability insurance, so every licensee has just bought both.
- Payroll, bookkeeping and software vendors looking for young small businesses.
- Supply houses and equipment-rental reps working a territory by ZIP prefix (980/981 for Seattle–Bellevue, 992 for Spokane).
- General contractors recruiting licensed subs.
Pull it yourself
The dataset is on Socrata, so it has a free SODA API:
curl 'https://data.wa.gov/resource/m8qx-ubtq.json?$where=licenseeffectivedate>="2026-10-01"&$limit=5000'
Then drop rows where the business type is an individual, and check each name for an entity marker (LLC, Inc, Corp...). Don't pull the principal-name column, which holds personal names.
If you'd rather not maintain that, I packaged the query, the business-only filter and the cleanup as a pay-per-result tool: WA Contractor License Scraper ($3 per 1,000 results). Schedule it daily to get each day's new licensees.
Related: Turning contractor registrations and building permits into a sales pipeline.
Not affiliated with Washington L&I. Data is public and changes daily, so verify a license with L&I before relying on it.
