Remodeling contractors with clean board records

What a clean board record would have to mean

“Contractors with no complaints” is the query. It is not a thing any of these boards actually publish, and it is not a thing we can compute from the store.

A complaint is an allegation. Most boards keep complaints confidential until they have found probable cause, issued a citation, or taken a formal action. Florida’s rule is statutory: under Fla. Stat. §455.225(10), the complaint and the investigation are confidential until ten days after probable cause, or until the licensee waives confidentiality. Nevada’s board states that complaint disclosure is restricted to cases that resulted in disciplinary action. California discloses some complaints under Business and Professions Code §7124.6 — those referred for accusation, or referred for investigation after a supervisor-reviewed finding of a probable violation that would warrant suspension, revocation or criminal prosecution — and does not disclose complaints resolved in the contractor’s favour. North Carolina’s board says a complaint is a public record but “the information that remains on the licence record is the resulting Board decision,” and a disciplinary action “will be disclosed upon request.”

So the public record, where it exists, is almost never “complaints.” It is discipline: citations, accusations, suspensions, revocations, stipulations, docket numbers. A clean board record, if the phrase is going to mean anything we can defend, is a licence for which the issuing board publishes disciplinary history in a form we retrieved, and that retrieval came back with no actions inside the window the board itself discloses.

HyreRemodel analysis: that definition has three screens, and failing any one of them is exclusion, not a maybe. The board must publish. We must have ingested what it publishes. The empty result must be the board’s empty result, not our empty field. A fourth screen sits on top of those three for any named firm: we re-check the live lookup. We did not clear that fourth screen on 2026-09-05.

Which boards actually publish discipline

Publication and ingestion are different jobs. On 2026-09-05 we re-opened the six board sites the contract named. Five of the seven authorities in this store — Utah, California, Arizona, Nevada and Florida — publish disciplinary history in a form a homeowner can query without a public-records request. We have ingested that history from one of them. North Carolina discloses upon request and in newsletter summaries. Texas has no state remodeling-GC board to query.

Utah DOPL, opened 2026-09-05. The Licensee Lookup & Verification returned, on the live search page, the banner “Information Current as of 09/03/2026.” That matches the currency stamp we recorded as 2026-09-03. Contractor is a selectable profession. Each contractor detail still returns either “YES View Actions” with a docket citation or the string “NO DISCIPLINARY ACTIONS WITHIN THE TIME FRAME ESTABLISHED IN UTAH CODE 63G-4-106 AND 107**.” Detail is a POST to /llv/search/detail.html, reCAPTCHA v3 gated; there is no shareable per-licence URL. A named-firm re-check still could not be completed as a citation. DOPL also maintains a Disciplinary Actions and Citations search (Cloudflare-challenged this session) and publishes monthly disciplinary newsletters as PDFs.

California CSLB, opened 2026-09-05. Check a License still leads with the sentence we need: look up a contractor licence “to verify information, including complaint disclosure.” Business and Professions Code §7124.6, retrieved the same day, still requires the registrar to make available the date, nature and status of complaints referred for accusation or for investigation of a probable violation that would warrant suspension, revocation or criminal prosecution, and the date, nature and disposition of legal actions. The clocks are unchanged: citations five years after compliance (longer if later actions were filed); accusations resulting in suspension or stayed revocation seven years; unstayed revocations indefinitely; letters of admonishment one or two years. Complaints resolved in the contractor’s favour are not disclosed. The public data portal is a set of free filtered lists (by classification, county, master list, ZIP). The Complaint Disclosure / Legal Action File is a separate paid bulk order through CSLB Forms and Applications / Data Services, currently listed with the Action Codes file at a non-refundable $235. We have not purchased it and have not loaded it into disciplinary_actions.

Arizona ROC, retrieved 2026-09-05. The posting list is live. As of 2026-09-02 it offered a current-contractors file of 57,886 records and a Disciplinary Actions CSV covering 2026-03-03 to 2026-09-02 (71.77 KB). The CSV’s own header tells the reader that some forms of discipline are temporary and that good standing must be confirmed on Contractor Search. The contractor search on roc.az.gov returned a Cloudflare challenge this session; the Aura community endpoint at azroc.my.site.com/AZRoc/s/contractor-search loaded as a JavaScript shell without a named-firm record we could cite. We queried that Aura search for roster and status in August 2026. We did not ingest the complaint pane or the CSV, and we name no firm from either.

Nevada NSCB, opened 2026-09-05. The contractor licence search is the public lookup — search by licence number, company name, or principal or qualified individual. The board’s homepage still links it as “Verify Contractor License.” The board’s consumer-complaint PDF, retrieved this date, states the disclosure rule in one sentence: the Board provides licence and bond status and disciplinary action, and “Complaint disclosure is restricted by law to cases which resulted in disciplinary action taken by the Board.” That is the public restatement of NRS 624.327: investigation files are confidential; the charging document and the record considered when the Board imposes discipline are public. Monthly disciplinary-hearing outcome PDFs continue to be posted on nvcontractorsboard.com — the May 2026 outcomes PDF is live. We have not parsed those PDFs into the field, and we name no firm from them.

Florida DBPR, opened 2026-09-05. The licensee search is the official verification portal. The search page itself was timestamped 9/4/2026 when we opened it. Licence detail carries a “View License Complaint” link. DBPR’s own FAQ answers what that link shows: “The only complaints that appear on this screen are complaints for which probable cause has been found or where the subject of the complaint has waived his/her right to confidentiality and complaints against unlicensed persons.” The FAQ then quotes Fla. Stat. §455.225(10). We harvested roster and status from wl11.asp. We did not write the complaint pane into the store.

North Carolina NCLBGC, opened 2026-09-05. nclbgc.org/license-search/ now redirects to portal.nclbgc.org/Public/Search. The form searches classification, licence number, qualifier, company, name, phone and address. It does not expose a discipline field. The contractor FAQ, live this date, still says: “A complaint is a public record. The information that remains on the licence record is the resulting Board decision. A disciplinary action will be disclosed upon request.” Quarterly newsletter summaries of final decisions and consent orders are posted as PDFs. We did not request a disciplinary file, we did not parse the newsletters into the store, and we name no firm from them.

What we have actually ingested

HyreRemodel calculation, measured 2026-09-05 from 22,183 licence files on disk:

disciplinary_actions is a nonempty array on 32 records. All 32 are Utah. Every Utah nonempty value is the board’s own flag, “YES View Actions,” stored with a docket citation from the LLV detail. Those 32 match, one-for-one, the “YES” rows in the raw DOPL evidence files we retrieved on 2026-08-29 / 2026-08-30.

Utah’s other 671 records are empty arrays that are not missing retrieval. Each one matches a DOPL detail row whose disciplinary field is the time-limited “NO DISCIPLINARY ACTIONS WITHIN THE TIME FRAME…” string. That is the only state in which empty means “the board said no, inside its window.”

California, Florida, Arizona, Nevada, Texas and North Carolina together account for 21,480 records. All of them have empty disciplinary_actions arrays. That is missing retrieval.

We did ingest other public-record fields from those boards. All 4,820 California records are primary_verified_active; 919 of them carry board_notices — workers’-compensation events, licence reissues, home-improvement-salesperson letters. Those notices are not discipline, and they sit next to empty disciplinary arrays on licences whose Check a License page would show citations if we had asked. Arizona is the sharper case: status is ingested (active, inactive, suspended, revoked) and discipline is not.

Records with a nonempty disciplinary_actions array, by authority. Zero is missing retrieval except in Utah, where it would have been a board “no” — and even Utah’s “no” is time-limited.

HyreRemodel calculation from data/remodeling-data/licenses/, counted 2026-09-05. The bar is a count of ingested discipline, not a count of clean contractors.

Utah, and why we still will not name firms

Utah is the only jurisdiction that clears the first three screens: the board publishes, we retrieved the field, and empty means the board’s empty, not ours. On retrieval dates 2026-08-29 / 2026-08-30 we held 703 Utah contractor licences for 703 companies. 32 carried “YES View Actions” with a docket citation. 671 carried the board’s time-limited “no actions” string. All 703 were listed Active on the LLV, with expiration 30 November 2027.

That is not a clean-record ranking, for three independent reasons.

The “no” is not forever. Utah Code §63G-4-106 requires an agency that posts administrative disciplinary action on a state-controlled website to remove it from public access no later than ten years from the final order, or from commencement if no final order issued. §63G-4-107 lets a person petition for removal after five years if they have completed the order, have not repeated the same violation, and pay a fee — or sooner with a related criminal expungement. DOPL’s own string says so in capital letters: “NO DISCIPLINARY ACTIONS WITHIN THE TIME FRAME ESTABLISHED IN UTAH CODE 63G-4-106 AND 107.” A firm with a 2014 revocation that aged off the website would appear in our 671 as empty. Older actions remain public records under GRAMA; they are just not on the website.

The lookup cannot be cited per firm. The LLV has no shareable per-licence URL. Detail is a session POST behind reCAPTCHA v3. We opened the live lookup on 2026-09-05; it reported information current as of 2026-09-03. Completing a named-firm search requires a real browser session we cannot replay here as a citation. The standing rule on this desk is that if we cannot confirm a named firm against the live board, we do not name it.

A list of 671 identical “no” results is not a ranking. The contract asked for a ranked list with a published selection methodology and a per-entry basis. Public-record attributes only; no review scores; no self-reported revenue. Inside Utah, the 671 firms that cleared the retrieved-empty screen are not ordered by any second public-record variable we are prepared to defend. Publishing them alphabetically would be a directory of absences. Publishing a sample without live confirmation would be a sample of our August files.

HyreRemodel analysis: Utah is the proof of method, not the inventory of winners. The useful number is 32 of 703 — about one in twenty-two of the Utah remodelers we researched had a published action inside DOPL’s window on the August retrieval dates. That is a fact about our sample, on those dates, not a Utah industry rate. Anyone hiring in Utah should run the LLV themselves, then read the docket, then ask DOPL under GRAMA if the website “no” is the whole story they need.