Remodeling Contractors in Texas

The local rule that changes the advice

In a licensed state the first question is “what is your licence number?” In Texas that question has no state-level answer for a remodeler. The Texas Occupations Code licenses the trades a remodeler hires — electricians under Chapter 1305, air-conditioning and refrigeration contractors under Chapter 1302, plumbers under Chapter 1301 through the Texas State Board of Plumbing Examiners — and it does not create a residential general-contractor licence at all. TDLR’s own “at a glance” roster of 41 regulated programs (FY 2025) lists electricians, ACR contractors, mould assessors, elevator contractors and industrialized housing. General contracting is not on it.

That is not a loophole the agency forgot to close. The last statewide builder-registration body, the Texas Residential Construction Commission, was abolished after the 81st Legislature declined to continue it. The Sunset Commission’s 2009 final report recommended repealing the TRCC Act; the agency wound down, and no successor licensing board was created. Builders remained subject to municipal permitting. They did not become state licensees.

The rule that actually changes what a Texas homeowner should do is therefore municipal, and it is not one rule. San Antonio requires a registered residential building contractor or home-improvement contractor before a permit is issued for the work those classes cover. El Paso requires a city contractor registration in the General Contractor class, with a blanket construction bond and a general-liability certificate on file, before the One Stop Shop will issue a building permit. Houston, Dallas, Austin and unincorporated counties each have their own counter. A registration in one city is not a registration in the next.

HyreRemodel recommendation: stop asking a Texas remodeler whether they are “licensed.” Ask three narrower questions: (1) are you registered with the city that will inspect this lot, and what is the number; (2) who holds the TDLR or TSBPE licence for any electrical, HVAC or plumbing work you will self-perform; (3) will you hand me the Tex. Prop. Code § 53.255 disclosure and a current certificate of insurance before I sign.

What those fees actually buy a homeowner

San Antonio’s $170 two-year residential-building registration is the cleanest local figure on this page because it is in the ordinance, on the department’s public page, and it is the price of being allowed to pull a structural remodel permit in that city. We reopened the Development Services “Building & Home Improvement” page on 5 September 2026: home-improvement registration is still $150 for two years; residential-building contractor registration is still $170 for two years; commercial general contractors still have “no license or registration requirements.” Those three sentences are the city’s, not ours. The $170 is not a competency exam score. Category 1 (“Registered”) on Contractor Connect requires the fee, a code-of-ethics acknowledgement, general liability insurance and an FBI background check — Information Bulletin 236, revised 10 November 2025. Category 2 (Registered Plus) adds current permitting fees, no verified building-related infractions, and two DSD training events a year. Category 3 (Premier) adds a Residential ICC certification or a Building Official-approved equivalent. They still are not a state licence.

El Paso’s $100 annual fee plus a $50,000 bond is the price of being on the Accela register that the One Stop Shop checks before it issues a building permit. We reopened the Planning and Inspections Contractor Registration Requirements sheet (Rev. 07/2024) on 5 September 2026. The general-contractor box still reads: assumed-name or corporate documents; the application; a certificate of insurance (GL) with a printed minimum of $100,000 and the City of El Paso as certificate holder; a $50,000 blanket building construction bond; and “$100 Annual Fee + Tech Fee.” The same sheet’s note still sets the coverage floors at $250,000 bodily injury per person / $500,000 aggregate and $100,000 property damage per occurrence and aggregate. The 2024 schedule raised the general-contractor bond from the $25,000 figure on the 2020 requirements sheet our store still quotes in older insurance notes. Use the 2024 schedule. An Issued Accela registration is evidence that the city held a certificate and a bond at registration. The register does not publish the carrier, the limits or the policy period, so it is not proof of current coverage. Ask for the certificate.

Neither fee is statewide. An Austin remodeler registered with Austin’s Development Services is invisible to San Antonio Contractor Connect. That is the market structure, not a data gap we can fill by pretending TDLR has a lookup.

HyreRemodel analysis: the two cities also price the licensed trades differently from the unlicensed GC, which is the local rule a national “check the licence” page never reaches. El Paso charges electrical, mechanical and plumbing registrants no annual fee — they file the state licence instead of the bond. San Antonio charges no fee to register a state plumber licence, $85 a year to register a state mechanical licence, and $85 a year to register a TCEQ irrigator licence. The remodeler’s $170 or $100 is the price of being allowed to pull the building permit. The trades’ city fees are the price of being allowed to pull the trade permit. They are not substitutes for each other.

When the work goes wrong: liens, retainage, not a board complaint

There is no TDLR complaint to file against a remodeler for being unlicensed as a general contractor, because the licence does not exist. Recovery in Texas is a property-law problem, not a licensing-board problem. That is the local rule that most national “check the licence” advice quietly fails.

Chapter 53 of the Property Code is the mechanic’s-lien statute. Section 53.021 is who can file: a person who, under a contract with the owner or the owner’s agent, contractor or subcontractor, labours or furnishes labour or materials for construction or repair of an improvement — and, separately, licensed architects, engineers and surveyors, landscapers, and demolition labour. The original contractor you hired is not the only person who can put a claim on the house. That is the point of the statute.

For a residential construction contract, § 53.255 requires a disclosure the original contractor must deliver before the owner signs. The disclosure is not a pamphlet. It is the state’s explanation that unpaid subcontractors can lien the house, that the owner should withhold against a written notice of claim, and that the owner should reserve 10 percent of payments for 30 days after completion. Failure to give the disclosure does not, by itself, kill a lien (§ 53.255(c)). It is still the document you should have in the file before the first draw.

Retainage is the statutory number. Section 53.101 requires the owner, during the work and for 30 days after the work under the original contract is completed, to reserve 10 percent of the contract price of the work to the owner, or 10 percent of the value of the work measured against the contract. On a $75,000 residential construction contract that is $7,500 held back — a statutory illustration, not a quote for any kitchen, and not a claim about typical Texas remodel cost. Section 53.105 is the consequence of skipping it: claimants who complied with Subchapter C or the retainage subchapter have a lien, at least to the extent of the amount that should have been reserved, against the improvements and the lot. The 10 percent is not a courtesy the contractor grants you. It is the recovery mechanism the state built instead of a licensing board.

Section 53.256 requires a written list of subcontractors and suppliers — name, address, telephone — before construction starts, updated within 15 days of any addition or deletion, unless the owner waives it in writing in the 10-point bold form the statute prints. The waiver, once signed, “may not be canceled at a later date.” Asking for that list is how you find out who actually holds the TDLR and TSBPE numbers on your job. Do not initial the waiver because it was in the stack.

A homestead has a second gate. Section 53.254 will not let a mechanic’s lien attach to a homestead unless the owner and the person furnishing labour or material execute a written contract before the material is furnished or the labour is performed, both spouses sign if the owner is married, and the contract is filed with the county clerk of the county where the homestead sits. The lien affidavit on a homestead must carry, in at least 10-point bold at the top of the page: “NOTICE: THIS IS NOT A LIEN. THIS IS ONLY AN AFFIDAVIT CLAIMING A LIEN.”

Filing windows, after the 1 January 2022 amendments in House Bill 2237: an original contractor on a residential project must file the affidavit with the county clerk not later than the 15th day of the third month after the month in which the original contractor’s work was completed, terminated or abandoned (§ 53.052(a)(2)). A derivative claimant on a residential project has the same third-month window, measured from the later of last labour or materials or the date specially fabricated materials would normally have been delivered (§ 53.052(c)). A retainage claimant who is not the original contractor files by the 15th day of the third month after the original contract was completed, terminated or abandoned (§ 53.052(d)). Those are the statute’s clocks. They are not a recommendation to wait until month three.

Final payment has its own paper. Section 53.259 requires the original contractor, as a condition of final payment on a residential construction contract, to execute and deliver a bills-paid affidavit: either that every person has been paid in full for labour and materials, or the amount owed and the name, address and telephone of each person still unpaid. An intentionally, knowingly or recklessly false statement in that affidavit is a misdemeanor — a fine not to exceed $4,000, confinement not to exceed one year, or both — and the signer is personally liable for loss or damage from false or incorrect information. Do not treat a “paid in full” stamp on an invoice as a substitute.

Defect claims against a builder sit under the Residential Construction Liability Act, Property Code Chapter 27 — a notice-and-opportunity-to-cure statute, not a licensing action. Deceptive-practice claims sit under the Deceptive Trade Practices Act. None of those is a substitute for a licence lookup, and none of this section is legal advice. A Texas construction lawyer is the person who applies Chapter 53 or Chapter 27 to a named job. We publish the map; we do not walk it for you.

Method, limits, and what this page is not

Licence-file counts are a directory listing of data/remodeling-data/licenses/ with state = TX, measured 2026-09-05. Authority strings are taken from the files. Company-state counts are the same measurement on company-states/. El Paso Accela CapDetail URLs for the two named El Paso firms were reopened on 5 September 2026: LCCR19-00259 Issued, expires 11 August 2027; LCCR25-00297 Issued, expires 3 August 2027. San Antonio Contractor Connect does not expose a stable per-firm URL; GDK Remodeling LLC is cited from the 29 August 2026 harvest of that register. San Antonio registration fees, insurance floors and trade-overlay fees were re-read from the live DSD Building & Home Improvement, Electrical, Mechanical and Plumbing pages on 5 September 2026. El Paso fees, bond and trade-overlay rules were re-read from Contractor Registration Requirements, Rev. 07/2024, on 5 September 2026. Comptroller outlet counts are from research/harvests/tx-comptroller-remodeling-2026-08-29.json, itself a pull of the public Active Sales Tax Permit Holders dataset. Occupations Code and Property Code citations were retrieved from statutes.capitol.texas.gov on 5 September 2026 and cross-checked on texas.public.law (statute texts there verified to 26 May 2025).

Limits, stated rather than footnoted: the store’s Texas layer is two cities, not 254 counties. Houston, Dallas, Austin, Fort Worth, unincorporated Harris County and every other Texas permitting authority are outside this harvest. A firm that works only in those places is invisible here, which is a sampling frame, not a finding that they are unverified. Disciplinary arrays on Texas records are empty because we have not retrieved a disciplinary feed for these municipal registers — empty is missing retrieval, not a clean record. An Issued Accela row is not current insurance. A Contractor Connect “Registered” row is not an examined trade licence.

This page does not rank contractors, does not score reviews, and does not say anyone is the best remodeler in Texas. It does not cannibalise the 50-state study of which states issue no contractor licence — that study is The States Where Anyone Can Call Themselves a Remodeling Contractor. The lookup URLs for every state board sit on Every State’s Contractor Licence Lookup, and Whether It Works. Texas, as a market a homeowner has to navigate, is this URL.

HyreRemodel does not remodel homes, does not pull permits, and does not take a fee for placing a firm on this list. Nothing here is legal advice, a licence verification for a named job, or a quote.