What licensed contractor means in every state

The five-level scheme, and the assignment rule

HyreRemodel analysis, not a statutory hierarchy. Each state is assigned to the highest level its statewide residential-remodeling credential reaches. “Highest” is defined by how much of the credential a homeowner can read off the published class list without a lawyer. A municipal overlay never raises a state’s level. A registration never outranks a competency licence. A licence whose published title does not contain remodel, remodeling or home improvement never outranks one that does.

Level 1 is no statewide residential general-contractor or home-improvement credential. Level 2 is a statewide registration without a competency exam for remodeling. Level 3 is a statewide competency licence that exists only above a published project-value trigger of $25,000 or more — the line at which a typical mid-range remodel can sit outside the licence. A $1,000–$2,500 casual or handyman exemption inside an otherwise licensed state is treated as a carve-out, not as a threshold regime, and does not pull the state down to Level 3. Level 4 is a statewide competency licence whose published class names (CGC, CBC, CRC, Class B, B-100, Residential Contractor, Home Builder) do not contain those words; remodeling is permitted by the scope language, not by the title. Level 5 is a statewide competency licence that publishes at least one classification whose official title contains remodel, remodeling or home improvement.

The $25,000 cutoff in Level 3 is our line, not a board’s. North Carolina’s $40,000 trigger and Tennessee’s $25,000 trigger clear it. Alabama’s $10,000 Home Builder trigger does not, so Alabama is Level 4 with the $10,000 figure noted. Florida’s $2,500 casual exemption in F.S. 489.103(9) is a handyman carve-out inside a Level 4 state, not a finding that Florida only licenses work above $2,500. A different cutoff would re-sort Alabama. It would not rewrite F.S. 489.105 or Ala. Code § 34-14A-2.

A remodeling-named class can exist and still not be the class anyone holds

California is the cleanest version of that sentence. CSLB’s own classifications page, retrieved 5 September 2026, lists (A) General Engineering, (B) General Building, (B-2) Residential Remodeling Contractor, and (C) Specialty. B-2 was added by Stats. 2020, Ch. 364 (SB 1189), effective 1 January 2021, as Business & Professions Code § 7057.5. A B-2 contractor’s principal business is improvements to an existing residential wood-frame structure requiring at least three unrelated trades; the holder may not contract for structural changes to load-bearing portions, and may not install, replace or substantially alter electrical, mechanical or plumbing systems unless separately classified or subcontracted.

HyreRemodel calculation: 4,620 of 4,820 California records in this store hold B General Building. Two hold B02 Residential Remodeling, both alongside C-06 Cabinet, Millwork and Finish Carpentry. The harvest note on every California record still says “CSLB issues no remodeling classification.” That note is stale. The class exists. The store does not use it. A homeowner who asks “are you a licensed remodeler?” in California and is shown a Class B has been shown the class this trade actually holds, not the class the statute named for the trade in 2021.

Nevada prints the word too. NAC 624.170(7) defines subclassification B-7, Residential Remodeling, as remodeling and improvement of an existing detached single-family residence or unit not more than three stories above ground and one below, and does not authorise increasing the enclosed space. NSCB’s own July 2026 classifications bulletin restates that a General Building (B) project must include more than two unrelated trades. Approved regulation R030-25, retrieved this session, separately authorises a restricted B-7 for nonstructural remodeling of existing single-family residences. HyreRemodel calculation: 112 of 3,494 Nevada records carry a classification whose title contains “remodel,” of which 62 are B-7 Residential Remodeling as the primary class. The harvest is B-2 Residential and Small Commercial (1,778) and B General Building (553).

Utah publishes R-101, Residential and Small Commercial Non-Structural Remodeling and Repair. The Division’s classification table and Rule R156-55a-301 describe it as remodeling and repairing an existing structure with no change to bearing portions, historically with a $50,000 total-cost cap. HyreRemodel calculation: 33 of 703 Utah records in this store carry R-101. 443 carry B-100 General Building. The store’s names_the_trade flag is false on every Utah record; the classification field disagrees, because R-101’s title contains “Remodel.” We report the title the Division prints, not the harvest flag.

HyreRemodel analysis: Level 5 means the class list contains the word. It does not mean the typical remodeler holds that class. In this seven-state store, Arizona is the only state where a remodeling-named class is also a top class in the harvest. California, Nevada and Utah all publish a remodeling-named class that the harvest barely uses. Florida does not publish one at all. That is a different fact from “who is licensed to remodel,” and collapsing the two is how a class map becomes a ranking blog.

What the seven-state store actually holds, by class

The HyreRemodel contractor store, measured 2026-09-05, holds 23,756 companies and 22,183 licence records across seven states. An asset resting on that store is titled to those states. The bars below are a picture of the classes we harvested, not of the size of each state’s industry, and not a census of every licence the board issues.

Florida, California, Nevada, Utah and North Carolina mostly license a building class. Arizona is the exception that writes the trade into the classification in volume. Texas is not a state licence at all — 955 municipal registrations from San Antonio (805) and El Paso (150). How many firms that is, and what a municipal registration is worth as evidence, belong to the Texas contractors page and to the no-licence-state study.

North Carolina is thin on purpose. The Board rate-limits the public portal, and G.S. 87-1 leaves work under $40,000 outside the licence. Of 149 records, 59 parse cleanly as Residential and 13 as Building. The rest of the classification field on this harvest includes qualifier-row scrape artifacts and is not a class census. Limited / Intermediate / Unlimited is a project-size ceiling (Limited $750,000, Intermediate $1,500,000, Unlimited uncapped), not a remodeling taxonomy.

Licence records in the HyreRemodel store by the class the harvest actually holds, measured 2026-09-05. Titled to Florida, California, Arizona, Nevada, Texas, Utah and North Carolina. Not a market size.

Disciplinary_actions in this snapshot is populated only for Utah. An empty disciplinary field in another state is missing retrieval, not a clean record. See clean board records.

Thresholds, carve-outs, and the $25,000 line we drew

Almost every licensed state carves out something small. Florida’s $2,500 casual exemption, Virginia’s $1,000 Class C floor, Oregon’s $2,500 multi-trade specialty cap and Alabama’s $10,000 Home Builder trigger are four different legal facts. Folding them into one “no licence below $X” column is how ranking blogs produce a number that cannot be checked against any single statute.

HyreRemodel analysis: we reserved Level 3 for a statewide competency licence whose published project-value trigger is $25,000 or more, because that is the line at which a typical 2026 kitchen remodel can sit entirely outside the credential. North Carolina is the textbook case — the Board says so on its homepage, in a sentence a homeowner can read without a lawyer: “If a project is valued at $40,000 or more, your general contractor must have a license issued by the state. It’s the law.” The practice act is G.S. 87-1. The threshold was raised from $30,000 to $40,000 effective 1 October 2023. What a homeowner can do below that line is the same stack as a Level 1 state, and that stack is documented on the no-licence-state study, not here.

Tennessee is the other sourced Level 3. The Board for Licensing Contractors requires a contractor licence before bidding or negotiating at $25,000 or more. A separate Home Improvement licence covers $3,000 to $24,999, and only in nine counties that have adopted it. A kitchen in Shelby County and a kitchen in an un-adopting county are different legal facts under the same state board. That is a threshold regime with a municipal overlay, not a finding that Tennessee does not license contractors.

Alabama’s $10,000 trigger is real (Ala. Code § 34-14A-2) and is below our Level 3 line. The class is still called Home Builder. Florida’s $2,500 is a casual-work exemption that vanishes if you advertise as a contractor. Treating either as “North Carolina-but-smaller” would make the five-level scheme a dollar ranking rather than a credential ranking. We did not.

States we have not verified — and will not guess

Twenty-three states are in the verified table. Twenty-seven are not: Alaska, Arkansas, Delaware, Hawaii, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Dakota, Ohio, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Vermont, West Virginia, Wisconsin, Wyoming.

Several of those are widely described, in secondary round-ups, as licensed (Hawaii Contractors License Board, Louisiana State Licensing Board for Contractors, Mississippi State Board of Contractors, South Carolina Residential Builders Commission, West Virginia Contractor Licensing Board, Wisconsin dwelling contractor, New Mexico CID, Arkansas Contractors Licensing Board, Alaska construction contractors). Several are widely described as registration regimes (Idaho, Montana, Nebraska, New Jersey). Several are widely described as no-statewide-GC (Kansas, Missouri, New York, Ohio, Wyoming, Kentucky, Maine, New Hampshire, South Dakota, Vermont, Delaware). We did not retrieve a primary source that lets us put them in the verified table this session.

What we attempted, so the gap is specific: NRS Chapter 624 (Nevada’s dollar exemption) was blocked by Cloudflare on this date; we still sourced Nevada’s class names from NAC 624.170, NSCB and approved regulation R030-25. New York Department of State paths have previously returned 403. Ohio Revised Code chapters 4740 and 4722 failed to retrieve from codes.ohio.gov on the companion no-licence study; Ohio’s Construction Industry Licensing Board, which NASCLA lists, licenses trades (electrical, HVAC, plumbing, hydronics, refrigeration), not a residential general contractor — that distinction is not asserted here as a Level 1 finding because we did not retrieve OCILB’s own profession list this session.

HyreRemodel analysis: an honest 23-row table plus a named gap is more useful than a 50-row table whose last twenty-seven rows were copied from one another. States will be added as each is retrieved and dated. Until then they are unverified, which is not the same as unlicensed, unregistered, or Level 4.

Method

Research question: what does “licensed contractor” mean for residential remodeling in each US state — which classes exist, whether the published title names remodeling, what exam, experience, bond, insurance, reciprocity and project-value threshold attach, and what a homeowner can look up.

For each candidate state we identified the agency that would license residential general contracting or home improvement if anyone did, retrieved that agency’s own class list, profession list, or an affirmative statement on its own site, and recorded what it says together with the retrieval date. A negative (no licence) is recorded only from that list or statement, never from a failed lookup. Requirements are recorded in three states, not two: verified at the primary source, verified not present at the primary source, and not verified. An unchecked cell is never rendered as a “no.”

The five-level scheme is HyreRemodel analysis. Assignment rule: highest statewide residential-remodeling credential; municipal overlays never raise a level; a registration never outranks a competency licence; a licence whose published title does not contain remodel, remodeling or home improvement never outranks one that does; Level 3 requires a published project-value trigger of $25,000 or more. The rule is judgement. It is printed so it can be disagreed with.

Store-derived class counts come from the HyreRemodel contractor verification store, measured 2026-09-05 from files on disk at data/remodeling-data/licenses/. Classification was read from the classification or classifications field on each record. A record was counted as “title contains remodel” only when the board’s own class string contained that word. Florida CGC was counted from the licence-number prefix CGC and from the classification value; both counts are zero in this harvest. Texas records are stored against municipal authorities and are labelled as such.

No claim on this page is taken from a contractor-directory round-up. During research, published “contractor licence by state” pages disagreed with each other on whether Connecticut, Massachusetts, Iowa, Idaho, Tennessee’s home-improvement counties and California’s B-2 counted as licensed remodeling. That disagreement is the reason this method refuses to paper over unverified rows.