Plumbline / methodology
Every record comes from an official licensing authority: the state boards and city licensing departments that publish their contractor rosters as public data. The homepage lists each covered jurisdiction with its issuing agencies and latest snapshot date. We fetch only public data, identify ourselves to every source (a named crawler carrying a contact address), and rate-limit our requests.
We try to collect updates daily, though some boards use a different schedule. Failed downloads can leave older records in place. Some agencies publish the date they last updated their list; a record from one of them carries the agency’s own date, and says when we last checked it. Every other record carries the day we collected it. Check with the agency for current information.
We keep each downloaded file unchanged, identified by its SHA256 hash. Record pages include the file hash so the source can be checked.
We show the source’s status, or explain when a status comes from inclusion in a roster. We also group statuses as active, inactive, suspended or revoked to help compare records. Check the license type and restrictions as well as the status.
Record history shows changes we observed between saved copies, including changes to status and expiration dates. Each history states when tracking began.
Ratings, rankings, recommendations, and dossiers. A page is one occupational-license record as the board publishes it: no aggregation across sources about a person, no characterization, and never for any FCRA purpose (employment, tenant, credit, or insurance screening). A "no records found" is never a determination that a contractor is unlicensed.
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