State fact page

Home-service contractors in California

California has 124,216 home-service contractors on record across 11 trades, or 31.88 per 10,000 residents.

California is in the verified-license layer. Every license fact on a California page comes from CSLB bulk files as of September 2, 2026, and each one links back to the board’s own record. A license record is a fact about a filing, not a judgment about the work.

That count is the sum of the trade rows further down, and it is the full deduplicated set for California. Each business is counted once, under its primary trade, and the California total includes records that are unpublishable or residentially screened. California records that are closed, flagged, or missing a city sit inside that number but do not publish as pages. Every figure below carries the date it was true and the file it came from.

The facts

Home-service contractors in California: 124,216
Foursquare Open Source Places, release August 11, 2026
The sum of this state’s trade rows. Each row’s own universe, as the facts table defines it: All deduped entities whose primary trade is this trade, including records that are unpublishable or residential-screened; each entity counted once, so the trade rows partition the area entity total.
Per 10,000 residents: 31.88 per 10,000
Population 38,965,193, Census Bureau Vintage 2023 population estimates, as of July 1, 2023
Records first appearing in the last 12 months: 3,403
Foursquare Open Source Places, release August 11, 2026
This counts records first appearing in Foursquare Open Source Places, not California businesses first opening. A record can appear years after a business does. Our own first-seen series becomes the primary measure after three snapshots.
Records flagged closed in the last 12 months: 541
Foursquare Open Source Places, release August 11, 2026
This counts California records flagged closed in Foursquare Open Source Places, not confirmed closures of California businesses. The flag is a soft signal contributed upstream.
Independent, franchise, corporate: 120,408 independent, 1,182 franchise brand, 2,040 corporate owned, 586 awaiting chain review
Foursquare Open Source Places, release August 11, 2026
Chain status is computed from how many locations a normalized name holds nationally. Brands at the threshold that our seed list does not cover sit in the review bucket and are labeled that way, never as independent.
Active licenses with no public listing: 81,087
State license files, as of September 2, 2026
Active, trade-covering, business-level CA licenses in this state with no matching record in open place data. This is the home-based tail, deduplicated on the license. Verify any single record at the board: CSLB, check a license.
Licenses issued and lapsed in the last 12 months: 6,566 issued, 10,986 lapsed
State license files, as of September 2, 2026
From the state's own status field.
Universe quality: 0.70% of source records merged as duplicates, 1.94% carry no street address
Foursquare Open Source Places, release August 11, 2026
Both figures are for California, weighted across its trades. A California record with no street address still publishes when a city and coordinates are present.

Metro areas in California

The metro fact pages California owns, by residents. Each one carries the same counts for one trade in one metro area, and a city page wherever a city inside California stands on its own.

Contractors by trade

Ordered alphabetically by trade. Each row is a distinct set of entities: a California business is counted once, under its primary trade, so the rows add up to the California total above.

Trade	Contractors	Per 10,000 residents	Licensed share	BLS occupation, title as published
Cleaning	6,024	1.55	No license source for this trade in CA	No BLS occupation mapped to this trade
Electrical	6,011	1.54	25.9%	Electricians (SOC 47-2111)
Flooring	7,626	1.96	7.9%	No BLS occupation mapped to this trade
HVAC	6,552	1.68	20.3%	Heating, Air Conditioning, and Refrigeration Mechanics and Installers (SOC 49-9021)
Landscaping	7,933	2.04	15.7%	No BLS occupation mapped to this trade
Other home services	68,808	17.66	No license source for this trade in CA	No BLS occupation mapped to this trade
Painting	4,589	1.18	22.1%	No BLS occupation mapped to this trade
Pest control	2,616	0.67	No license source for this trade in CA	No BLS occupation mapped to this trade
Plumbing	8,151	2.09	18.9%	Plumbers, Pipefitters, and Steamfitters (SOC 47-2152)
Pool	2,120	0.54	12.9%	No BLS occupation mapped to this trade
Roofing	3,786	0.97	21.5%	Roofers (SOC 47-2181)

Employment and wage figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics are published by metropolitan area in the extract loaded here, so they appear on California’s metro pages rather than on this one. The occupation title above is the Bureau’s own, reproduced exactly. Licensed share is computed within California only, never across states, and its numerator counts California entities with an active link to a license that covers the trade in that row. California licenses the business itself, so the share is measured against business-level records. About 47% of California licensees are sole owners, whose published address is frequently a home.

What these numbers say about California

Every sentence below is read off the rows above and off the same rows for the other fifty states. Nothing here is written about California by hand: the wording is chosen by where California’s own measurement falls, so a state that is ordinary on a measure says so.

California's largest trade by record count is other home service, and it is dominant rather than merely first: more than a quarter of every home-service record this site holds for California sits in that one trade, with plumbing the next largest. A concentrated mix like this usually says more about how the source data categorises a business than about how California homeowners spend.

In order, California's four largest trades are other home service, plumbing, landscaping and flooring. Other home service alone account for half of every record on this page, which is a narrow base for a statewide figure.

Every one of the eleven trades this site counts carries at least one record in California, which is not true of every state. The smallest of them here is pool, and a small row is a small row: it is not evidence that California is short of that trade, only that few businesses in it were categorised that way.

At the other end of the same ordering, California's three smallest trades are pool, pest control and roofing. Between them they still hold a workable share of California, so most of their metro hub pages clear this site's publish floor and publish.

Measured against the national mix, California is heaviest in pool: that trade takes a far larger share of California's records than it takes of the country's. Climate, housing stock and how a state's own businesses describe themselves all feed that, and this page separates none of them.

Roofing is thinner in California than it is nationally, the mirror of the lean above. Read it as a difference in how businesses here are categorised before reading it as a difference in what they do.

Per resident, California sits close to the national rate for home-service records, in the middle of the fifty-one this site counts. Being average is worth stating plainly rather than dressing up, and it means the counts on this page can be read as typical.

By raw record count California is one of the five largest states in this corpus, so its pages carry more names than most and its metro hubs page further.

California's split between independent, franchise-brand and corporate-owned records is close to the national one, so the chain mix on this page is typical rather than distinctive.

More of California's records carry no street address than the national average, which usually means a larger share of the state's businesses run from a home rather than a storefront.

Almost none of California's records are waiting on chain review, so the independent, franchise and corporate counts on this page describe nearly the whole state rather than most of it. Pest control holds what little of the review bucket California has.

Read per resident rather than by count, the ordering does not change at the top: other home service is both the largest trade in California and the one with the most records per ten thousand residents, and pool has the fewest.

Over the last twelve months more California records first appeared than were flagged closed, so the file for this state grew; pest control added the largest share of new records and flooring lost the largest share to closed flags. A record appears when the source learns about a business, which is not the same event as a business opening.

Cleaning, Flooring, Landscaping, Other home service, Painting, Pest control and Pool carry no Bureau of Labor Statistics occupation in the extract loaded here, so those California rows have no employment or wage series to sit beside them. Every other California row does, by metropolitan area rather than statewide.

The metro fact pages California owns are Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario, San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont and San Diego-Chula Vista-Carlsbad, and 15 more. Each carries the same counts for one trade in one metro area, and a metro that crosses a state line is listed under the state its name leads with, not under every state it touches.

Ordered by records per resident, California sits between Arizona above it and Louisiana below it. Those two are the states this page's per-resident rate is closest to, and they are named because a rank on its own says less than the company it keeps.

Ordered by total records rather than by rate, California is the largest of the fifty-one, just above Florida.

Of the California records that are not independent, corporate-owned locations outnumber franchise brands, and they concentrate in other home service; the most franchised trade in California is flooring.

Within California, electrical is the most independently held trade and pest control the least. That gap is the reason the statewide independent share is a summary rather than a description: a homeowner hiring in pest control meets a different market from one hiring in electrical.

Cleaning is the California trade whose records most often carry no street address, and HVAC the one whose records most often do. A missing street line usually means the business runs from a home, so the list on a cleaning page in California is thinner in addresses than an HVAC one and no less real for it.

Among the California trades with a measured licensed share, electrical links to an active state licence most often and flooring least often. That spread is a measurement of how well two files join in California, the licence file and the place file, and it is not a statement about whether the businesses in either row hold a licence.

Cleaning, Other home service and Pest control have no business-level licence source in California, so those rows show no licensed share rather than a share of zero. Contractors State License Board (CSLB) issues what it issues, and a trade it does not licence at the state level cannot have a state licensed share here.

Taking the largest row on its own: other home service is about as large a part of California as it is of the country, so California leads with that trade for the same reason the country does.

License classes in scope

The classes below are the ones this site reads as covering each trade in California. The list is generated by the ingest pipeline, not written into this page, so a class cannot appear here that the data does not actually map. Classes outside the list still exist at the board; they are simply not counted toward a trade here.

CSLB

Class, as the source spells it	Counted as
B and all other classes	Other
C-10	Electrical
C-15	Flooring
C-20	HVAC
C-27	Landscaping
C-33	Painting
C-36	Plumbing
C-39	Roofing
C-53	Pool

DBPR's official code table defines CPC as Certified Pool/Spa Contractor, so CPC is pool, not plumbing.
Multi-class licenses retain every match in all_trades and select primary_trade by the priority list.

How to read a California license number

CSLB numbers: All digits, 1 to 7 characters
Measured across 242,879 CSLB records, as of September 2, 2026
Type the number into CSLB, check a license to see the board’s live record, which is authoritative over anything reproduced here.

Bond and workers’ compensation

Bond: Published on 242,759 records
State license files, as of September 2, 2026
The amounts the file carries, most common first: $25,000 on 242,461 records, $15,000 on 188 records, $12,500 on 74 records, $7,500 on 17 records, $10,000 on 11 records, $5,000 on 8 records. A bond is a filing the board records, not insurance for a homeowner and not a guarantee of the work.
Workers’ compensation: Published on 242,879 records
State license files, as of September 2, 2026
The coverage types the file carries, most common first: Exempt on 118,840 records, Workers' Compensation Insurance on 116,018 records, License does not have current W/C on 4,173 records, Leasing Firm, Temp Agency, etc on 3,222 records, Out of State on 417 records, Self-Insured on 208 records, not stated on 1 record. An exemption is a claim the licensee filed with the board, and it means the state was told no employees are covered, nothing more.

Where these records come from

CSLB: 242,879 records, 216,077 active
CSLB bulk file, released September 2, 2026
242,879 business-level, 0 qualified-business, and 0 individual-practitioner records. Only business-level and qualified-business records can link to a listing here.
Status vocabulary: 4 normalized values in use
State license files, as of September 2, 2026
Only active counts toward licensed share or the verified tier. The state’s own wording is printed beside every status on a profile. active 216,077 records, from CLEAR, CLEAR | 7073E Probation, CLEAR | 7073E Probation| DISC Bond Filed, CLEAR | 7073E Probation| FAM Sup Tmp Lic, CLEAR | 7073E Probation| Pending Canc, CLEAR | 7073E Probation| Pending Case/CIT, and 49 more raw strings; suspended 26,776 records, from ARB Entity Susp, ARB Suspension, ARB Suspension | Pending Case/CIT| BOND Pay Pending, BND Pay EN Susp, BND Pay EN Susp | Pending Case/CIT| Judgement Pend, BOND Pay Susp, and 146 more raw strings; inactive 25 records, from CLEAR | Renew Inactive only, CLEAR | Renew Inactive only| DISC Bond Filed, CLEAR | Renew Inactive only| Pending Case/CIT; delinquent-renewable 1 record, from CLEAR.

What licensing looks like trade by trade in California

Where a California rule changes the answer for one trade in particular, it is set out below, trade by trade. Some of those rules are a licence and a board that issues it; others are the absence of one. The rest of a trade’s explanation, which is the same in California as anywhere else, is on that trade’s own page.

Electrical

The C-10 classification in California

Electrical work in California is the C-10 specialty classification issued by the Contractors State License Board to the business, and separately the state certifies individual electricians through the Department of Industrial Relations. The two are different credentials answering different questions: the C-10 says who may contract for the work, the certification says who may perform it.

This site reads the board file, so the share on this page is about the contracting licence.

Source: California Contractors State License Board

Everything else about electrical work is on the electrical page.

Flooring

The C-15 classification in California

Flooring and floor covering is the C-15 specialty classification issued by the Contractors State License Board, and it covers the preparation of the surface as well as the covering itself. California's licensing threshold means small jobs can sit below the requirement while a whole-house installation does not.

Source: California Contractors State License Board

Everything else about flooring work is on the flooring page.

HVAC

The C-20 classification in California

California licenses the business rather than the individual, and warm-air heating, ventilating and air-conditioning work is the C-20 specialty classification issued by the Contractors State License Board. A class B general building contractor may also hold C-20 among its classifications, which is why a single California licence record on this site can carry several trades at once.

About half of California's licensees are sole owners whose address of record is frequently a home, so a Californian HVAC contractor with no storefront is an ordinary shape rather than an unusual one.

Source: California Contractors State License Board

Everything else about HVAC work is on the HVAC page.

Landscaping

The C-27 classification in California

Landscaping in California is the C-27 specialty classification issued by the Contractors State License Board, and it covers the grading, planting, irrigation and hardscape that make up a yard. Tree service and pest applications are separately regulated, so one Californian company can hold a C-27 and still not be the right holder for either.

Source: California Contractors State License Board

Everything else about landscaping work is on the landscaping page.

Painting

The C-33 classification in California

Painting and decorating is the C-33 specialty classification issued by the Contractors State License Board. California requires a contractor licence for most work at or above a stated combined labour-and-materials threshold, so a small interior repaint can sit under the licensing requirement while a whole-house exterior does not.

Source: California Contractors State License Board

Everything else about painting work is on the painting page.

Plumbing

The C-36 classification in California

California issues plumbing work as the C-36 specialty classification through the Contractors State License Board, held by the business. A separate C-42 sanitation classification covers sewer and drain work, and a class A or class B general contractor may hold either alongside other classifications, which is why one Californian licence record on this site can map to more than one trade.

Because the licence is held by the business, California is the state where the licensed share on a plumbing hub means the most nearly what a reader assumes it means.

Source: California Contractors State License Board, licence classifications

Everything else about plumbing work is on the plumbing page.

Pool

The C-53 classification in California

Swimming pool work in California is the C-53 specialty classification issued by the Contractors State License Board, covering construction, repair and the equipment that serves the pool. Electrical bonding and the barrier requirements are inspected locally on top of it.

Source: California Contractors State License Board

Everything else about pool work is on the pool page.

Roofing

The C-39 classification in California

Roofing in California is the C-39 specialty classification issued by the Contractors State License Board to the business. California also requires workers' compensation coverage for roofing contractors whether or not they have employees, which is a distinction from most other classifications and is worth confirming on the board's own record.

Source: California Contractors State License Board, check a licence

Everything else about roofing work is on the roofing page.

Every rule stated above links the public page that states it: California Contractors State License Board; California Contractors State License Board, check a licence.

Where to check a contractor in California

Licensing body: Contractors State License Board (CSLB)
California state agency, linked directly
Consumer protection: California Department of Consumer Affairs
California consumer-protection resource, linked directly
This site takes no complaints and resolves no disputes. It is a directory built from public records, and this is where a California homeowner takes a problem with a California contractor.
Complaint process: CSLB, file a complaint
Contractors State License Board (CSLB), linked directly
A complaint against a California licensee goes to the board that issued the license, not to this site. The board is the only body that can act on it.

Nothing on this page is a rating, an endorsement, or a recommendation, and no figure here is an assessment of any individual Californiabusiness. How every California number is counted, and where every source comes from, is on the methodology page.