State fact page

Home-service contractors in Texas

Texas has 90,342 home-service contractors on record across 11 trades, or 29.62 per 10,000 residents.

Texas is in the verified-license layer. Every license fact on a Texas page comes from TDLR and TSBPE 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 Texas. Each business is counted once, under its primary trade, and the Texas total includes records that are unpublishable or residentially screened. Texas records that are closed, flagged, or missing a city sit inside that number but do not publish as pages.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 Texas: 90,342
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: 29.62 per 10,000
Population 30,503,301, Census Bureau Vintage 2023 population estimates, as of July 1, 2023
Records first appearing in the last 12 months: 2,701
Foursquare Open Source Places, release August 11, 2026
This counts records first appearing in Foursquare Open Source Places, not Texas 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: 263
Foursquare Open Source Places, release August 11, 2026
This counts Texas records flagged closed in Foursquare Open Source Places, not confirmed closures of Texas businesses. The flag is a soft signal contributed upstream.
Independent, franchise, corporate: 86,847 independent, 1,062 franchise brand, 1,801 corporate owned, 632 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: 28,170
State license files, as of September 2, 2026
Active, trade-covering, business-level TX 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: TDLR, license search.
Licenses issued and lapsed in the last 12 months: not published issued, 2,287 lapsed
State license files, as of September 2, 2026
Derived from expiration dates, because this state publishes no status column. The derivation carries its own error rate and is labeled as derived wherever it appears.
Universe quality: 0.89% of source records merged as duplicates, 2.28% carry no street address
Foursquare Open Source Places, release August 11, 2026
Both figures are for Texas, weighted across its trades. A Texas record with no street address still publishes when a city and coordinates are present.

Metro areas in Texas

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

Contractors by trade

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

Trade	Contractors	Per 10,000 residents	Licensed share	BLS occupation, title as published
Cleaning	4,283	1.40	No license source for this trade in TX	No BLS occupation mapped to this trade
Electrical	3,491	1.14	24.2%	Electricians (SOC 47-2111)
Flooring	3,788	1.24	No license source for this trade in TX	No BLS occupation mapped to this trade
HVAC	6,373	2.09	23.5%	Heating, Air Conditioning, and Refrigeration Mechanics and Installers (SOC 49-9021)
Landscaping	5,706	1.87	No license source for this trade in TX	No BLS occupation mapped to this trade
Other home services	51,281	16.81	No license source for this trade in TX	No BLS occupation mapped to this trade
Painting	2,365	0.78	No license source for this trade in TX	No BLS occupation mapped to this trade
Pest control	2,387	0.78	No license source for this trade in TX	No BLS occupation mapped to this trade
Plumbing	4,724	1.55	No license source for this trade in TX	Plumbers, Pipefitters, and Steamfitters (SOC 47-2152)
Pool	1,372	0.45	No license source for this trade in TX	No BLS occupation mapped to this trade
Roofing	4,572	1.50	No license source for this trade in TX	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 Texas’s metro pages rather than on this one. The occupation title above is the Bureau’s own, reproduced exactly. Licensed share is computed within Texas only, never across states, and its numerator counts Texas entities with an active link to a license that covers the trade in that row. Texas publishes business-level records and blanks individual practitioners by policy, so a contractor licensed only as an individual cannot appear in this share. Texas also publishes no status column; status is derived from the expiration date and is labeled as derived.

What these numbers say about Texas

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

Texas'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 Texas sits in that one trade, with HVAC the next largest. A concentrated mix like this usually says more about how the source data categorises a business than about how Texas homeowners spend.

In order, Texas's four largest trades are other home service, HVAC, landscaping and plumbing. 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 Texas, 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 Texas is short of that trade, only that few businesses in it were categorised that way.

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

Measured against the national mix, Texas is heaviest in pool: that trade takes a far larger share of Texas'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.

Painting is thinner in Texas 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, Texas carries fewer home-service records than the country does, in the middle of the fifty-one this site counts. A thinner state usually means fewer competing quotes in the smaller markets and, in a busy season, a longer wait.

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

Texas'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 Texas'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 Texas'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. Pool holds what little of the review bucket Texas 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 Texas and the one with the most records per ten thousand residents, and pool has the fewest.

Over the last twelve months more Texas records first appeared than were flagged closed, so the file for this state grew; cleaning 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 Texas rows have no employment or wage series to sit beside them. Every other Texas row does, by metropolitan area rather than statewide.

The metro fact pages Texas owns are Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands, San Antonio-New Braunfels and Austin-Round Rock-San Marcos, and 13 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, Texas sits between Kentucky above it and New Mexico 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, Texas's neighbours are Florida and New York. A state can sit high on one of these two orderings and low on the other, and reading both is the point of naming them.

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

Within Texas, 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.

Other home service is the Texas 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 an other home service page in Texas is thinner in addresses than an HVAC one and no less real for it.

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

Cleaning, Flooring, Landscaping, Other home service, Painting, Pest control, Plumbing, Pool and Roofing have no business-level licence source in Texas, so those rows show no licensed share rather than a share of zero. Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation (TDLR) 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 Texas as it is of the country, so Texas 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 Texas. 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.

TDLR

Class, as the source spells it	Counted as
A/C Contractor	HVAC
A/C Technician	HVAC
Electrical Contractor	Electrical

TSBPE

Class, as the source spells it	Counted as
all published license and registration types	Plumbing

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 Texas license number

TDLR numbers: All digits, 3 to 6 characters
Measured across 95,027 TDLR records, as of September 2, 2026
Type the number into TDLR, license search to see the board’s live record, which is authoritative over anything reproduced here.
TSBPE numbers: 2 to 7 characters, most carrying a letter prefix
Measured across 86,856 TSBPE records, as of September 2, 2026
The prefixes that appear most often are A (41,566), J (26,209), M (13,681), T (3,575), I (1,825). The prefix is the license class the board issued, so it is the fastest way to tell what a number is for. Type the number into TDLR, license search to see the board’s live record, which is authoritative over anything reproduced here.

Bond and workers’ compensation

Bond: Not published by Texas
State license files, as of September 2, 2026
Texas’s bulk file carries no bond column, so no bond fact appears on a Texas profile. That is an absence in the source, not a finding about any contractor. A bond may still exist and be visible at the board itself.
Workers’ compensation: Not published by Texas
State license files, as of September 2, 2026
Texas’s bulk file carries no workers’ compensation column, so no coverage fact appears on a Texas profile. Absence of the column is not evidence either way about a contractor’s coverage.

Where these records come from

TDLR: 95,027 records, 72,421 active
TDLR bulk file, released September 2, 2026
34,454 business-level, 0 qualified-business, and 60,573 individual-practitioner records. Only business-level and qualified-business records can link to a listing here. This file publishes no status column, so status is derived from the expiration date and is labeled as derived everywhere it appears.
TSBPE: 86,856 records, 67,796 active
TSBPE bulk file, released September 1, 2026
0 business-level, 0 qualified-business, and 86,856 individual-practitioner records. Only business-level and qualified-business records can link to a listing here.
Status vocabulary: 2 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 140,217 records, from Current, no status column; lapsed 41,666 records, from Expired, no status column.

What licensing looks like trade by trade in Texas

Where a Texas 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 Texas as anywhere else, is on that trade’s own page.

Electrical

Electrical licensing in Texas

Texas licenses electrical work statewide through the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation, which issues an electrical contractor licence to the business and master, journeyman, residential wireman and apprentice credentials to individuals. A company holds the contractor licence and works under a master electrician of record.

TDLR publishes no status column, so a Texas status on this site is derived from the expiration date and labelled as derived. Municipal permit and inspection requirements sit on top of the state licence and are set by each city.

Source: Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation, electricians

Everything else about electrical work is on the electrical page.

HVAC

Air conditioning licensing in Texas

Texas licenses air conditioning and refrigeration work at the state level through the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation, which issues a contractor licence to the business and a technician registration to the individual. The licence carries a class that says whether it covers environmental air conditioning, commercial refrigeration, or both, and an endorsement for the equipment size the holder may work on.

TDLR publishes no status column of its own, so every status this site shows for a Texas record is derived from the expiration date and is labelled as derived wherever it appears.

Source: Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation, air conditioning and refrigeration

Everything else about HVAC work is on the HVAC page.

Plumbing

Texas licenses the plumber, not the plumbing company

Plumbing in Texas is licensed by the Texas State Board of Plumbing Examiners, separately from the department that licenses air conditioning and electrical work, and the credential attaches to a person: a responsible master plumber, a master, a journeyman, or a registered apprentice or tradesman. A company works under the responsible master plumber who holds its licence.

That is why the licensed-share figure on a Texas plumbing hub is built differently from a California one. Texas publishes business-level records and blanks individual practitioners by policy, so a contractor licensed only as an individual cannot appear in a business-level share at all. The share here is a floor, not a census, and the count of active licences with no public listing beside it is the size of the tail that open place data never saw.

Source: Texas State Board of Plumbing Examiners

Everything else about plumbing work is on the plumbing page.

Roofing

Texas has no state roofing licence, and cities fill the gap

Texas does not license roofing contractors at the state level at all. There is no state board to check, no state licence number to compare against a truck door, and no statewide status column, which is why the licensed share on a Texas roofing hub is shown as not published rather than as a percentage. That is a statement about the source file, not about any business on this page.

What exists instead is municipal. A number of Texas cities require a roofing contractor to register with the city, carry insurance and pull permits for reroofing work, and those registers are held city by city rather than centrally. The city building department for the address is the place to check, and it is also the body that issues the permit.

A voluntary state registration programme run by a trade association also exists and is exactly that: voluntary, and not a state licence.

Source: Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation, licensed programme list

Everything else about roofing work is on the roofing page.

Every rule stated above links the public page that states it: Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation, electricians; Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation, air conditioning and refrigeration; Texas State Board of Plumbing Examiners; Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation, licensed programme list.

Where to check a contractor in Texas

Licensing body: Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation (TDLR)
Texas state agency, linked directly
TDLR licenses air conditioning and refrigeration contractors and electricians. Plumbing is licensed separately by the Texas State Board of Plumbing Examiners, and roofing carries no state license at all.
Consumer protection: Texas Attorney General, Consumer Protection
Texas 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 Texas homeowner takes a problem with a Texas contractor.
Complaint process: TDLR, file a complaint
Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation (TDLR), linked directly
A complaint against a Texas 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 Texasbusiness. How every Texas number is counted, and where every source comes from, is on the methodology page.