Half of Washington's Contractors Got Their Registration in 2021 or Later

Washington publishes a file of every contractor it has registered, and updates it three times a day. Business name, mailing address, specialty, the date the state approved the registration, and what happened to it since. As of October 7, 2026, the file had 161,677 rows.

Subser's contractor directory is built on this file, so we spend more time inside it than is probably healthy. This post is what you find when you stop looking up individual contractors and start counting them.

Some of it is what you'd expect. Some of it changed how I think about the word "established."

The count

Of those 161,677 records, 148,820 are construction contractors. The rest are electrical contractors, plumbing contractors, and elevator contractors, which Washington licenses under separate rules.

Among construction contractors, here is where every record stands today:

Status	Registrations
Active	68,107
Expired	58,124
Suspended	9,302
Re-licensed under a new number	8,922
Out of business	4,250
Inactive	114
Passed away	1

So 68,107 active construction contractors, plus 5,549 active electrical contractors, 2,215 plumbing contractors, and 83 elevator contractors. The construction figure is close to the Department of Labor & Industries' own count of 66,940 active contractor registrations as of June 30, 2025.

Three in four active construction registrations, 51,816 of them, are general contractors. In Washington that word means less than it sounds like. A general contractor registration requires a bond, insurance, a state business number, and a fee. There is no exam. The registration says a business has met the state's financial requirements. It says nothing about whether anyone there can hang a door.

Half of them are new

The date on each record is the day the state first approved that registration. Line up the 68,107 active ones by that date and the midpoint lands in 2021. A little over half of Washington's active construction contractors, 34,196, were first approved in 2021 or later. Nearly a third, 30.5%, were approved since the start of 2024.

Only 18% of active registrations predate 2010. Only 6.5% predate 2000.

I expected the file to be full of thirty-year shops with a few newcomers around the edges. It is the other way around. The thirty-year shops are the edge.

The other way to see this is to take everyone who registered in a given year and ask how many are still active.

First approved	Registrations	Still active	Share
2025	10,186	7,068	69%
2024	10,639	5,451	51%
2023	11,248	5,319	47%
2022	11,264	4,412	39%
2021	9,906	3,710	37%
2020	8,524	2,726	32%
2019	11,344	3,300	29%

Roughly ten thousand new construction contractor registrations get approved every year. Two years later about half are still active. After five years, a bit more than a third.

For comparison, the Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks new private-sector business establishments across the country, in every industry. Of those that opened in the year ending March 2014, 79.7% made it one year and 50.8% made it five. Put the other way around: nationally, about 20% of new businesses are gone after a year and 49% after five. For Washington contractor registrations it's about 31% and 63%.

What this table does not say

It does not say two-thirds of contractors fail within five years. I want to be careful here, because that is the headline someone will write.

A registration is not a business. When a sole proprietor turns into an LLC, the old registration is marked "re-licensed" and a new one starts. There are 8,922 records marked that way in this file. The business is fine. It just has a new row. People also retire, move to Idaho, take a job with a bigger outfit, or decide that one winter of crawl spaces was enough. None of those is a failure.

And the file doesn't seem to keep a full set of expired records from before about 2018, judging by how the totals thin out, which is why the table stops at 2019.

What the table does say is narrower and still useful: the registration number on the side of a truck has, on average, a short life. If you are a homeowner and a contractor has held the same registration for ten years, that puts them in a small group. If you are that contractor, that decade is an asset, and almost nothing in how contractors get found online gives you credit for it.

One suspended registration for every seven active ones

There are 9,302 construction registrations currently flagged as suspended. That is one suspended registration for roughly every seven active ones.

Before anyone panics: 7,213 of those suspensions are dated 2026, and another 2,061 are from 2025. This is a rolling population, not a rogues' gallery. Under state law a registration suspends automatically the moment the bond is cancelled or the insurance lapses. A missed premium does it. Most of these are probably paperwork, and most will resolve by the contractor fixing it or by the registration quietly expiring.

Look closely at the 2025 row in the table above, though. A Washington registration runs for two years. Nobody who registered in 2025 has come up for renewal yet. And still 31% of them are no longer active. Most of them are sitting in suspended status, and a registration that gets suspended before its first renewal has mostly gotten there one way: the bond or the insurance stopped being paid for.

That is the practical reason to check a contractor's status on the day you sign, not the day you first called. "Registered" is a condition that can lapse on a Tuesday.

Where the contractors are (not where the kitchens are)

By mailing address, the top ten cities for active construction contractors:

City	Active registrations
Seattle	3,385
Vancouver	2,772
Spokane	2,461
Tacoma	2,010
Everett	1,798
Auburn	1,472
Kent	1,407
Renton	1,164
Lynnwood	1,066
Puyallup	1,051

Seattle is first, as you'd expect from the biggest city in the state. Now divide by population. Seattle has about one active contractor registration for every 220 residents. Auburn and Everett have about one for every 60. Bellevue, where a great many of the region's expensive kitchens live, has one for every 170 or so.

Mailing-address cities are fuzzy. Post office boundaries wander past city limits, and a registration is counted where the mail goes, not where the work happens. But the pattern is hard to miss. Contractors live where a shop and a yard for the trailer are affordable, and they drive to where the remodels are. The truck you see in Laurelhurst at 7:30 a.m. left Auburn at 6:15.

About 12% of Washington's active construction contractors, 8,119, do not have a Washington mailing address at all. Oregon accounts for 3,677 and Idaho for 1,334, which is what you'd expect with Portland and Coeur d'Alene sitting on the border. Then there are 647 in California, 271 in Texas, and a long tail of national firms registered here to install one chain's signage or one retailer's shelving.

What they do

Take out the general contractors and 16,291 specialty registrations remain.

Painters are the largest group by a wide margin, at 2,300. Flooring and countertops comes second, then landscaping, tile, and finish carpentry. Roofing, which generates a wildly disproportionate share of the ads you see, has 534 registered specialists. There are four painters for every roofer.

The low end of the list has its own charm. Washington has 30 registered wood, pellet, and gas stove contractors. It has 11 central vacuum specialists, which is 11 more than I would have guessed. And it has exactly three registered house movers. If you need a house moved in this state, you are choosing among three companies, and I assume they all know each other.

What they call themselves

A business name is a small act of marketing, so we counted those too.

Among active construction contractors, 1,013 have "Custom" in the name. 844 have "Northwest." 636 are some variety of "Handyman," 626 promise "Quality," and 594 are "Pacific." Then the landscape takes over: 249 Cascades, 238 Evergreens, 117 Pugets, 98 Olympics, 84 Rainiers, and 80 Emeralds.

"Affordable" appears 83 times. "Perfect" appears 88 times, which is confident. "Honest" appears 26 times.

There are 311 businesses with "Sons" in the name and 299 with "Brothers." There are 5 with "Daughter."

And the phone book is not dead, at least not in spirit. 5,947 active contractors, almost 9% of the total, have a name that starts with the letter A. Another 570 or so start with a number or a punctuation mark, which sorts even higher. The very first active record in the file begins with an exclamation point. Somebody did that on purpose, and I respect the hustle, even if alphabetical order stopped mattering about the time search engines showed up.

A few names I just liked: 100 Proof Drywall, in Southworth. 110% LLC, in Yelm. And 12th Man Tiling, also in Yelm, which tells you everything about what was on TV when the paperwork got filed.

The class of 1963

Washington's contractor registration law dates from 1963. The oldest construction registration still active was approved on July 22 of that year.

Twenty-eight registrations approved in 1963 are still active today. O.B. Williams Company in Seattle. W.G. Clark Construction. Bouten Construction and N.A. Degerstrom in the Spokane area. Sixty-three years on, the same registration is still active.

Set that next to the cohort table. Ten thousand registrations a year come in, and within five years most are gone. A handful make it to sixty.

What I take from this

Three things.

The first is for homeowners. "Licensed, bonded, and insured" is a snapshot, and the snapshot changes. Look the contractor up when you are ready to sign. It takes two minutes on L&I's Verify tool or on the Subser directory, which shows the same state record.

The second is for contractors who have been at this a while. If you have held one registration for eight or ten years, you have outlasted most of the people who registered alongside you. That is the kind of fact a homeowner would pay attention to, and today it sits in a state database that almost no homeowner reads. Put the year on your truck. Put it on your estimates.

The third is for the half of active contractors who registered since 2021. The number that matters is not how long you've been registered. It is whether, three years from now, there is a record of the jobs you did, the dates you showed up, and the customers who would vouch for you. The state only records that you were allowed to work. Everything else, you have to keep yourself.

That last part is what we are building Subser to do. Claiming your directory profile is free.

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Method and sources

All counts come from the Washington State Department of Labor & Industries dataset "L&I Contractor License Data - General" on data.wa.gov, queried on October 7, 2026. Unless noted, figures cover records with license type "Construction Contractor" and status "Active." Name counts are case-insensitive text matches on the registered business name, so "Custom" also catches "Customs"; "Sons" is counted only as a separate word, so it skips the Masons and Johnsons. City counts combine upper- and lower-case spellings and include only Washington mailing addresses. Per-resident figures use 2020 Census city populations and are rounded.

• L&I Contractor License Data - General, data.wa.gov
• L&I, Underground Economy Benchmark Report, fiscal year 2025 (66,940 active registered contractors)
• RCW 18.27.040 and RCW 18.27.050 (automatic suspension when a bond is cancelled or impaired, or insurance lapses)
• RCW 18.27.020 (registration requirement; history note cites Laws of 1963, chapter 77)
• L&I, Register as a contractor
• Bureau of Labor Statistics, Business Employment Dynamics, survival of establishments by opening year