How to Verify an Oregon or Washington Contractor

Check a licence in two minutes

Do this before you sign anything, and before any money changes hands. It is free and it is the single highest-value two minutes in the entire process of hiring a contractor.

The name is the step people skip. A licence held by “Cascade Crawl Space LLC” does not cover work contracted with “Cascade Crawlspace Services”. If the register name and the contract name are not the same legal entity, the bond and insurance you just confirmed do not attach to your job.

Oregon: what a CCB licence means

Oregon requires anyone contracting for construction work to hold a licence from the Construction Contractors Board. Licences carry an endorsement that sets what the contractor may do, and each endorsement carries its own surety bond and liability insurance minimum. Every endorsement's minimum bond rose by $5,000 effective January 1, 2024.

Insurance minimums are shown where the CCB states a figure for that endorsement. Coverage must be maintained throughout the licensing period, not merely purchased once at application — which is why checking that it is current matters more than checking that it exists.

Reading the result

Four fields carry most of the signal, and one of them is routinely misread.

Status

Active means the licence is current today. It says nothing about whether it has lapsed before, which is why the history below it is worth the extra thirty seconds.

Endorsement

Determines what the contractor may contract for, and which bond and insurance row above applies. A specialty endorsement is not a lesser contractor — it is a narrower one.

Date first licensed

The one field that is hard to dress up. A business trading under a new name with an old licence date is a different proposition from a licence issued last quarter, and this is where “serving Portland since 1987” either holds up or does not.

Complaint history

Includes disciplinary history and previous suspensions. The routine misreading is treating an empty record as an endorsement. Most jobs never generate a complaint, so an empty record is the normal state, not a distinction.

Oregon also publishes the full active-licence register as a public dataset, which is how a property manager or agent with a list of vendors can check all of them at once rather than one at a time.

What “bonded and insured” actually buys you

This is the most misunderstood phrase in the trade, and the gap between what homeowners think it means and what it does is where most of the disappointment lives.

A surety bond is not insurance for you. It does not pay out because you are unhappy, and it is not a fund the CCB draws on to make you whole. Per the CCB, the only route to a residential bond is a signed court judgment or an arbitration award, obtained by you, with an active CCB complaint alongside it. The bond will not pay your attorney fees even where a judgment awards them. Once a certified judgment reaches the CCB, payout takes at least 60 days.

The practical consequence: on a $12,000 encapsulation gone wrong, recovering against a $20,000 bond means litigating or arbitrating first, paying your own lawyer throughout, and waiting months after you win. The bond is real and it is worth confirming. It is not a refund mechanism, and any contractor who implies it is has told you something useful about themselves.

Liability insurance is a different instrument again. It covers damage the contractor causes — a foot through a ceiling, a burst line — not workmanship you are dissatisfied with. Defective work is a contract dispute, not an insurance claim.

Washington: the Clark County difference

Vancouver, Camas, Washougal and Battle Ground sit under an entirely separate system. An Oregon CCB licence has no force there, and vice versa.

• Washington requires contractor registration with Labor & Industries, verified through L&I's own tool rather than the CCB's.
• Bonds are set by registration type: $30,000 for a general contractor and $15,000 for a specialty contractor, effective July 1, 2024 — up from $12,000 and $6,000, the first increase since 2001.
• L&I's verification surfaces things Oregon's does not, notably whether the workers' compensation account is active and paid to date, and whether there are lawsuits filed against the bond.

A contractor genuinely working both sides of the Columbia appears in both registers. Check the register for the state the house is in, not the state the contractor's office is in.

If the work goes wrong

The deadlines below are the reason to read this section before you need it. The CCB states there are no exceptions to them.

1. Pre-complaint notice, by certified mail. For residential work you must notify the contractor of your intent to file, at the address on record with the board, and the CCB cannot accept the complaint until 30 days after you mailed it. If the notice is refused or returned undelivered you may still file 30 days after mailing. Because of this step, start at least a month before the filing deadline.
2. File within the time limit. Existing home: one year from the date work was substantially completed, or the date work ceased. New structure: one year from first occupancy, or two years from substantial completion — whichever comes first. A $50 statutory filing fee applies.
3. Obtain a judgment or award. A complaint alone does not reach the bond. Small claims court caps at $10,000 and needs no attorney; circuit court has no cap and effectively requires one.
4. Bond payout. At least 60 days from the CCB receiving a certified judgment, and it will not include your attorney fees.

What this means practically: document as you go. Photograph the crawl space before work starts, keep the written scope, keep every invoice, and put change orders in writing. The recourse process rewards documentation and punishes recollection, and one year passes faster than it sounds when a moisture problem takes a full wet season to reveal that it was not fixed.

What the register will not tell you

Verification clears a floor. It is not a quality assessment, and this page would be misleading if it implied otherwise.

• Workmanship on jobs that never generated a complaint — which is nearly all of them.
• Whether the crew on your job are the licence holder's employees or an unvetted subcontractor.
• Whether the scope you were quoted is the right scope. A fully licensed contractor can sell you an encapsulation when the actual problem is drainage.
• Whether the price is reasonable. See the cost guide and its methodology for ranges and how they were produced.
• Whether a warranty offered is backed by anything durable. A 25-year warranty from a business licensed 18 months ago is a statement of intent.

Verifying is necessary and it is not sufficient. Do it anyway — it takes two minutes and it removes an entire category of problem before it starts.