Before You Hand Over the Deposit: How to Check a Contractor's License, Complaints, and Bond

The guy in your driveway sounds great and the price feels right. Fifteen minutes of checking the public record is what stands between you and the half-finished job that empties your savings.

NU ranks records over spin. This is a general public-knowledge guide to checking a contractor before you hire — not legal advice, and not a comment on any specific company. The exact agency names, websites, and rules differ by state and country, so treat the steps below as the pattern and confirm the details for where you live.

The feeling first: you already want to say yes

Here's the moment this article is really about. Someone is standing on your porch or sitting at your kitchen table. The roof leaks, or the water heater died, or the kitchen has been gutted for three weeks. They seem confident, they can "start Monday," and the price is a little lower than the other quote. Every part of you wants the problem gone, so every part of you wants to believe them.

That want is exactly what a bad actor counts on. The most expensive home-repair stories almost never start with an obvious villain — they start with relief. You pay a deposit, work stalls, calls go unanswered, and now you're out money and still have the original problem, plus a half-torn-apart house.

The good news: the single best defense costs about fifteen minutes and zero dollars, and it happens before any money changes hands. It's reading the public record.

Step one: get their real, full identity

You can't check someone you can't name. Before anything else, get in writing: the exact legal business name, the owner's name, a physical address (not just a P.O. box), a phone number, and — where your area issues them — a license or registration number.

A contractor running an honest business hands this over without flinching. Hesitation, a "the number's on the truck," or a name that keeps shifting is itself a data point. Write down what's painted on the vehicle and what's printed on the card, and make sure they match.

Step two: verify the license at the source

Most places that license trades (general contracting, electrical, plumbing, HVAC, roofing) run a free public lookup maintained by a state or provincial board. In much of the U.S. it's a state contractors' board, licensing department, or consumer-affairs agency; many other countries have an equivalent trade registry.

Go to the official government site directly — not a link the contractor texts you, and not the top sponsored search result, which may be a lookalike. Then check that the license is:

• Real and active, not expired, suspended, or revoked.
• In the right name — matching the person and business you're actually dealing with.
• For the right trade and scope — a handyman registration is not an electrical license.

A license is a floor, not a guarantee of good work. But an active, correctly-scoped license means a real human is accountable to a real authority, and that someone met the area's baseline requirements. "Unlicensed for work that legally requires a license" is one of the brightest red flags there is.

Step three: pull the complaint and discipline history

This is the step people skip, and it's the one that pays. The same boards that verify licenses usually publish complaint, disciplinary, or enforcement history — and court records (small claims, civil judgments, liens, sometimes criminal) are often searchable too.

What you're reading for isn't perfection. Any long-running business collects a complaint or two. You're looking for patterns: repeated unfinished-work or abandonment complaints, formal disciplinary actions, a license that was suspended and quietly reinstated under a new business name. One angry review is noise. A documented enforcement action from a licensing board is a record.

Cross-check the name across a few places — the licensing board, your local consumer-protection or attorney-general office, and a general web search of the business and the owner's name plus words like "complaint," "lawsuit," or "scam." Phoenixing — closing a business under a bad name and reopening under a fresh one — is common enough that searching the person, not just the company, matters.

Step four: bonding and insurance — what they actually protect

Three different words get blurred together, so here's the plain version:

• Licensed means they met the authority's requirements to do the work.
• Bonded usually means a surety bond exists — a third party that can pay out, up to a limit, if the contractor fails to meet certain obligations. It's a backstop, often modest, not a blank check.
• Insured is the big one for your protection. Liability insurance covers damage they cause to your property; workers' compensation covers their crew if someone is injured on your job. Without it, an injury on your property can become your financial problem.

Don't accept "yep, I'm fully insured" as proof. Ask for a certificate of insurance, and where it's offered, have it sent directly from the insurer or agent — fake certificates are easy to mock up. Confirm the coverage is current, not lapsed last year.

Step five: protect the money and the paper

Verification gets you to a trustworthy name. These habits protect you the rest of the way:

• Get it in writing. A real, itemized contract — scope, materials, total price, payment schedule, start and finish dates. Vague is a choice, and rarely an innocent one.
• Never pay the whole thing up front, and be wary of a large cash-only deposit demand. Staged payments tied to completed milestones keep leverage on your side.
• Pay traceably. Card or check leaves a record and recourse; cash, gift cards, or wire transfers do not. A push to pay in untraceable ways is a classic scam tell.
• Beware pressure. "Today only," "I have leftover material from another job," "pay now before the price goes up," and unsolicited door-knocking after a storm are pressure tactics, not deals.

The one-line takeaway

Before any deposit, spend fifteen minutes: confirm the exact name, verify the license on the official government site, read the complaint and discipline history, and get insurance proof from the insurer. The contractor who's earned your trust will wait fifteen minutes without blinking. The one who can't is the one this checklist just saved you from.