Only 27.2% of licensed deck contractors publish a website

Nobody can answer that from a single source, and any figure presented as a national count is an estimate rather than a measurement. Contractor licensing in the United States is administered state by state — and in some places city by city — with no federal registry and no common definition of what a licence covers. This analysis holds 458,398 deck-capable licence records across nine jurisdictions that publish their registries: WA, CA, NY, FL, OR, CT, AZ, DE, IA. That is a real count for those nine, not an extrapolation to fifty. Several large states, Texas among them, do not license general residential contractors at the state level at all, so a national total would be counting different things in different places. When you see a national figure quoted, check whether it counts licences, businesses, or employed workers — the three differ by an order of magnitude.

Across the nine registries, 124,913 of 458,398 deck-capable licence records publish a website — 27.2%. The spread between jurisdictions is narrower than expected: IA is highest at 32.3% and NY lowest at 16.4%, with most sitting between 25 and 31%. Read the number carefully. It measures websites published in the licence record, so a firm operating only through a social page, a marketplace profile, or word of mouth counts as having none, and a firm whose website exists but was never filed with the licensing authority is undercounted. Even allowing generously for both, the finding holds: the clear majority of licensed residential contractors have no independent web presence attached to their public licence record.

It depends enormously on the state, which is the most surprising result here. Median years since original licence issue runs from 6 in OR to 15 in CA — roughly a factor of 2.5. In CA, 38.8% of licence holders have held one for more than twenty years. In OR the equivalent figure is 17.1%. That is not a statement about skill — it reflects how hard a licence is to obtain and how long people keep one. States with demanding examination and bonding requirements accumulate long-tenured holders; states with lighter registration see far more churn. Two of the nine registries are excluded from this measure entirely because they re-issue licences annually, which resets the date.

No, and treating it as a single credential is the most common mistake homeowners make when checking a contractor. In California a CSLB licence is a state-level trade licence requiring examination, bonding and classification — a B general building licence covers a full deck build. In Florida the DBPR distinguishes "certified" contractors, valid statewide, from "registered" contractors, valid only in the jurisdiction that issued the registration, which is a distinction that matters if a firm crosses county lines. In New York City the DCWP home improvement contractor licence is a consumer-protection licence covering the five boroughs and does not apply to the rest of the state. Several states have no state-level residential contractor licence at all. So "licensed and insured" in an advertisement is a claim to verify against a specific registry, not a uniform standard.

Yes. The figures on this page may be quoted or reproduced with attribution to DeckMath and a link to this page. Please cite the snapshot date — August 2026 — because licence registries change continuously and the counts will drift. If you need a figure that is not published here, or a breakdown by licence class within a state, the underlying analysis exists and we will usually run it on request. Two things we ask you not to do, because they misrepresent the data: do not present these counts as national totals, since they cover nine jurisdictions rather than fifty, and do not present the tenure figures for Delaware or Iowa, which are excluded here because both registries re-issue licences annually and their date fields would read as zero years of experience for every holder.