The Florida contractor licensing report

Florida's licensing board publishes the raw records but never says what they add up to — how many new contractors got licensed last year, which trades are growing, where they're concentrated. We counted 167,361 license records straight from the state's own registry to find out. Free to cite.

Executive summary

Florida holds 167,361 contractor license records in this dataset. New licenses issued per year have risen every year since 2015, general contractors are the largest single trade by license count, and licensed contractors are heavily concentrated in a small number of metro areas. The sections below break out each of those figures, with the count method and its limits stated plainly so the numbers can be checked rather than taken on faith.

New licenses issued each year

Florida issued 12,862 new contractor licenses in 2025, against 4,535 in 2015 — a rise of 184% over 10 years, with the steepest climb after 2021.

2026 is deliberately excluded from the chart: it is still in progress (10,641 new licenses so far), and a part-year placed beside full years reads as a collapse that is not happening.

Which trades hold the most licenses

Counting only licenses currently listed in this directory.

Certified vs registered

Every Florida contractor license is either “certified” (valid statewide) or “registered” (limited to the local jurisdiction that issued it) — see the license lookup page for what each means. This report doesn't yet break its counts out by that distinction; the trade and geographic figures above mix both. If a certified/registered split by trade or city would be useful, ask and we'll run it against the same underlying records.

Where they are

Counties are not reported here. Florida’s records store them as numeric codes and we hold no lookup table for them — publishing names would mean guessing the mapping.

What the status field says

Status is free text set by the state, not a category we assign. These are the values that appear most often, exactly as they are published.

Method, and how to check it

• Source. Florida DBPR contractor license records, read directly from the state, last refreshed Sep 30, 2026. Any individual record can be checked at MyFloridaLicense.
• Counts only. Nothing here is projected, weighted or estimated. Every figure is a count of records matching a stated condition.
• Year of issue means the issue date on the license record, not the date a business started trading.
• “Listed in this directory” is a subset: records that passed our publishing rules (an active license, enough detail to identify the business, no duplicate). It is smaller than the full record count, and the difference is not a measure of anything.
• Last refreshed Sep 30, 2026.