Ask what a contractor license costs and you will get quoted everything from the price of a nice dinner to the price of a used truck, because both are true. Georgia will take a general-contractor application for $10. The District of Columbia charges $655. Between them sit 27 more licensing states, each with its own fee, its own renewal clock, and its own answer to whether you sit an exam.
This guide lays out the actual numbers — application fees, exam requirements, renewal periods — for every state that issues a statewide general-contractor license, the fee ranges for the four big trades, and the fact that surprises almost everyone: 22 states have no statewide GC license at all.
The 22 states with no statewide GC license
Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Texas, Vermont, and Wyoming license general contractors at the city or county level, or not at all. Texas — the second-largest construction market in the country — has no statewide GC license. Neither does New York.
That does not mean no rules: most of these states license the specialty trades statewide (only five states skip electricians; only six skip plumbers), and cities like Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia run substantial local licensing regimes. But it is why any national “licensed general contractor” dataset is honestly a patchwork — and why our own state coverage names, state by state, which registry each roster comes from instead of pretending one national list exists.
Roofing is patchier still: 22 states issue no statewide roofing license. HVAC goes unlicensed at the state level in 15.
GC application fees, state by state
For the 29 jurisdictions that license general contractors statewide (fees are the application charge; most states add license/registration fees on issuance, plus bond and insurance requirements that dwarf the fee itself):
Alabama — $300, exam, renews annually. Alaska — $300, exam, 2 years. Arizona — $200, exam, 2 years. Arkansas — $100, exam, annual. California — $450, exam, 2 years. District of Columbia — $655, no exam, 2 years. Florida — $335, exam, 2 years. Georgia — $10, exam, 2 years. Hawaii — $50, exam, 2 years. Louisiana — $100, exam, licensee's choice of 1-3 years. Maryland — $281.25, exam, 2 years. Massachusetts — $23, exam, 2 years. Michigan — $195, exam, 3 years. Minnesota — $200, exam, 2 years. Mississippi — $400, exam, annual. Nevada — $300, exam, 2 years. New Jersey — $110, no exam, annual. New Mexico — $36, exam, 3 years. North Carolina — $75, exam, annual. North Dakota — $450, no exam, annual. Oregon — $400, exam, 2 years. Rhode Island — $150, exam, 2 years. South Carolina — $350, exam, 2 years. Tennessee — $250, exam, 2 years. Utah — $210, exam, 2 years. Virginia — $360, exam, 2 years. Washington — $150.20, no exam, 2 years. West Virginia — $90, exam, annual. Wisconsin — $15, no exam, annual.
Five of the 29 skip the exam — D.C., New Jersey, North Dakota, Washington, and Wisconsin — which is worth knowing before assuming a license implies a tested tradesperson. In Washington, for instance, contractor registration is a bond-and-insurance check, not a competency exam; the state is admirably transparent about exactly that.
What the trades cost
Across the states that license them statewide, application fees for contractor-level licenses run: electricians $0-$450 across 46 licensing states, plumbers $10-$450 across 45, HVAC $0-$450 across 36, roofing $36-$450 across 29. The zero-dollar entries are real — a few states fold the application into the exam or issuance fee.
The fee is never the real cost. The pattern that matters: exam prep and scheduling (weeks to months), the surety bond (hundreds to thousands annually, credit-dependent), liability insurance, and workers' comp. A $10 Georgia application sits on top of the same bond-and-insurance stack as a $450 California one. Fees tell you what the state charges; the stack tells you what the license costs.
Why the fee map matters if you sell to contractors
Licensing friction shapes the supply of licensed firms. High-friction states (exam + high fees + annual renewal) hold smaller, more stable licensed populations; a license there is a stronger signal of a committed business. Low-friction states run bigger, faster-churning rosters. Our own re-ingest deltas show the churn side directly: Connecticut, an annual-renewal state, rolled roughly 3,500 expired credentials off its registry in a single 2026 refresh, while most two-year states we track moved by a few hundred records in the same cycle.
If you prospect licensed contractors, that changes what a list is worth where. In a high-friction state, a roster of active licensees is close to a census of serious firms. In a no-statewide-license state, the honest unit is the specialty trades — which is how we structure coverage there.
License-requirement facts in this guide draw on the US Contractor Licensing Dataset by GetTradeLicense (CC BY 4.0), verified against state sources between April and July 2026, plus the state boards we ingest directly. Rules change and reciprocity agreements get renegotiated — before acting on any single state's requirements, confirm with that state's licensing board. Where this guide and a board disagree, the board is right.