Every state publishes contractor license data. Almost no two states publish the same fields — and the difference between a registry that includes contact details and one that stops at a license number decides how useful the public record actually is, whether you're verifying one roofer or building a call list.
We ingest the registries of 30 states, so we can rank them by what actually arrives in the file, measured at ingest time. This is that ranking. It reflects what each state hands the public on day one, before any enrichment we do on top.
The gold tier: phone and email, natively
Iowa is the best public contractor file in the country. The DIAL contractor registration export carries a native phone number on 99.6% of records and a native email on 97.6% — plus a trade-activity breakdown most umbrella registrations lack. Arkansas is right behind it (about 99% phone and 98% email at ingest), and Louisiana's board publishes email on nearly every record (98.7%). Utah's DOPL registry publishes phone, email, and street address natively for every participating contractor.
It is no coincidence these are also the states where verification is easiest for consumers: a registry built to connect the public with licensees publishes the fields the public actually needs.
The phone-book tier
A larger group publishes reliable phones but no email. Washington L&I: 100% native phone. Texas TDLR: 100%. Nebraska: 100%. Alabama and West Virginia: better than 99%. Oklahoma's new roofing-registration platform: 100%. Maine's license rolls carry a phone for 96.7% of master-level licensees. California's CSLB master file includes phone for effectively every active license.
Phone-only sounds limiting, but a registry phone number is the single highest-value contact field: it is board-verified, tied to the license, and current as of the last renewal.
The name-and-number tier
At the other end, several registries publish no contact fields at all. Florida's DBPR licensing file — one of the largest in the country — carries no phone numbers. Massachusetts publishes almost none (about 1% at ingest). Idaho's bulk export runs near 5% despite the same software vendor powering Utah's contact-rich file, and Alaska's carries none. Delaware, Vermont, and DC's open-data registries stop at name, license, and address.
For these states the public record answers "is this business licensed?" but not "how do I reach them?" — which is precisely the gap enrichment exists to fill, and why our records attach contact fields from public business listings where the state publishes none. Where a field is genuinely absent everywhere, we say so rather than invent it.
The pattern worth naming
Data quality does not track state size, politics, or budget. Iowa and Arkansas beat California and New York. What it tracks is the registry's design intent: states that built their portal as a consumer-protection tool publish contact data; states that built it as an internal licensing ledger publish what the ledger needed and nothing more.
Yields above are measured at ingest from each state's own published file or portal, September 2026; percentages move a little with every refresh.