How to Check a Site-Work Contractor in North Carolina

“Licensed and insured” costs a contractor nothing to say. It goes on the truck door, the flyer and the first phone call, and it tells you nothing until you can point at a record behind it.

We’re a directory of site-work contractors, checked against public records. We don’t do the work. This page is what we’d want a friend to run through before handing a stranger a deposit and a machine: the checks, what each one proves, what it can’t, and how we run them for the contractors we list.

Would a clean title tell you whether a used car’s engine is any good?

It wouldn’t. A title tells you about ownership. The engine needs its own look. Contractor records work the same way: each one answers one question and stays quiet on the rest, so you run the ones your job calls for, and you read a gap as a question to ask instead of a verdict.

The License: Required at $40,000, and Not for Every Job

North Carolina defines a general contractor by the size of the job. Under G.S. 87-1, anyone who bids on or builds a building, highway, public utilities, grading or other improvement where the cost of the undertaking is $40,000 or more counts as a general contractor, and needs a license from the NC Licensing Board for General Contractors (NCLBGC). The Board’s own consumer page puts it plainly: at $40,000 or more, your general contractor must have a license. There is an exception for owners building on their own land for their own use.

Below $40,000, the state doesn’t require that license. A small drainage fix from someone with no general contractor license isn’t illegal for that reason alone.

Three details are worth knowing:

• The license has a class. The statute lists building, residential, highway, public utilities and specialty. The Board’s search form also lists a grading and excavating class, so a license in some other class doesn’t automatically cover your dig. The record shows which one the contractor holds.
• The license has a limit. A limited license covers a single project up to $750,000, an intermediate license up to $1.5 million, and an unlimited license has no cap. The cost counted leaves out the land.
• Bidding without one is a crime. G.S. 87-13 makes it a Class 2 misdemeanor to contract for or bid on a covered project without the license. And under G.S. 87-14, whoever applies for a permit on a covered job has to show the permit office proof of a license, or of an exemption.

What the license record can’t tell you: how good the work is, or whether the company has money in the bank today. It tells you the company’s qualifying person passed the Board’s exam and the license has been renewed. For the step-by-step on searching the NCLBGC portal, use our license lookup guide, and the NC licensing page goes deeper on the rule itself.

Septic Work Runs on a Different Certificate

If the job is a septic system, the license that matters isn’t the general contractor’s. North Carolina’s On-Site Wastewater Contractor Inspector Certification Board certifies installers and inspectors. Installers hold Grade Level II or Grade Level IV, and the grade decides which systems they may install. The board publishes lists of current certification holders by name and by county, so you can check one yourself. It also says the $40,000 general contractor threshold does not apply to a septic system installed by a certified installer, as long as the work covers only the septic system.

One more change is coming. The board says that from January 1, 2027, anyone it certifies must hold sufficient general liability coverage for the project. Pumping a tank is a separate permit, and the board says it doesn’t regulate pumpers. Our septic guide covers who does what.

Insurance: Two Policies and a Piece of Paper

Two different policies get lumped into “insured,” and they protect against different things. General liability is for damage the work causes, like a cut line or a cracked wall. Workers’ compensation is for the contractor’s people getting hurt.

North Carolina’s workers’ compensation law covers private employers that regularly employ three or more people (G.S. 97-2). So a two-person crew may legitimately have no policy, and a ten-person crew without one is a real problem. We didn’t find a general contractor license rule that makes general liability coverage a condition of the license itself.

The paper is where owners slip. A certificate of insurance is a snapshot of a policy on the day someone printed it. Three habits make it worth something:

• Have the insurance agent send it to you, not the contractor. A forwarded PDF can be last year’s.
• Check the dates on each coverage, not the date the certificate was issued.
• Call the agent to confirm the policy is still in force today. One North Carolina thread on hiring a tree crew gave exactly that advice: ask for the certificate, then call the agent to make sure it’s current.

North Carolina’s law shows why workers’ comp matters to the person doing the hiring. G.S. 97-19 says a contractor who sublets work without getting the subcontractor’s insurance certificate can be held liable for that subcontractor’s injured worker, even when the subcontractor has fewer than three employees. The statute speaks to contractors who hire subs. Whether an injury could reach you as the owner depends on the facts and on your own policy, so ask your insurer before work starts.

The NC Industrial Commission runs a public coverage search, and it’s worth the minute. But the Commission says on that page that what it shows is not proof of workers’ compensation insurance, may lag changes by thirty days or more, and should be verified with the employer or the insurer. Use it as a lead. The insurer’s certificate and a call to the agent are the proof.

A word on bonds. Some licensed contractors carry a surety bond because the licensing board lets an applicant post one instead of showing working capital. The bond amounts, $175,000 for a limited license up to $1 million for an unlimited one, are set by the Board’s rule, which says the bond is for the benefit of people damaged by the contractor’s breach of a construction contract. Only contractors who chose the bond route have one. A bond written for your own job is something to ask the contractor and the surety about. Nothing we read says a contractor must provide one.

Business Registration: Does the Company Exist

The Secretary of State’s business search tells you whether a company by that name is registered with the state and what its status is. You can search by company name, by Secretary of State ID, by the people listed as officials, or by registered agent, and there’s a separate search for assumed names, the “doing business as” names.

It answers a narrow question. A company that shows up in good standing is a real entity on file. It says nothing about skill or about insurance. A company that doesn’t show up is a question: the contractor may work under a different legal name, or under his own name. Ask which name will be on your contract, and make sure it’s the one you checked.

The Safety Record: OSHA

The federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration publishes an establishment search of its inspections by company name. North Carolina runs its own OSHA-approved program, the NC Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Division, and OSHA says state agencies that carry out approved programs feed the same system, so North Carolina’s inspections are in the search too.

Read it with care, because OSHA’s own note says so. Entries stay open to correction until a case closes, and citations can be amended, settled or contested. Different companies share similar names, so check the address. No results is not the same as a clean inspection history: it means no inspection was found under the name you typed. Try other spellings before you read anything into it. For a dig, the useful thing to look for is serious citations tied to trench or excavation work.

Permits: Who Pulled Them

Most real site work needs a permit from someone: the county health department for septic, the state or a local erosion-control program for larger land disturbance, NCDOT for a driveway onto a state road. Our pages on land-disturbance permits and septic permits sort out which.

Ask the contractor which permits the job needs and who pulls them, then ask the permit office to confirm. A permit in the contractor’s own name for a past job is evidence that they’ve taken on permitted work before. A permit in the owner’s name isn’t by itself a red flag, so a missing contractor name proves nothing on its own. What does worry us is a contractor who tells you the job needs no permit and won’t say how he knows.

References: What No Record Holds

Nothing above tells you whether a contractor answers the phone in week three, or whether the yard still drains after the first hard rain. That part is people. Ask for two recent jobs in your county, and ask the owners what happened when something went wrong, not whether they liked him. One r/NorthCarolina thread complained of contractors “vanishing mid project,” and no public database lists them.

Once you have a name you trust, comparing the quotes is the next job.

How We Check the Contractors We List

Every listing shows four checks: the license, the safety record, the business registration and workers’ comp. Each one links to the public search it came from, so you can look the contractor up yourself and don’t have to take our word.

The listings use three labels, and they mean less than “verified” sounds like it should, so here is the exact rule.

Some limits we’d rather say out loud:

• Workers’ comp is shown, but it isn’t part of the label. A contractor with no coverage on file could be a small crew the law doesn’t cover or could be breaking the law, and from the record alone we can’t tell which. So that check appears on the listing without deciding the label. It comes from the Industrial Commission search above, which says it is not proof of coverage, so the insurer’s certificate still matters.
• Permit history comes from two cities. We read the building permit feeds published by the City of Raleigh and the City of Greensboro. Contractors who work elsewhere won’t have permit history from us.
• Some lookups are slow to read. A few state pages block simple programs, so our software opens them in a real browser, one contractor at a time, and pulls the fields out of the result page. Records can lag the source, and an extraction can be wrong. That is the reason to open the link yourself.
• A suspended, expired or revoked license stops the process. We don’t spend more checks on a contractor whose license isn’t in force.
• We can correct a label by hand. Our admin tools can set a label directly, for fixing a misread record. The next automatic check works it out again by the rule.
• Featured is placement. A contractor with an active ad purchase, or a free founding placement we granted, can carry a Featured star and sort near the top of the directory. It changes none of the checks.

If a contractor isn’t in the directory, nothing here changes. You can run all of these lookups yourself, and our license lookup guide walks through them. When you’re ready to look at contractors we’ve already checked, start at the directory, or at the trade page for your job: excavation, grading, drainage or driveways.

Where to Go From Here

Look something up

• How to look up a contractor’s license: the step-by-step for each tool.
• NC licensing: the $40,000 rule and the license classes
• What to check before you dig: excavation

Compare what you’re offered

• Comparing site-work quotes: what a bid should itemize and why quotes differ.
• Red flags in contractor quotes

Something already went wrong

• Builder accountability: the escalation steps