Disclaimer

Read this alongside any page on this site. It sets out two limits that apply to everything here.

Not affiliated with the Contractors State License Board

This site is not affiliated with the Contractors State License Board, the Department of Consumer Affairs, or any other state or federal agency. It is an independent publication.

It is not operated, reviewed, endorsed or approved by the board. It cannot issue, renew, suspend or look up a license on your behalf. It has no access to any application file. Where a page describes what the board requires, that description is ours and the board’s own material is the authority — the citation on the page is there so you can go and read it.

The board publishes its own information at cslb.ca.gov. If this site and the board disagree, the board is right and we want to hear about it.

Not legal advice

To be plain about it: the content here is general information about what published rules say. It is not legal advice, it creates no professional relationship, and it must not be relied on as a substitute for advice about your own situation.

The distinction is real, not a formality. This site describes rules. It does not apply them to your facts, and applying a rule to a particular person’s circumstances is where the difficulty almost always lies. We deliberately do not do it — you will find pages here that explain a test and then decline to tell you which side of it you fall on. That restraint is the point.

The unauthorized practice of law

Telling an individual what their own legal position is, or what they should do about it, would be the unauthorized practice of law (UPL) if done by someone not licensed to practice law in California. We do not do it, and no page here should be read as doing it.

That editorial rule is what actually protects a reader, more than any notice can: the pages describe what the classifications cover and what the statute requires, rather than telling you which license you need or whether an exemption applies to you.

How current a page is

Regulatory pages carry a “Last checked” date recording when their facts were last read against the official source. Rules change, sometimes with little notice, and a dated page is an honest statement about when it was accurate rather than a guarantee about today. Where we could not verify something, the page says so instead of guessing.

Start from the California contractor license overview, where every page shows the source it was read from.