Washington Contractor Bond Report
Analysis of 8,473 active registrations across three L&I populations · data as of August 30, 2026
Download the county-level data (CSV) - free to cite with attribution and a link (license: CC BY 4.0).
8,204 of 8,473 active contractor registrations in Washington's public L&I file - 96.8% - have a surety bond on file, and the amounts barely vary: 2,132 of the construction population's 2,171 bonds are exactly $6,000. A bond in this register is a floor nearly everyone stands on, not a signal that separates one company from another.
The second finding is about what the register can NOT show. Washington publishes only the insurance policies currently on file - a lapsed policy is dropped from the dataset rather than shown as lapsed - so a Texas-style lapse rate is impossible to compute here: Texas's own file shows the lapses, Washington's hides them by design. Two states, two definitions of what a public record is for.
Bonds by population
L&I registers the three trades as separate populations with separate files; we analyze them separately because their bond floors differ - pooling them would blur exactly the structure worth seeing.
| Population | Active | Bonded | Median bond | Most common amounts |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Construction contractors | 2,194 | 2,171 (99.0%) | $6,000 | $6,000 (2,132), $15,000 (28), $30,000 (7) |
| Electrical contractors | 5,520 | 5,280 (95.7%) | $4,000 | $4,000 (5,206), $6,000 (70), $30,000 (2) |
| HVAC contractors | 759 | 753 (99.2%) | $15,000 | $15,000 (692), $30,000 (60), $12,000 (1) |
Amounts are reported exactly as the bond file publishes them. We do not restate statutory minimums here: the file speaks for what contractors actually carry, and the tight clusters at one amount per population are the observable fact.
What this means for hiring
A bond is money a customer can claim against, and L&I's verify tool shows each contractor's bond, its amount and the firm that issued it. But because nearly every registration carries the same amount, the bond's presence tells you a company is registered properly - not that it is better than the next one. The handful of companies carrying $30,000 bonds chose to stand on a higher floor, and our Washington listings rank bond amount only after insurance for exactly that reason.
Insurance is the sharper question in Washington precisely because the register only shows live policies: ask any contractor for a current certificate of insurance, and check the registration itself in L&I's verify tool at secure.lni.wa.gov/verify. How we verify.
Method and reuse
Source: Washington L&I's public contractor registration datasets on data.wa.gov (license, insurance and bond files, joined on the registration number), ingested in full and analyzed as of August 30, 2026. We count one row per ACTIVE registration; a bond counts when the bond file names a surety and its expiration has not passed at the data date - continuous bonds with no expiration count as live, matching how L&I publishes them. Figures recompute automatically each time we re-ingest, so they may differ slightly from an earlier citation.
You are welcome to cite or republish these figures with attribution to Homversa and a link to this page. Journalists and researchers who want the city-level breakdown can request it at hello@homversa.com.