How to Verify a Minnesota Contractor's License

Minnesota keeps its home-trade credentials at one agency, the Department of Labor and Industry (DLI), but not every trade gets the same credential. Plumbing and electrical contractors hold a DLI license. Heating and cooling contractors hold something different. In DLI's own words, while there is no state license required for mechanical contractors, businesses must file a $25,000 mechanical contractor bond with DLI in order to contract to perform gas, heating, ventilation, cooling, air conditioning, fuel burning or refrigeration work. So for an HVAC company you are verifying a bond, not a license. The same search shows you both.

What each trade should hold

• Plumbing: a plumbing contractor license. DLI says businesses and individuals that contract to perform plumbing work in Minnesota must have a plumbing contractor license or a restricted plumbing contractor license, and that a plumbing contractor license is required for plumbing work in Minnesota communities with a population over 5,000. The license belongs to the business, and the business must have at all times a licensed master plumber as its responsible person. DLI tells homeowners that licensed plumbing contractors carry a surety bond and liability insurance.
• Electrical: a Class A electrical contractor license. Businesses and individuals that contract to perform electrical work in Minnesota must have an electrical contractor license. The responsible person must hold an active master electrician license, and the business must provide a $25,000 surety bond.
• HVAC: a mechanical contractor bond. The bond covers the gas, heating, cooling and refrigeration work quoted above, and the filing is valid for two years. One more line matters: in addition to filing a bond with DLI, mechanical contractors must comply with local licensing requirements, so ask your city as well.

Where to look it up

Start at DLI's license and registration lookup page. It sends you into iMS, DLI's licensing system, and an account is not required to search. DLI's own step list:

1. Open iMS and click Continue as Guest, found in the lower left-hand corner of the iMS homepage.
2. In the License & Registration Tile, click Search License/Registration Holders. DLI's iMS basics page calls the same button Search Licenses & Registrations.
3. Pick a search criterion from the drop-down. DLI suggests License/Registration No, Licensee Personal Name, or Company Name/DBA. For a company name, type in just part of a company name, the search will depend on how the name was entered into our licensing system, then pick the right record from the list.
4. To narrow it, click on the green Add icon to add additional search criteria and use License/Reg Type or License/Reg Discipline and pick from the drop-down lists to search specific licenses. On DLI's own records the three credentials are named Plumbing Contractor, Class A Electrical Contractor and Mechanical Contractor Bond.

How to read the result

Status. DLI is plain about the word to look for: current, active licenses or registrations will have a status of Issued. Expired is not a current credential. DLI's nightly export, which this site ingests, carries live records under both Issued and LICENSED, so we treat both spellings as current. A listing here is only published when the record is current and its expiration date has not passed.

Expiration date. Check it against today, not just the status. Minnesota credentials run on fixed calendars: plumbing contractor licenses expire on December 31 of odd-numbered years, electrical contractor licenses expire on the last day of February in even-numbered years, and a mechanical bond filing is valid for two years.

Business or Personal. The record you want for a company is the business one. DLI's instructions: all contractor licenses (electrical, plumbing, residential building contractor, remodeler, elevator, HPP, roofer, manufactured homes) are a business license even if the contractor is an individual proprietor.

Name. Match it to the name on the estimate. DLI's export carries a legal name and, where one exists, a DBA, and the lookup searches Company Name/DBA, so try both names.

The traps that catch Minnesota homeowners

1. A person's license is not the company's license. DLI lists a master plumber, a journeyworker plumber and an unlicensed individual - plumbing as individual credentials, separate from the plumbing contractor business license. In the DLI plumbing export this site ingests, only about one row in ten is a business: 36,629 rows, 3,501 businesses, and 17,556 registered unlicensed plumbers. A hit on a technician's name proves that person's standing, not that the company you are hiring holds a contractor license.
2. Registered is not licensed. DLI: registered contractors are not considered to be licensed to perform services for which a license is required, and these records all begin with the two-letter prefix IR. An IR number on a plumbing or electrical quote is the wrong credential.
3. For HVAC, stop looking for a license. There is none to find. Search the mechanical contractor bond type instead. In DLI's bond export as this site reads it, those numbers carry the prefix MB. A company calling itself state-licensed for heating and cooling is describing a credential Minnesota does not issue.
4. Discipline lives on a different page. DLI publishes yearly plumbing enforcement actions and electrical enforcement actions as documents, and suggests you use the keyboard shortcut Control + F (command + F on Macintosh) to access your browser's search bar to find a name. A current status alone does not tell you this. On this site, DLI's enforcement-action flag is a hard exclusion: a flagged company does not appear on any Minnesota page at any position.
5. A plumbing start date may be a database date. DLI moved its records into a new system in 2012 and stamped everything it carried across with one date. In the plumbing export this site ingests, 30% of current plumbing contractors share that single day. Do not read it as the year the company started. For that reason we publish no start date for those companies and list Minnesota plumbing contractors alphabetically.

What DLI's export will not tell you

DLI's public export carries no insurance policy and no bond amount for anyone: the mechanical file records that a bond exists, never what it is worth. That is why Minnesota listings on this site show neither. The bond and insurance figures above come from DLI's licensing pages, not from any contractor's record. For proof of a particular company's coverage, ask the company for it.

Every Minnesota company listed here was matched against DLI's nightly export for its trade, holds a current and unexpired record with no enforcement action on file, and shows the DLI number for you to enter. How that check works, and what it cannot see, is on the methodology page.