Half of California's contractors are a single person

We analyzed all 243,127 contractor licenses on file with the California Contractors State License Board. 232,260 are in good standing. The industry looks nothing like the software built to serve it.

1. The typical licensed contractor is one person, not a company

115,497 of the 243,127 licenses on file — 47.5% — are registered to a sole owner. Corporations account for 45.4%, LLCs for 5.4%, and partnerships for 1.5%. Most contractor software is priced per user, but in a market where nearly half the licensed operators are the entire user list, per-seat pricing solves a problem most of the industry doesn't have.

2. Solo rates swing 38 points depending on the trade

Painting & Decorating is the most solo trade in California at 64.0%, followed by Ceramic & Mosaic Tile at 62.5% and Flooring at 55.3%. General Engineering is the least solo at 26.3%. The pattern tracks what the work physically requires: trades one person can perform with a truck and hand tools skew solo, while trades needing crews, heavy equipment, or bonding capacity skew corporate.

3. Rural counties are far more solo than urban ones

Humboldt County is 69.7% sole owners, Butte 67.3%, and Santa Cruz 64.9%. At the other end, Orange County is 41.9% and Los Angeles 42.2%. Across the 33 counties with at least 1,000 licenses the gap runs a consistent gradient — the denser and more expensive the metro, the more likely a contractor operates as a corporation.

4. Dangerous trades lose licenses to workers'-comp lapses at 8x the rate of safer ones

6.21% of Tree Service licenses are currently suspended for a workers'-compensation lapse, against 0.75% for Plumbing. Concrete (5.08%), Roofing (4.13%), and HVAC (3.94%) also sit near the top. These are the trades where premiums are highest, which is exactly where a missed payment is most likely and most costly.

Methodology

The dataset is the public license roster published by the California Contractors State License Board. Business structure, county, and classification codes are populated on 96–100% of records. Where a license carries multiple classifications, the first listed code is treated as the primary trade. Trade-level breakdowns are limited to classifications with at least 1,500 licenses and county breakdowns to counties with at least 1,000. Every figure is generated programmatically from the raw records rather than entered by hand.

These findings are free to cite, quote, and republish with attribution.