The nationwide building contractor directory
Look up contractors by their service area, not their business address. Filter by their permit history, construction speed, and inspection pass rate.
Everything you need to find and vet contractors
3.65M+ contractors
Our contractor directory is derived from our national building permit database. We use advanced data science to clean and deduplicate contractors across over 100M building permits in the United States.
Look up by service area
When you hire a contractor, you don't care about their business address; you care about their service area. We know where contractors work because we use their building permits.
Always accurate
Our contractor data is refreshed and re-processed monthly. We retrieve updates from our building permit database and supplement with state contractor license files.
Quality metrics
We calculate inspection pass rate and construction speed wherever it's available, providing an overall score and metrics by permit type.
Job availability
We know how many jobs each contractor can usually handle and whether they have the capacity to add one more.
CSVs and APIs
You can download to CSV directly from Shovels to analyze or transfer into your other applications.
Frequently asked questions
How do I find a building contractor?
Search the Shovels contractor directory by service area, trade, and permit history. Because every profile is built from building permits, you can find contractors who actually work in your area — not just those with a nearby business address — and compare them by their real track record of permits pulled, inspection pass rate, and construction speed.
What is the Shovels contractor directory?
It is a nationwide directory of 3.65M+ contractors, built from our national building permit database. We clean and deduplicate contractors across 178M+ US building permits, so you get one accurate profile per business — with their specialty, license status, contacts, and a verifiable history of the work they have done.
Can I search contractors by trade and location?
Yes. You can filter by standardized specialty — roofing, electrical, HVAC, plumbing, general building, and more — and by the service area derived from where each contractor actually pulls permits. That lets you separate pure-play specialists from generalists and size companies by permit volume.
How current and accurate is the contractor data?
The directory is refreshed and re-processed monthly. Contractor details come from permit applications, state licensing boards, and business registrations, and license status — active, expired, suspended, or revoked — comes straight from official state license files, so you can verify a contractor before you hire, onboard, or underwrite.
What is included in each contractor profile?
Each profile includes the business name, standardized specialty, license number and status, contact details such as email and phone pulled from recent permits plus website and LinkedIn, work history by permit type, and performance metrics like average job value, construction duration, and inspection pass rate.
How do I access the contractor directory?
Search the directory for free in Shovels Online — no credit card required. You can export results to CSV, integrate the Shovels API, or license the full dataset through Snowflake, Databricks, or BigQuery.
Find the right contractor, anywhere in the US
Search 3.65M+ contractors by service area, permit history, and quality metrics.