How to check a roofing contractor license in Florida

The license belongs to a person not to the company

Roofing in Florida is a licensed trade. The work on your roof is legal only if somebody with the right license takes responsibility for it.

That license is issued by the Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation. On this site the class letters and number sit beside each business name, with a link straight to the department's own lookup.

The part most people miss is who holds it. The license belongs to a named individual, called the qualifier, not to the company. A company can only pull permits and do licensed work because a qualifier has attached their license to it.

Companies change names, merge and rebrand. A qualifier is a person whose license the state can suspend. That is why every card here names the qualifier next to the number rather than printing a number on its own.

It is also why a business can look entirely real, with a good website and a sign-written truck, and still have nobody qualified attached to it.

Running the check yourself

This takes about a minute.

Open the department's licensee search, linked from every license number on this site. Put the company name in the business name field.

Read three things on the record that comes back.

Read the status. Active is the only status that lets somebody pull a permit on your roof.

Read the class. A certified license is valid statewide. A registered license is only valid where a local authority has licensed the holder, which matters if the work is in one county and the office is in another.

Read the qualifier's name, and write it down.

If the company name returns nothing, that does not mean the business is unlicensed. Small operations often hold the license in the owner's personal name and trade under something else. Search the owner's name instead. If you do not know it, ask on the phone.

Then ask whether the qualifier is still there

Take that name and ask, on the call, whether that person is still with the business.

Qualifiers move. A company whose qualifier has left cannot pull a permit until it finds another one. That is not an exotic failure. It is one of the most common reasons a license looks fine on paper while a permit application stalls two weeks into a job.

It is also where a company name can mislead without anybody intending it. One Naples roofer on this site trades under a family name while its license is held by a person with a different surname entirely. That is perfectly ordinary, and it is worth knowing before you assume the owner is the licensee.

Every roofer ranked here has been matched to a named qualifier with a date on which we checked it. Of the 136 roofing businesses we hold across Lee and Collier counties, 63 cleared that match. The rest are listed with verification recorded as not complete, which is a statement about our checking rather than an accusation about them.

The city registration nobody asks about

Here is the requirement that catches people out even when the state license is perfect.

A contractor working inside a city usually has to be registered with that city as well, separately from the state. Fort Myers requires contractors to be actively registered with the city, with current license and insurance details on file, before it issues a permit. Cape Coral runs its own registration through its permitting division.

So a roofer can hold a clean, active state license and still be unable to start on your house this month, because they have never registered in your city or their insurance certificate there has lapsed.

Ask which cities they are currently registered in. It is a one-sentence answer for anybody who works your area regularly.

What the record does not tell you

Our September 2026 extract of the state roster shows the limits of this neatly.

Every certified roofing license in it carried the same expiry date, because the class renews on a common cycle rather than per contractor. So an expiry date tells you nothing that separates one roofer from another. The status line and the issue date do more work. Across the roofers ranked here those issue dates run from 1986 to 2026, a forty-year spread in how long the named qualifier has held a license at all.

A license is a floor, not a recommendation. It says the holder met the state's requirements and is currently in good standing.

It says nothing about workmanship. Nothing about how a warranty claim gets handled. Nothing about whether the crew on your roof works for the license holder or for a subcontractor two steps removed. And nothing about the company's finances or whether it will still exist when a problem surfaces in three years.

The discipline file behind the license

A license record and a discipline record are two different files, and the second is the one most people never open.

The department publishes an export of disciplinary action against licensed contractors, one file per fiscal year. We hold ten of those files, covering 1 July 2021 to 30 June 2026, checked on 16 September 2026.

Because that set is complete for the period, a roofer with no row in any of those years is recorded here as a verified absence rather than as an unknown. An absence of evidence is only evidence of absence when you can show the file you searched was complete, and for Florida roofing contractors we can.

We also hold disciplinary records we have not published. Every one is withheld until the business has been notified at its record address, given seven days to respond, and had an editor confirm the record really belongs to it. Nothing about a withheld record reaches a page. Allegations are never published as findings.

Three things worth stopping on

A company that cannot tell you its license number.

A license number that returns a different business name with no explanation for the difference.

A contractor who asks you to pull the permit yourself as the homeowner.

None of the three proves anything on its own. All three are reasonable to raise before money changes hands, and a roofer who works your city every week will have an answer ready.

If something here is wrong about a business, the correction form is free and does not require anyone to buy anything. Identity and license errors are corrected within one working day of a credible report.