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Ava Torres
Ava Torres

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How to Search Texas Professional Licenses (TDLR) Programmatically

#api #automation #webscraping #data

The Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation (TDLR) oversees licenses for 30+ professions -- HVAC technicians, electricians, cosmetologists, auctioneers, property tax consultants, tow truck operators, and a bunch of others you'd never think to group together. If you're doing lead gen, compliance, or building a contractor verification tool for Texas, TDLR is where the data lives.

There's no public API. The portal is classic ASP with session-cookie-based navigation, pagination via pageDir=N links, and no bulk export. So I built an actor for it.

What it returns 

{
  "licenseNumber": "TACLA12389E",
  "licenseType": "Air Conditioning and Refrigeration Contractor",
  "holderName": "Cool Breeze HVAC Services LLC",
  "status": "Active",
  "issueDate": "2019-08-15",
  "expirationDate": "2026-08-31",
  "city": "Houston",
  "state": "TX",
  "zip": "77002",
  "phone": "(713) 555-0142",
  "email": "info@coolbreezetx.com"
}
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Email shows up for a good chunk of records -- TDLR collects it as part of the licensing process. That's pretty rare for a state licensing database. Makes it actually useful for outreach, not just verification.

License types you can search

The 30+ types include things like:

  • Air Conditioning and Refrigeration (TACLA prefix)
  • Electrician (TECL prefix)
  • Cosmetology (TDLR issues salon and individual licenses)
  • Property Tax Consultant
  • Barbershop
  • Tow Truck Operator / Company
  • Boiler Inspector
  • Auctioneers

The full list is on the TDLR portal. Each license type has its own prefix in the license number, which makes filtering easy.

Running it 

{
  "licenseType": "Air Conditioning and Refrigeration Contractor",
  "searchQuery": "Houston",
  "maxResults": 200
}
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Or search by license holder name:

{
  "licenseType": "Electrician",
  "searchQuery": "Rodriguez",
  "maxResults": 100
}
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You can also search by city, which is useful if you're building a local vendor directory or targeting outreach by market.

Why this is actually useful

Lead gen for trades is the obvious one -- HVAC and electrical especially, since those are high-value service contracts. But the cosmetology angle is interesting too. If you're selling POS systems, booking software, or supplies to salons, TDLR has contact info for individual license holders and salon owners. That's a lead list that's hard to get anywhere else.

For compliance, same story as any professional license database: you need to verify your vendors are actually licensed, and checking one at a time on a state portal doesn't scale.

ngl the TDLR portal is one of the less annoying state licensing sites to work with -- no Cloudflare, no modern anti-bot, just old ASP. Which means the actor is stable and unlikely to break on random UI changes.

Try the actor: TDLR Texas Professional License Search on Apify

Covers all 30+ license types. Good for trades lead gen or vendor compliance workflows in Texas.

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