Before anyone hires a contractor or lets a builder onto a platform, one question matters: are they actually licensed, and is that licence in good standing? In Canada the answer lives in provincial registries — Quebec's RBQ, Ontario's HCRA — and checking one contractor by hand is easy. Checking hundreds, or wiring the check into your product, is where it gets painful. This is a practical guide to verifying Canadian contractor licences at scale, plus a free tool for one-off lookups.
Two ways to use licence data
One-off checks (free). If you just need to confirm a specific contractor before hiring, use a lookup. CheckContractors.ca aggregates Quebec (RBQ) and Ontario (HCRA) licences into one search — type a name or licence number and see the status. Always confirm on the official registry too; the site links back to it.
At scale (data / API). If you run a marketplace, an insurer, a screening service, or any product that needs to verify contractors programmatically, you don't want to retype names into a government portal. You want the registry as structured data. That's the Canada Contractor Licences actor: Quebec RBQ and Ontario HCRA records — name, licence number, status, location — as JSON/CSV, updated regularly.
Why status is the whole point
A licence lookup isn't just "do they exist." The valuable signal is status: Active, Licensed, Licensed with Conditions — and the red flags: Revoked, Suspended, Refused, Cancelled. For anyone doing risk or trust work, those negative statuses are exactly what you're screening for. A marketplace wants to keep revoked builders off the platform; an insurer wants to price around them. The data carries all of it, not just the clean records.
The recipe: verification at scale
- Pull the registry. Run the Canada Contractor Licences actor for Quebec, Ontario, or both.
- Match against your list. Join it to your existing contractors/vendors by name or licence number to flag who's licensed, who isn't, and whose status changed.
- Screen for red flags. Filter for Revoked / Suspended / Refused to catch the records that should stop a hire or an approval.
- Wire it into your flow. Via Make or n8n or the Apify API, refresh on a schedule so your platform's licence checks stay current instead of going stale the day after onboarding.
- Keep the official registry as source of truth. Aggregated data is for scale and screening; for a formal decision, confirm the current status on the RBQ/HCRA registry itself.
Who uses this
- Home-services marketplaces and directories — verify and badge contractors, keep revoked ones out.
- Insurers and underwriters — licence status as a risk input.
- Background-check and vendor-screening services — add contractor-licensing to their checks.
- Lead-gen and proptech platforms — filter their contractor lists to licensed-only.
- Homeowners — the free CheckContractors.ca lookup for a single check before hiring.
The honest part
Licensing is provincial, so coverage is by province — this is Quebec (RBQ) and Ontario (HCRA) today, the two biggest, with more provinces the natural next step. And aggregated data is for scale and screening, not the final word: registries update on their own cadence, so for a formal, high-stakes decision, always re-check the current status on the official provincial registry. Use the dataset to work fast across thousands; use the official source to close the loop on the one that matters.
Free single lookup: CheckContractors.ca. Bulk / API data for Quebec and Ontario: the Canada Contractor Licences actor. Questions about verifying licences at scale? Happy to help in the comments.
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