Hiring someone who is properly licensed involves key steps to ensure you are choosing a qualified professional who cannot only get the job done, but meets all necessary legal and industry standards.
The Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation (TDLR) provides oversight for a broad range of occupations, businesses, facilities, and equipment – 37 programs with almost 1,000,000 licensees in 2023.
Hiring someone who’s properly licensed is important because it ensures:
- They have undergone a criminal background check;
- And in many cases, they have had training, passed examinations, and completed continuing education covering important rules and regulations.
Verify Their License
When you’re interviewing someone who should have a license issued by TDLR, it’s easy to verify that they’ve got the appropriate license. Go to https://www.tdlr.texas.gov/LicenseSearch/.
You can search by license type, license number (if you know it), license expiration date, name, city, county or zip code.
Depending on the type of licensing program, the landing page will look different. (Fun fact: TDLR has eight different licensing systems because of the number of programs the agency has received over the years.)
This is what the search page looks like for most TDLR license programs:
This is what the search page looks like for the health-related license programs:
If your search seems to reveal that the person you’re inquiring about does not have a license, you can always call the TDLR PIO (512-463-3208) or email to ask for assistance in confirming that the person in question is indeed unlicensed.
Checking whether someone is licensed is an important part of determining whether to allow that person to provide a service or whether to allow them into your home. Please direct them to contact TDLR Customer Service (Toll-Free in Texas: 1-800-803-9202) to confirm someone’s license status if they can’t locate a license online.
You can also search to see whether a person has been assessed a sanction, administrative penalty – or both – by the Texas Commission of Licensing and Regulation or the TDLR executive director during the current and past two fiscal years. You can search by license type, license number, last name, company name, city, county or zip code.
Source: Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation
