There is no Texas contractor license to wait for, so go and get the work

Texas does not issue a general contractor license. No state exam, no state application, no state fee, no board deciding whether you are ready. A general contractor, a framer, a roofer, a painter, a concrete crew, a drywall outfit, a flooring installer and a landscaper can all be trading in Texas this month.

That is not a loophole and it is not an oversight. It is deliberate policy. Texas licenses the trades where a mistake burns a house down or contaminates a water supply, and leaves the rest to contract, insurance and the city that issues the permit.

So the question worth asking is not whether you are allowed to work. It is who actually decides whether you get on site. Three parties do, and the state of Texas is not one of them: the board that licenses your trade, if your trade is licensed at all; the city where the permit gets pulled; and the general contractor or owner whose insurer wants paper in hand before your truck comes through the gate.

Here is the map of all three, with the numbers, the fees and the names of the people holding the pen.

Texas licenses a short list of trades and stays out of the rest

The list of state-licensed construction trades in Texas is short, and it is short on purpose. If your trade is not on it, the state has no opinion about you.

Electrical runs on hours, not years in a classroom. A residential wireman needs 4,000 hours of supervised work and a $20 application, with the exam through PSI. A journeyman needs 8,000 hours under a master and can sit the test at 7,000, though the license issues at 8,000. A master needs 12,000 hours and two years holding a journeyman license. Holding any of those still does not let your company sign a contract: that takes a Texas Electrical Contractor license, around $110 to apply, and the business has to be or employ a master electrician. 16 TAC 73.40(a) sets the insurance at $300,000 per occurrence for combined bodily injury and property damage, $600,000 aggregate, and $300,000 aggregate for products and completed operations. Renewal is annual with 4 hours of continuing education. The full ladder is the Texas electrician license.

Plumbing answers to its own board. The Texas State Board of Plumbing Examiners is separate from TDLR, with a separate portal and separate dates. Tradesman plumber-limited is 4,000 hours as a registered apprentice plus 24 hours of board-approved classroom time and an exam. Journeyman is 8,000 hours plus 48 hours of classroom. Master is a $25 application and an exam at Pearson VUE, open to a Texas journeyman who has held the license two years, a Texas journeyman with one year plus a completed US Department of Labor training program, or an out-of-state journeyman with four years. To contract directly with the public you register as a Responsible Master Plumber: a master in good standing with a certificate of insurance on file before you start working as one, at least $300,000 of commercial general liability for all claims in a one-year period under Occupations Code 1301.552, filed under 1301.3576. One RMP is the RMP of record for one company at a time. Annual renewal, 6 hours of continuing education. The route through is the Texas plumbing license.

HVAC splits on capacity. Class A covers any size system. Class B stops at 25 tons of cooling and 1.5 million BTU per hour of heating. Both carry endorsements for environmental air and for commercial refrigeration and process cooling. Insurance under 16 TAC 75.40 follows the class: Class A is $300,000 per occurrence, $600,000 aggregate and $300,000 products and completed operations, and Class B is $100,000, $200,000 and $100,000. Annual renewal, 8 hours of continuing education including one hour of Texas law and rules. Which class to apply for, and what the endorsements let you touch, is the Texas HVAC license.

Irrigation is the one people look for on the wrong website. TCEQ issues it, under Occupations Code Ch.1903 and 30 TAC ch.344. The license runs three years, costs $111 to issue and $111 to renew, and the continuing education is 24 hours for an irrigator, 16 for a technician and 24 for an inspector. Installing zones inside a landscaping package is licensed work. The landscaping around it is not.

Three more sit quietly at TDLR. Mold assessment and remediation moved across from the state health department in 2021. Elevator contracting and inspection run under Occupations Code Ch.754. Water well drilling and pump installation are there too. If a scope of work uses those words, the license is TDLR's to issue, and that is worth checking while you are pricing the job rather than after you have won it.

Roofing has no Texas license at all. The Roofing Contractors Association of Texas runs a voluntary certification. It is a marketing credential rather than a legal gate, which is exactly what makes it useful: a homeowner comparing three bids has no state register to look you up in, so the badge on your proposal is doing work that no license number could do for you here. The coast is a different matter. Inside the designated catastrophe area, which is 14 first-tier coastal counties plus part of Harris County, a WPI-8 Certificate of Compliance from the Texas Department of Insurance is required for new construction, additions, alterations, re-roofs and retrofits. WPI-8 is what makes the building insurable through TWIA, so a missing certificate is not a paperwork problem, it is the reason a sale does not close. Tier 1 shingles have to meet ASTM D7158 Class H and ASTM D3161 Class F.

The city is your licensing board, and the big five disagree with each other

Because the state stepped back, the cities stepped in. For the unregulated trades, the city registration matrix is the licensing regime. There is no statewide pattern to memorize, which sounds like a burden and is actually the opposite: in Texas the city asks for a form and a fee, where a licensing state asks for an exam and a bond.

Read that table as good news, because it is. Dallas is $120 and a form. Austin is a portal login and nothing. Houston asks nothing of a GC whatsoever. Compare California, where the same contractor needs four years of journey-level experience inside the last ten, a two-part exam at a PSI test center, and a $25,000 contractor's bond before signing a single contract. In Texas the money that would have been tied up in the bond is working capital, and the months that would have gone into the exam are bidding months.

Which city applies to you is decided by where the permit gets pulled, not where you live or where the office is. The whole matrix, portal by portal, with what each one wants attached, is Texas city contractor registration.

The certificate of insurance is the gate you will actually stand in front of

Talk to a general contractor about getting on their subcontractor list and the word license may not come up. The certificate will.

The GC's insurer sets that list, not the GC and not the city. Expect to be asked for commercial general liability with the GC named as additional insured, a waiver of subrogation, a completed W-9, and either a workers compensation policy or a clear written answer about why you do not carry one. Auto liability appears the moment your truck comes on site. On larger commercial work you may also be asked for an umbrella layer.

The limits the state already sets for licensed trades are a useful floor to aim at even when the state does not ask you for anything: $300,000 per occurrence, $600,000 aggregate and $300,000 products and completed operations is what a Texas Electrical Contractor or an ACR Class A has to carry, and it is what a serious private client tends to want to see.

Workers compensation is the genuinely Texan decision here. Texas is the one state that lets a private employer choose not to carry it, which makes coverage a number you price rather than a cost the state imposes. If you go non-subscriber, DWC Form-005 gets filed with the Division of Workers' Compensation each year between 1 February and 30 April, within 30 days of hiring your first employee, within 10 days of dropping a policy, and within 10 days of the Division asking for it. The no-coverage notice goes on the wall in English and Spanish. Make the call on purpose and it works for you: a GC can still require coverage in the contract, which turns this into a per-client decision rather than a company-wide one, and knowing your own number before the bid is what lets you say yes to that clause with a price attached. The full arithmetic is workers comp optional in Texas.

Texas does regulate one thing hard, and it is aimed at your customer

The state that will not license you will absolutely make the owner hold money on your behalf. This is where Texas law gets specific, and the specifics run in your favor.

The monthly notice traps funds. For every month in which you furnish labor or materials as a subcontractor or supplier at any tier, one notice goes to the owner and the original contractor together, by the 15th day of the third month after that month on commercial work, or the second month on residential, under Tex. Prop. Code s.53.056. It has to carry the statutory warning text word for word. From the moment the owner receives it, s.53.081 authorizes them to withhold whatever it takes to pay your claim, and s.53.084 makes an owner who pays the contractor anyway personally liable to you for the money that went past. Demand payment and the original contractor has 30 days under s.53.083 to dispute it or be deemed to have agreed, at which point the owner shall pay you out of the funds withheld.

Ten percent is already yours. Section 53.101 makes 10% statutory retainage mandatory during the work and for 30 days after completion. It is not a favor the owner grants. Where your own contract also provides for retainage, s.53.057 puts a separate notice on a 30-day clock running from the earlier of your contract finishing and the original contract being terminated or abandoned, and that notice is what keeps the retainage lien alive. Retainage is where the profit sits, which makes it the one clock worth setting on the day you sign.

Thirty-five days is the clock on private work. Chapter 28 of the Property Code gives an owner 35 days from a written payment request to pay a contractor, and s.28.002 gives you a statutory right to suspend work after notice when they do not. Overdue amounts run at 1.5% a month under s.28.004, and those terms cannot be waived in the contract, so a clause trying to trade them away does not survive. When money reaches you, the lower tier's share goes down within 7 days at the same 1.5% penalty, and Chapter 162 makes those funds trust funds while they sit in your account.

Writing and sending the notice itself, month by month, is the Texas monthly notice.

The affidavit, the copy, and the year

Texas runs its lien deadlines on month buckets rather than day counts. Everything you furnished in March shares one deadline. That is a kindness once you see it, because it means you are tracking a handful of dates a year instead of a date per invoice.

The affidavit is due on the 15th too. File with the county clerk by the 15th day of the fourth month after the trigger month on commercial work, the third month on residential, under s.53.052. Which month is the trigger depends on where you sit. An original contractor counts from the month the original contract was completed, terminated or abandoned. A subcontractor or supplier counts from their own last furnishing month. One statute, two different calendars, which is why the GC's date on a job is rarely your date.

Serve a copy within five days. Section 53.055 gives you until the fifth day after filing to send a copy to the owner, and to the original contractor as well when you are not the original contractor. HB 2237 removed the certified-mail-only rule, so any delivery method counts and proof of sending is the thing worth keeping.

Then you have a year. One year to file suit, measured from the last day you could have filed the affidavit, and it is one year on every project type now. The old split of one year residential and two years commercial went out with HB 2237 for contracts signed on or after 1 January 2022, under s.53.158. You can push it to two years by written agreement with the owner recorded before the first year expires, which is a reasonable thing to put on the table in a conversation you would otherwise be having with a courthouse.

On a homestead, the contract is the lien right. Improving a Texas homestead as the original contractor means a written contract executed before any labor or material is furnished, signed by both spouses when the owner is married, and filed with the county clerk in the county where the homestead sits, under s.53.254. The affidavit itself carries a conspicuous 10-point boldface notice reading THIS IS NOT A LIEN. THIS IS ONLY AN AFFIDAVIT CLAIMING A LIEN. Sign and file on day zero and the lien right is with you for the whole job.

Those dates are arithmetic done on a bad day, which is exactly what software is for. The Texas lien deadline calculator takes the month you worked and counts the 15ths.

Your first week, in the order that actually works

Form the entity and open the account. An LLC filed with the Secretary of State, an EIN from the IRS, and a business bank account that is not your personal one. Which wrapper suits the work is LLC or sole proprietor in Texas.

Buy the insurance before somebody asks for the certificate. Your broker issues the certificate, not you, so the request goes in before the bid rather than after the award. Aim at $300,000 per occurrence, $600,000 aggregate and $300,000 products and completed operations, which is the number the state itself picked as adequate for licensed work.

Register in the city where the first permit gets pulled. One city, the one with the job. Add the others as the work moves.

Start the hours if your trade is licensed. Hours are the one input you cannot buy back later, so the apprentice registration is worth filing in week one even when journeyman sits 8,000 hours away.

Decide the workers comp question deliberately. If you go non-subscriber, put the February to April filing window on the calendar the same day.

Put 15 May on the calendar. The Texas franchise tax report is annual, and the public information report is due even when you owe nothing. The no-tax-due threshold is $2,650,000 for report years 2026 and 2027.

Bid while the paperwork settles. Nothing on this list has to finish before you quote your first job.

What this costs on AEC Stack

Your business record, your certificates, your quotes and your invoices sit in one place, and there is no monthly subscription. AEC Stack takes 2.5% of each invoice processed through the platform, collected on the payment due date, which means the platform gets paid when you do.

You did not need a license to read this and you do not need one to start. The next move is a job worth quoting, and find work is where Texas projects show up before they hit the tender boards.