Your master licence wires the job. The TECL is what lets your company sign for it.

You have done the hours. Twelve thousand of them, plus two years holding a journeyman card, plus the master exam. And you are still handing your day to a company that bills your hands out at three times what it pays you.

The thing standing between those two positions is one application, roughly $110, filed with TDLR. It is the Texas Electrical Contractor Licence, TECL on every form and in every conversation, and it is not another exam. It is the licence that sits on a business rather than on a person, and it is what lets a company in Texas offer to do electrical work, quote it, sign for it and invoice it.

The state's requirement for it is one sentence long: the company must be, or employ, a master electrician. If you are reading this with a master licence in your wallet, the qualification half is finished. What is left is a form, an insurance certificate and about a week of business setup, and this page is that week with the numbers in it.

What the $110 actually buys

Under Occupations Code Ch.1305, TDLR licenses electricians on a ladder of hours and licenses electrical contractors as businesses. Those are two different things and the difference is the whole reason this page exists.

An individual licence lets you work. The TECL lets the company contract. A master electrician on payroll at somebody else's shop is the reason that shop can bid; the same master electrician with a TECL in their own company name is the reason your shop can. Nothing about your skill changes on the day the licence arrives. What changes is who signs the contract and who keeps the margin on the other people's hours.

That also means the TECL scales without another exam. Your company can carry journeymen, wiremen and apprentices, and their hours bill under your licence, so long as one master stands behind the business. The rung below is the Texas journeyman electrician licence, and the ladder up to master, if you are still climbing it, is the Texas master electrician licence.

TDLR also runs reciprocity agreements with other states at journeyman and master level, and it adds to them: Iowa went on by notice in February 2026. The list changes, so read the current one before you assume a master licence earned in another state means repeating 12,000 hours here.

The insurance line is the licence, and it is the number a GC wants anyway

The one real gate on a TECL is a certificate of insurance. 16 TAC 73.40(a) sets it, and TDLR verifies it before the licence issues and again at renewal.

Read that as the best-value line on your startup budget, because those three figures are not only TDLR's. San Antonio puts the identical 300/600/300 on a registered Home Improvement Contractor and asks for the city itself as certificate holder. Register there in the Residential Building Contractor category instead and the limits step up to $500,000 each occurrence, $1,000,000 aggregate and $500,000 products and completed operations. So the certificate you buy to satisfy TDLR is, on the same afternoon, the certificate that clears a city registration desk and goes out attached to your first bid. One premium, several doors.

The paperwork detail that actually gets certificates bounced is smaller than the limits: the named insured has to match your legal entity word for word, the additional insured endorsement has to be attached rather than promised, and the expiry date has to sit past the end of the job. Getting that right the first time is certificates of insurance for Texas contractors.

Filing it, and the rest of the week that gets you to your first invoice

Here is the whole cost of standing up an electrical contracting business in Texas, in the order that works. Order matters for one reason: a general contractor asks for a certificate of insurance, a federal tax ID and an entity name that matches your bank account, and none of those three exists in the company's name before the first filing does.

Cash out of the door for a one-van shop registered in Dallas: about $538 plus the insurance premium. Austin brings it under $420. That is the entire barrier to entry for a trade that took you six years of hours to qualify in. Whether the entity on line 1 should be an LLC at all is LLC versus sole proprietor in Texas.

Three of those rows carry more weight than their price suggests.

The city, not the state, decides whether you pull the permit. Texas has no general contractor licence, so the city registration desk is the licensing regime, and for electrical work the city wants your state licence on file. Houston registers your TDLR licence with the Houston Permitting Center rather than issuing anything of its own. Austin is free through the Austin Build and Connect portal and requires the state licence behind it. Fort Worth requires registration before an electrical permit, runs it one year from issuance, and charges $60 to change the master or registered official on the record, which tells you exactly how closely a Texas city tracks which master stands behind which company. Dallas wants proof of an established place of business and a named responsible party, and runs a separate registration route for state-licensed trades where the registration expires when your TDLR licence does and the holder turns up in person. City by city, with what each portal wants uploaded, is Texas city contractor registration.

The sales tax permit is a purchasing tool. Texas sales tax runs 6.25% at state level with local rates on top, capped so the combined figure stops at 8.25%. Under the contractor rule at 34 TAC 3.291, a lump sum contract treats you as the consumer of the materials, so you pay tax when you buy the gear and it lands in your cost. Write a separated contract, pricing labour and materials as distinct lines to the customer, and the permit lets you issue a resale certificate, buy the panel and the wire tax free, and charge the tax on the material line instead. On a service upgrade that is real margin, and the permit is what makes the second route available at all. Which contract form to write, job by job, is Texas sales tax for contractors.

Texas lets you choose whether to carry workers' compensation. It is the only state that gives a private employer that election, and it is a genuine fork rather than a technicality. Take the policy and a GC stops asking questions before your apprentice steps on site. Decline it, which Texas calls non-subscribing, and you take on a filing rhythm instead: DWC Form-005 each year between 1 February and 30 April, within 30 days of hiring your first employee, within 10 days of dropping cover, and within 10 days if DWC asks, plus a no-coverage notice posted in English and Spanish. It also changes where you stand if an injured employee sues. Running the choice against a shop your size is workers' comp is optional in Texas.

Price the work so the licence pays for itself in the first week

A TECL costs about $110 a year. The arithmetic that decides whether you keep it is the hourly rate, and the mistake that ends a first year is pricing off the wage you used to be paid.

Your old rate covered your hands. Your new rate has to cover the van, the fuel, the insurance premium, the licence renewal, the continuing education, the tools, the phone, the accounting, the hours you spend quoting and driving, and the weeks the phone stays quiet. Run it as a single sum and divide.

Say your fixed costs for the year land at $42,000 and you can realistically bill 1,400 hours after driving, quoting and admin come out of 2,080. That is $30 an hour of overhead before you have paid yourself a cent. Put your own pay at $45 an hour and you are at $75 just to break even, so a rate of $110 to $125 is what a 30% to 40% margin looks like, not greed. Change one input, say the billable hours drop to 1,100 because you are quoting more, and the overhead line jumps to $38 an hour. That is the number worth recalculating every quarter, and the long version of the method is how to price Texas jobs.

Three moves make the rate hold up in front of a customer.

Charge a trip and a minimum. A service call that bills 40 minutes of work has already spent an hour of van time. A stated minimum, set once and quoted the same way on every call, ends the argument before it starts.

Mark materials, and say you do. You are financing the panel, warrantying it and returning it if it is faulty. A separated contract makes the material line visible, which makes the markup a line item rather than a secret.

Price the licence into the work that needs it. Permit work, inspection sign-off and anything an insurer will ask about later are exactly the jobs an unlicensed handyman cannot legally take in Texas. That is your protected market. Quote it as skilled licensed work rather than competing on the price of an hour.

Bill it so Texas law does the collecting for you

Texas is stingy about licensing and generous about payment. Chapter 28 of the Property Code and Chapter 53 give an electrical contractor more leverage than the contract usually does, and the leverage runs on dates.

Thirty-five days on private work. An owner who receives your written payment request has 35 days to pay a contractor. Overdue money accrues interest at 1.5% per month under s.28.004, and those terms cannot be waived away in the subcontract. When money reaches you covering a lower tier's work, their share goes down within 7 days. The demand that collects it is get paid in 35 days in Texas.

Ten percent is reserved for you by statute. Under Tex. Prop. Code s.53.101 the owner reserves 10% of the contract price during the work and for 30 days after completion. That is not a favour. It is money already set aside with your name on it, and claiming it is a notice, not a negotiation. If you are below the original contractor and your contract provides for retainage, there is a second move worth diarising: a notice of claim for unpaid retainage under s.53.057, due within 30 days of whichever comes first, your own contract ending or the original contract ending. Retainage is where the profit on an electrical package usually sits, so the Texas 10% retainage rule is worth reading before the last panel goes in rather than after.

The monthly notice puts the owner's own money at risk. If you are working as a subcontractor or supplier rather than the original contractor, then for each month you furnish labour or materials, a notice goes to the owner and the original contractor 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 carries statutory warning text the owner has to read. From the moment it lands, s.53.081 lets the owner hold back what it takes to cover your claim, and s.53.084 makes an owner who pays the contractor anyway liable for that money. Sent on time, a slow payer stops being your problem and starts being the owner's. The month-by-month drill is the Texas monthly notice.

One page signed before you start carries your residential lien rights. On a homestead, the original contractor's lien rests on a written contract executed before any labour or material is furnished, signed by both spouses if the owner is married, and filed with the county clerk of that county under s.53.254. Signed on day one it costs you ten minutes at the kitchen table. Signed after the panel is in, it does not reach back. For a shop doing service upgrades and rewires, that single page is the cheapest paperwork on this list measured against what it protects.

One year to sue, on every job type. HB 2237 retired the old split where residential ran a year and commercial ran two. Foreclosure now runs one year from the last day you could have filed the affidavit, on all project types, and an owner can agree in writing to extend it to two, provided that agreement is recorded before the first year expires. One rule to hold in your head instead of two. The filing dates that feed it are Texas mechanics lien deadlines.

Those are 15ths counted across month boundaries on the day you are least in the mood for arithmetic. The Texas lien deadline calculator takes the months you actually worked and counts them for you.

The renewal is a diary entry, and it protects the thing you built

TDLR runs the electrical programme on an annual clock. The TECL renews yearly. Your master licence renews yearly with 4 hours of continuing education covering the NEC, safety, and Texas law and rules. Four hours a year is a morning.

The one link to keep an eye on is the master. The company holds the TECL because a master electrician stands behind it, so if that master leaves and it was not you, the business licence loses the thing it rests on. Two practical answers: be the master yourself, which is the cleanest structure for a shop of one to ten, or write the master's role into the employment terms and know the date you would need a replacement by. Fort Worth's $60 change-of-master fee is a reminder that the city expects to be told when that name changes.

Keep three dates in one calendar and the administrative side of this business is finished for the year: your TDLR renewal, 15 May for the franchise tax report, and the insurance expiry that every certificate you have issued depends on. The 15 May filing is due below the revenue threshold as well as above it, because the Public Information Report goes in either way, and that is the Texas franchise tax for contractors.

What it costs to run on AEC Stack

Your licence, the insurance certificate, the city registrations, your quotes and your invoices sit in one place. There is no monthly subscription. AEC Stack takes 2.5% of each invoice processed through the platform, collected on the payment due date, so the software gets paid after you do.

The application is about $110 and the exam is behind you. File the Certificate of Formation today, get the EIN while the confirmation lands, and send the insurance certificate to TDLR this week. Start your business walks the filings in order, get on GC bid lists in Texas is how the first commercial package finds you, and find work is where Texas jobs show up while the licence is in the post.