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Where the rules come from
Texas has no general contractor licence. What it has instead is a set of trade licences issued by different bodies, municipal contractor registration that varies by city, and a state statute that limits how far a city can go. Working out who licenses you in Texas starts with the trade and the city, not the state.
32 authorities, 28 of them statutory, across 8 areas of practice. Every entry links to the publisher.
The codes a design has to satisfy and the bodies that publish and amend them.
Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation
A Texas-only approval track running in parallel with the building permit, routinely missed by teams that assume federal accessibility compliance is the whole obligation.
ICC, as adopted by Texas municipalities
The most important entry in this discipline for Texas, because the usual assumption (one state code) is wrong there and would produce confidently incorrect advice.
State of Texas
Makes the widespread 'Texas has no building code' claim precisely wrong in the way that matters. There is a statutory baseline, it is a 2012 snapshot, and the AHJ has almost always moved past it. Only the AHJ's ordinance answers the question.
Texas Department of Insurance and Texas Windstorm Insurance Association
The certificate is the condition of the owner obtaining windstorm insurance, which makes it a commercial deliverable and not merely a code matter. The mismatch between the insurance regulator's adopted edition and the city's is the trap on every coastal job.
The contract forms, payment statutes and notice regimes that decide when you get paid and what you have to serve to keep the right.
State of Texas
Texas has codified what other jurisdictions leave to the Spearin doctrine and attached a reporting duty to it. It converts the RFI from an administrative habit into the discharge of a statutory duty, which is a concrete reason to date and keep them.
State of Texas
One handle for the five statutes that between them govern how a Texas public job is bought, bonded, paid and retained. On public work these displace the lien regime entirely, which is the single most consequential fact in the region.
State of Texas
Changes how a Texas subcontract should be read and priced. A broad indemnity here is usually unenforceable, so pricing risk into it prices something that will not bite, and relying on it upstream relies on nothing.
Texas Legislature
The most under-appreciated exposure on the residential side. A roofing or remodelling contractor who signs at the customer's kitchen table after knocking on the door is inside this chapter, the notice and the detachable form are both mandatory and both size-specified, and the consequence of getting the form wrong is that the contract is void and no compensation is recoverable for services already performed. It is a formatting requirement with a total-loss failure mode.
Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation; Texas State Board of Plumbing Examiners; Texas municipalities
The commonest wrong assumption made about Texas by anyone arriving from a licence state. The answer is genuinely 'it depends on the city', and saying that precisely, with the trades carved out, is more useful than any national summary.
Texas Legislature
Public property cannot be liened, so on public work the bond is the only route and the sworn statement of account is the document that carries the claim. Its content requirements, that all known lawful offsets, payments and credits have been allowed and that retainage not yet due is stated, are what make the account a distinct deliverable rather than a stack of invoices with a covering letter.
State of Texas
Texas notice deadlines are month-based and easy to state wrongly from memory. Always read the statute.
Texas Legislature
Relevant to the contract rather than the invoice, but it belongs in the same pack because the notice is a drafting requirement on the residential contract and its omission carries a civil penalty. The inspect and cure route it advertises is worth more to the contractor than the notice costs to include.
Texas Legislature
This is the single most load-bearing authority for the Texas invoice. Three things in it have no equivalent in most states: the owner's statutory reserve is a duty imposed on the owner rather than a contract term, the waiver and release forms are prescribed by statute rather than negotiated, and the notice clocks run from the calendar month of the work rather than from the invoice date.
The statutory safety duties on site and the bodies that enforce them.
State of Texas
Rare in being a safety statute that dictates the shape of the bill. Also a useful tell: a Texas public bid schedule with deep excavation and no trench safety item is either non-conforming or the excavation is shallower than the estimator thinks.
State of Texas; Texas Department of Insurance, Division of Workers' Compensation
Texas is the outlier state and the consequence runs both ways: a contractor can lawfully carry no cover on private work, while a governmental client will refuse to pay without a current certificate for every worker on site.
State of Texas
Held as a gap precisely because the answer is unstable. The right behaviour here is to check and to say what was checked; a confident answer either way could put a worker at risk or expose a contractor to an obligation it never priced.
What governs valuation, variation, retention and the reporting of cost against value.
Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts
Texas Legislature
Texas Legislature
This is where a Texas payment application diverges most sharply from a Florida one on public work: the retainage rate is capped by the value of the contract, the cap binds per line of the schedule of values as well as in total, and the percentage cannot increase as it passes down the chain. All three have to be checked before the schedule of values is signed, because that is the document retainage is computed from for the life of the job.
Texas Legislature
This is what stands behind the warranty printed on every statutory waiver form, that the signer will use the funds to pay its own labour and suppliers. It converts a payment application from a commercial document into a document with criminal consequences, and the construction account requirement for homestead work above a low threshold is a standalone offence that catches contractors who paid everyone properly out of the wrong bank account.
Texas Legislature
Texas Legislature
The Texas tax posture is decided by the structure of the contract and evidenced by the face of the invoice, which is why this authority shapes a document template rather than only a tax return. A contractor who itemises materials on a lump-sum job to look transparent has converted itself into a retailer of those materials and owes tax it never collected.
Texas Legislature
Held mainly for the cap, which is the only local tax figure that can be stated as a constant. The actual rate at a jobsite is a lookup, not a rule, which is why the corresponding canon rule is must_verify with a null threshold.
Construction accounting and surety practice (AICPA construction industry guidance; individual surety requirements)
The methods of measurement and the conventions that decide what a quantity means.
Texas Department of Transportation
Texas municipalities (Houston, San Antonio, Austin, Dallas, Fort Worth and others)
On municipal work this displaces both TxDOT and any national convention. It is also the direct answer to 'what should the bid schedule look like' on a city job: it should look like the city's own item list.
North Central Texas Council of Governments
The data sources and bid rules an estimate is built against.
Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts
An estimating authority, not a bookkeeping one. Get this wrong on a Texas commercial refurbishment and the bid is short by tax on the entire labour content, which no amount of good measurement recovers.
How information is named, issued, and proved to have been issued.
Texas Board of Professional Engineers and Land Surveyors; Texas Board of Architectural Examiners; State of Texas
Two boards, two acts and one procedural statute that together decide who may seal a Texas drawing and whether a design claim can even be filed. The certificate-of-merit requirement changes the sequence and cost of pursuing a designer and is easy to miss until it is too late.
Texas Legislature
Included because it is the only trade in Texas with a statutory requirement about what appears on the face of an invoice, and because it also requires a document to be handed over on completion even where nothing is charged, which is the part contractors miss on warranty callbacks. Texas licenses no general construction contractor, so there is no state licence number to carry on a general contractor's invoice.
Energy, carbon and environmental performance requirements and the schemes that certify them.
Texas Commission on Environmental Quality
Texas administers the federal programme itself, so the forms, the filing system and the thresholds are the state's rather than the EPA's. The inspection records kept under the plan are the evidence if anything is questioned, which makes this a site records obligation as much as an environmental one.
State Energy Conservation Office, Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts
The one code Texas genuinely does set statewide, which makes it the exception proving the rule about the building code. It is also the clearest example in this whole region of a number that secondary sources get wrong with total confidence.
Statutory means the law says so and a regulator can stop your job. A de facto standard binds you because the contract adopts it, which in practice is just as binding and is easier to argue about. Common practice is what the market does with nothing published behind it, and the honest thing to do with those is record them as convention rather than cite a standard that does not exist.
AEC Stack keeps the paperwork side of the register handled: registrations, insurance certificates, payment notices with their deadlines, and the documents a buyer asks for before they will let you start. Across Canada, built deepest for Ontario.
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