Every year, homeowners in Canada lose money to unlicensed contractors — and every province has an official registry that would have caught the problem in 30 seconds. The trouble is that each province has its own registry, its own search form, and its own data format.
In this guide: how contractor licensing works in Canada, how to check a licence for free, and how to get the full licence datasets by API if you're building something — a lead-gen tool, a due-diligence check, or an AI agent.
Who licenses contractors in Canada?
There is no federal contractor licence. The two biggest provincial systems:
Quebec — RBQ (Régie du bâtiment du Québec). Nearly every construction contractor in Quebec must hold an RBQ licence — general contractors, plumbers, electricians, roofers, excavators. The licence number is 10 digits (format XXXX-XXXX-XX), and the RBQ publishes the full list of ~54,000 active licences as open data (CC-BY 4.0), refreshed daily.
