California contractors doing jobs of $1,000 or more must hold a CSLB license.
92% of the 1,673 firms on the Palo Alto permit file match an active license in the California CSLB License Master file, using the license number recorded on each permit. Our match can miss a firm that files under another name, so a missing match is a reason to check, not a finding.
Ask the contractor for the license number and look it up at CSLB license check. How to check a contractor's license in California →
The middle value recorded on this contractor's matching permits. It's a permit value, not a quote or the final price. Ask for a written estimate.
Matching Palo Alto permits in the most recent year of our data. It shows recent recorded activity here, not every job the company did.
How long their permits take from the date the application was opened to final inspection, compared with other Palo Alto contractors in the trade. For permits not issued on the spot this includes plan-review time. Shown for firms with 10+ permits.
Matched by name against the California CSLB License Master file, using the license number recorded on each permit. Name matching can miss a license, so always check the number yourself.
About the ranking: The score combines how much of this exact work a contractor has on record, how often their older permits reached completion (where we can measure it), how well their usual job size matches your budget, how recently they've been active, and how much of their work is near you. A measure we can't calculate is left out rather than guessed, and a thin record pulls the score toward the middle. A contractor whose matched license has a problem is listed after everyone else. You set the weights with the sliders on every list.
Palo Alto specifics: Santa Clara County does not publish home values (the County Assessor sells its roll as a data file), so Palo Alto pages can't show the kind of homes a contractor works on or compare their prices with similar jobs. Almost every older permit here is eventually finaled, so completion rate can't tell contractors apart and isn't shown. The city publishes no issue date, so dates run from the application. Trades are read from the permit description, so a mixed job is listed under its largest scope. The CSLB file leaves out cancelled and long-expired licenses, so a missing match is a gap in our records.
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The numbers: Palo Alto permit statistics · How long permits take in Palo Alto
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