Methodology

How this directory is compiled, what we verify, and what we refuse to publish.

Where the data comes from

Every listing originates in a state licensing register, the public record kept by the body that issues the licence. Nothing here is scraped from a marketplace, bought from a lead broker, or submitted by the business itself.

We include a business only where its state licence carries a termite or wood-destroying-organism category. General pest licences alone are not enough to appear here.

What we verify

For every listing: the licence number, the licence type, the issuing board, the current status, the date the licence was first issued, what the licence covers, and the date we retrieved the record. Each of those is shown on the listing, and each is checkable by you against the state's own lookup.

"Years licensed" is calculated from the state's recorded issue date. It is not a company's claim about itself.

How often it is re-checked

California republishes its licence file on the first of each month; we re-pull and compare against the previous month. This matters more than it sounds: California removes lapsed businesses from the file rather than marking them expired, so a company that stops trading simply disappears. Comparing months is the only way to notice.

Texas publishes its licence files at stable addresses; we re-pull on the same monthly cycle and filter out licences past their expiry date.

What we deliberately do not publish

  • No ratings, rankings or recommendations. We have no basis for one, so we do not invent it. Listings are ordered by how long the licence has been held.
  • No "trusted", "vetted" or "approved" badges. If a claim is not traceable to a public record, it does not go on the page.
  • No phone numbers or websites (yet). No state register we currently use publishes them. We would rather show a listing without a phone number than show a number we guessed at.
  • No national average prices. There is no credible source for one. The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes no producer price index for this industry, and the figures repeated across the web trace to price lists withdrawn years ago.

Known limits

  • Texas is county-level. The state publishes the county a business is licensed in, but not a street address.
  • California licence numbers are not globally unique. They repeat across licence types, so a Branch Office registration and a Company Registration can share a number and be different businesses. Every listing states its licence type for that reason.
  • Some Texas issue dates are unknown. A block of records in the Texas file carries an issue date of 1 January 1990, every one on the same day, which makes it a database migration placeholder rather than a real date. Those listings show no "licensed since" figure at all, because we don't know it.
  • Coverage is two states. Other states are being worked through; several do not publish licence data online at all and require a public records request.
  • A licence is not a verdict on quality. It means the state issued a credential and it is current. It is a floor, not a review.

How automation is used

The licence files are downloaded, parsed and normalised by a script, and the pages are generated from the resulting data. That is what puts a licence number and a retrieval date on every listing.

Editorial content is not generated that way. Written guidance on this site is researched against primary sources (state statutes and administrative codes, licensing board advisories, and federal agency documents) and reviewed before publication. Where a claim is commonly repeated online but traces to a superseded or unsourceable document, we leave it out rather than repeat it.

Corrections

If a listing is wrong, we want to know, particularly if a licence has lapsed or a business has closed. Send a correction.