Contractor documentation index by city
How completely do a city's contractors document their compliance? Pick a county and trade for a per-city Documentation Index, a 0–100 score built from bond, workers' comp, and tenure in the public CSLB record. It rates places, never individual contractors.
Choose a county and trade above to build the index.
What the Documentation Index measures
Public CSLB records tell you whether a contractor has the paperwork in order, a bond on file, a workers' compensation status, a license held over time. The Documentation Index rolls those signals up to the city level, so you can see which markets within a county are uniformly well-documented and which are thinner. It is deliberately a measure of documentation, not a verdict on the contractors themselves.
How the score is built
Each city's score weights three documented signals: the share of contractors with a contractor bond on file (40%), the share with a documented workers' comp status, active coverage or a filed exemption (40%), and the share with five or more years of license tenure (20%). Bonding is near-universal because it's effectively required, so most of the spread between cities comes from coverage and tenure.
Aggregate, never individual
The index describes geographies and trades only. To check one contractor, use the directory; to see the full breakdown for a single county and trade, open the compliance snapshot or visualize it on the heatmap.
Frequently asked questions
What is the Documentation Index?
A 0–100 score for each city that summarizes how completely its contractors of a given trade document their compliance: contractor bond on file, a documented workers' compensation status (active coverage or a filed exemption), and license tenure. Higher means more complete documentation across the city's licensees.
Is this a ranking of contractors?
No. The index describes geographies, never individual contractors, and Prelien accepts no payment for placement. It measures documentation completeness from public records, not work quality, safety, pricing, or character.
How is the score calculated?
It weights three documented signals: the share of contractors with a bond on file (40%), the share with a documented workers' comp status (40%), and the share with five or more years of license tenure (20%). All three come straight from the public CSLB record.
Why are some cities missing?
Cities with fewer than three licensed contractors of the selected trade are omitted, because an index over a handful of records isn't meaningful. Pick a larger county or a more common trade to see more cities.