Texas license lookup / About
About this site
PermitPulled turns the daily file that the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation publishes into something you can actually read: how many licenses exist, where they are, when they expire, and what each trade has to do to renew.
Why it exists
TDLR publishes an enormous amount of public information and almost none of it is legible. The license file is a raw download of nearly a million rows. Renewal rules live across dozens of pages, one per program. Boilers, elevators and tow companies each sit in their own separate search. Everything is public, nothing is easy.
So the gap this site fills is not access, it is shape: how big each trade is, how many licenses come up for renewal each month, what the rules say in plain language, and which search answers which question.
What we publish
- Aggregated statistics: counts of active licenses by type and county, and renewals by month, from the public TDLR license file.
- Renewal guides written from TDLR's own pages, with the source of every rule listed at the foot of each guide and the date it was last reviewed.
- A downloadable dataset under CC BY 4.0, free to reuse commercially with attribution.
What we deliberately do not publish
Individual license records are not on this site. The source file also carries mailing addresses and phone numbers; we do not keep them at all. For any single license, the official TDLR search is the right place and the authoritative one.
We are also not a consumer reporting agency, and nothing here may be used to decide anyone's eligibility for employment, credit, insurance or housing.
Who runs it
PermitPulled is an independent site, not affiliated with TDLR or the State of Texas, and it is operated from outside the United States by one person who works in search and data. There is no newsroom behind it and no agency: when something is wrong, one person fixes it, usually the same day.
That cuts both ways, and it is the reason every figure on the site carries its source and its date, and the reason the method is published in full. You should be able to check us rather than trust us.
How it is funded
Today it is not. There is no advertising on the site, nothing is sold, and no email addresses are collected.
When that changes, it will be through sponsored placements and continuing-education listings, clearly labeled as such. Two commitments hold regardless: we will never sell or share personal data, and paid placement will never change what a statistic says or how a ranking is ordered. If a sponsored slot ever appears, it will be labeled as sponsored.
Corrections
If a figure looks wrong, or a rule in a guide is out of date, write to info@permitpulled.com. Corrections are welcome and get priority over everything else: on a site whose only asset is accuracy, a reported error is a gift.