Source
The records come from the Washington State Department of Licensing transportation business license list, published as open data at data.wa.gov/d/ucdg-xgbj. DOL's notes date this copy's contents to September 2026; the portal last updated it on 21 October 2026. Publisher: Washington State Department of Licensing, through the state open data portal.
License and attribution
The data is published under the Open Data Commons Open Database License (ODbL). Contains information from the Washington State Department of Licensing, via data.wa.gov, made available under the ODbL. This site reorganizes and displays that information; any errors introduced in doing so are ours.
What counts as one record
The source has 38,547 rows. A license number alone is not unique: numbers repeat across license types and between owners. This site treats a record as the combination of license type, license number, business name and first issue date, which gives 38,186 records.
Source rows that share that combination are merged into one record. The status and expiration date come from the source row with the highest-priority status (Active, then Held, then Expired, then Terminated), and then the latest real expiration date. Distinct bonds, locations and phone numbers across the merged rows are kept as lists, and the winning row's location is the primary one used for the city and state filters. Each record shows how many source rows it combines.
When several records share a type and number, the detail view lists them under "Other records with this type and number". The source does not say why a number appears more than once, so this site does not call them transfers.
Caveats
- This is a point-in-time list. Anything that changed after the snapshot date is not here.
- It contains no disciplinary or violation data. A license appearing here, or having a given status, says nothing about complaints or enforcement.
- It excludes trucking.
- Status definitions, from DOL's dataset notes. Active: license currently in effect. Expired: license has not been renewed for eligibility to do business. Held: license is in a holding period. Terminated: no longer eligible to do business. DOL's notes also define Pending and Suspended, but no record in this copy has either status.
- DOL uses the date 9999-12-31 when a date does not yet exist, is unknown or is not needed. It is shown as a dash and left out of every date calculation, including the expiring filters and charts.
- DOL notes that the data is entered by hand and can contain misspellings, so one city can appear under several spellings.
- DOL notes that not every license type requires a bond, and one bond can cover several license types without appearing on each record. "None on record" does not mean a business is unbonded.
- Addresses and phone numbers are shown as published by the source. They may be out of date or incomplete.
- The "Licenses issued per year" chart counts only records still in this dataset, so it is not a full history of licensing.
- Bond dates and amounts, where present, are also as published. A few bond dates in the source are plainly typos; they are shown as published.
Status changes and years
DOL's list has no status-change date, and no date for when a license ended. So this site compares 10 archived copies of the list from the Internet Archive, dated October 2024 to April 2026, against the current one. A change can only be placed between two copies, usually months apart. Records with the same type, number and business are compared as one. A November 2023 copy is used only for expiration dates, because its statuses differ from 2024 by about 8,000 Expired and Terminated records, which looks like a reclassification.
Years run from first issue to the end of an Expired or Terminated license. The end is the license's own past expiration date where DOL gives one, which may not be the day it actually stopped. Otherwise it is the first archived copy showing the new status, or an expiration date from an older copy, and these are marked ~. Most ended licenses have no end date in any copy, so they show a dash.
License type descriptions
The descriptions shown when you hover over a type are this site's plain-language summaries of Washington law, not DOL's wording and not legal advice.
Using the explorer
Search matches every word you type against business name, location name, license number, street, city, zip and phone digits. Filter pills combine with AND between groups and OR within a group, and their counts update to reflect the other active filters. The address bar holds the whole view, so you can share a link to it.