Virginia licenses contractors through the Department of Professional and Occupational Regulation (DPOR), which oversees both contractor business licenses (Class A, B, and C, based on project size and dollar volume) and individual tradesman certifications for electrical, plumbing, HVAC, and gas fitting work.
This two-layer structure is worth understanding: a contracting business holds a class-based contractor license, while the individual performing certain regulated work — like electrical or plumbing — may also need to hold (or employ someone who holds) a separate tradesman certification in that specific trade. A legitimate Virginia contractor doing electrical work should have both a valid contractor license and access to a certified electrical tradesman, whether that's the owner or an employee.
DPOR publishes its regulant lists as a public, tab-delimited export, refreshed every five business days — one of the more frequently updated data sources among the states this site covers. That means Virginia listings on TrustedTradesFinder stay reasonably current with DPOR's own records, typically within about a week of any change.
Status categories work the same way here as elsewhere on this site: active, expired, revoked, or pending, reflecting the contractor's or tradesman's standing directly per DPOR's own records as of the last data pull. An active status means DPOR currently recognizes the credential as valid — not that DPOR is vouching for the quality of the work.
To verify independently, DPOR maintains its own License Lookup tool searchable by name or license number, and it's worth checking directly before committing to a large project, since anything can change between this site's last refresh and today.
A detail worth knowing if you're hiring for a bigger project: Virginia's Class A/B/C contractor license tiers are based on the dollar value of projects a contractor is legally allowed to take on. A contractor licensed for smaller residential jobs (Class C) isn't automatically qualified or licensed to take on a large commercial buildout — it's worth confirming the license class matches the scope of what you're hiring for, not just that a license exists at all.