The Denver Contractor License, Explained

Ask a homeowner in Denver whether their contractor is licensed and most will say yes. Ask what license, issued by whom, in what class, and the room goes quiet.

That is not a failure on the homeowner’s part. Contractor licensing in Colorado is genuinely strange, it works differently here than in most states, and there is a gap in it big enough to drive a truck through. People fall into that gap constantly, and they usually find out at the worst possible moment: when they try to sell.

Here is the whole picture, plainly.

Colorado does not license general contractors

Start here, because almost everything else follows from it.

There is no Colorado state general contractor license. No state board, no statewide number, nothing to look up on a state register. When somebody tells you they are “a licensed contractor in Colorado,” that sentence on its own does not describe anything that exists.

What Colorado does license at the state level, through the Department of Regulatory Agencies, is a short list of trades where the risk of getting it wrong is fire or flood:

• Electricians — electrical contractors, master electricians, journeyman electricians.
• Plumbers — plumbing contractors, master plumbers, journey workers.

That is essentially it for the trades that touch a remodel. There is no state license for framing, roofing, drywall, tile, concrete, siding, cabinetry or “general remodeling.” You can check the state-regulated ones through Colorado DORA, and you should.

So the cities do it, one at a time

General contractor licensing in Colorado happens at the city or county level. Denver runs its own system. So does Aurora, Lakewood, Arvada, Jefferson County, Adams County and every other jurisdiction in the metro, each with its own classes, its own exams and its own renewal cycle.

This has a consequence people miss: a contractor properly licensed in one city may hold nothing at all in the next one over. Being licensed in Denver says nothing about being registered in Littleton. It is not dishonest for a company to say “we are licensed” while holding one municipal license — but it is incomplete, and the question that actually protects you is narrower:

“Are you licensed to pull the permit for this project, in this jurisdiction, and will you be the one pulling it?”

Denver’s license classes, A through D

Denver issues building contractor licenses in classes, scaled to what you are allowed to build. The larger and more complex the structure, the higher the class and the more verifiable experience the supervisor must show. Broadly:

Class	What it covers
Class A	Unlimited. Erection, alteration, demolition and repair of any building or structure, of any type or height. This is the high-rise and heavy commercial license.
Class B	Large buildings below the high-rise threshold — commercial and multifamily construction, within defined construction-type, height and area limits.
Class C	Residential. One- and two-family dwellings, attached townhomes and their accessory structures. This is the class that covers houses, and it governs virtually every remodel, addition, basement and ADU in the city.
Class D	Specialty. Roughly forty narrowly-defined trade certificates, each limited to one scope of work rather than to whole buildings.

A higher class is not automatically “better” for your project. A Class A holder is qualified to build a tower; that tells you nothing about whether they know how a 1958 Denver bungalow was framed. What matters is that the license actually covers the work you are asking for.

Denver publishes the current class definitions, experience requirements and exam details through Community Planning and Development. Confirm the specifics there rather than taking any contractor’s word for where the boundaries sit — ours included.

Class D is more granular than people expect

The Class D specialty certificates are worth knowing about, because they show how finely Denver actually slices trade work. The published list runs to more than forty certificate types, including:

Building Insulation · Concrete and Foundations · Curtain Walls · Custom Size Window Replacements · Drywall · Fence Structures · Fire Door Installer · Fireproofing · Firestop Installer · Lath and Plaster · Masonry · Metal Roof Installer · Non-Structural Residential Remodel · Open Deck Installer · Overhead Door Installer · Retaining Walls · Roof Covering and Waterproofing · Roofing-Shingles (Residential) · Scaffold Erection · Siding · Structural Metals · Tenant Finish · Waterproofing and Damp Proofing · Wood Framing.

Note that last one. Denver does have a Wood Framing certificate. A framer in this city can be certified, and the good ones are. The full list lives on Denver’s Specialty Class D Certificates page.

So the problem is not that the license does not exist. The problem is where it gets checked.

The gap: licensing is enforced at the permit desk

This is the part to understand, because it is the whole risk in a single idea.

A contractor license in Denver is, in practice, the credential you need in order to pull a building permit. That is the moment the city looks. There is no inspector at your front door checking credentials before somebody starts demolition in your kitchen.

Which means there are three ordinary situations where nobody ever verifies a license:

1. Work that does not require a permit. Plenty of remodeling scopes are genuinely permit-exempt — cosmetic work, finishes, like-for-like replacement of certain elements. No permit, no license check, ever.
2. Subcontractors working under someone else’s permit. When a licensed general contractor pulls the permit, the trades working under it are not each independently vetted by the city at your address. The general contractor’s license and accountability are what the system relies on. That works well when there is a real general contractor. It works badly when there is not.
3. Work that should have been permitted and simply was not. This is the dangerous one, and it is rarely an accident. An operator who cannot pull a permit has an obvious incentive to convince you that you do not need one.

Put those together and the honest summary is this: nothing in the system stops an unlicensed person from standing in your kitchen, quoting your remodel, taking your deposit and swinging a hammer. The gate is at the permit desk, and avoiding the permit desk is precisely the plan.

You will hear the pitch. “We can do it without a permit and save you the fee and the wait.” “Permits are just the city’s way of taxing you.” “It is only framing, it is not structural.” That last one should end the conversation. Framing is the structure.

What actually goes wrong

These are not hypotheticals. They are the ordinary consequences, roughly in the order they arrive.

• The work is wrong in ways you cannot see. A header sized by eye instead of by span table. A bearing wall opened without a beam. Joists notched to run a drain. It stands up on day one. That is not the same as being safe.
• No workers’ compensation. If an uninsured worker is injured in your house, that can land on you in ways your homeowner policy may not absorb. This is the risk homeowners underestimate most.
• No recourse when it fails. An unlicensed operator has no license to lose, often no real business entity and sometimes no verifiable address. Your warranty is a phone number that stops answering.
• Your insurer can decline the claim. Carriers can deny coverage on damage traced to unpermitted work. A fire that starts in unpermitted wiring is exactly that scenario.
• It surfaces at the sale. Buyers’ inspectors find it. Appraisers may count unpermitted square footage as zero. Lenders get nervous and deals get renegotiated, so you discover the discount at the least convenient moment of your life.
• The city can require it opened up. Applying for a permit after the fact can mean exposing concealed work for inspection — pulling down finished drywall to prove what is behind it.
• The cheap job is rarely cheap twice. Remediation means paying a second contractor to undo the first one’s work before doing yours.

The pattern we see most often is not dramatic collapse. It is a homeowner who saved four thousand dollars a few years ago and then spent multiples of it making a basement legal enough to sell.

How to check, in about two minutes

None of this requires expertise. It requires asking.

1. Look them up in the jurisdiction that will issue your permit. For Denver, use the city’s contractor license search — enter the company name, and the supervisor’s last name if the license sits under an individual. Confirm the status is active and the expiration has not passed.
2. Check the class covers your work. A residential remodel wants a residential class.
3. Check electrical and plumbing separately through Colorado DORA. These are state-licensed, and there is no excuse for a gap.
4. Ask for a certificate of insurance directly from the agent — general liability and workers’ compensation, not a PDF forwarded by the contractor. Certificates are trivial to fake and easy to verify.
5. Ask who pulls the permit. If the answer is “you do, as the homeowner,” understand what is being handed to you: the code responsibility, and most of your recourse, gone. There are legitimate reasons a homeowner pulls a permit. A contractor preferring it is not one.
6. Ask what happens outside Denver. Every metro jurisdiction licenses separately. A good contractor will tell you exactly how they are registered where you live.

One fair caveat

We are not going to pretend that every unlicensed person holding a tool is a menace. There are excellent tradespeople working as subcontractors under licensed generals, exactly as the system contemplates, and there is genuinely permit-exempt work where none of this applies.

The distinction that matters is not whether every hand on site holds a certificate. It is whether somebody accountable holds the license, pulls the permit and carries the insurance — and whether work that legally requires inspection actually gets inspected. When that is true, the rest of the crew being subcontracted specialists is normal and fine. When it is not true, no amount of good intentions puts a beam in the right place.

Ours, so you can check it

It would be poor form to write all of this and stay vague about our own.

BH Builders LLC holds a City and County of Denver Residential Contractor license, Class C, license number LIC00255323, held by Dan Tourdegman and active through August 31, 2029. Class C is the residential class — one- and two-family dwellings, townhomes and accessory structures, which is exactly the work we do.

Go and check it. Denver’s contractor license search takes about thirty seconds: company name “BH Builders,” last name “Tourdegman.” For projects outside Denver, ask us and we will tell you how we are licensed or registered in that jurisdiction before we file anything.

Then ask us for the insurance certificate from our agent. A contractor who is comfortable being checked is the only kind worth hiring.

More on the surrounding questions: how to vet a Denver contractor, who issues permits in each metro jurisdiction, and what permit review actually costs you in time.

Keep reading from the BH Builders blog

• Denver Construction Roundup: August 24, 2026
• How to Vet a Denver Contractor
• Denver Construction Roundup: August 17, 2026

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