A public-records index of Chicago contractors — nothing more, nothing less.
ContractorCheck is an independent index of Chicago-licensed home-service contractors. We pull three datasets every day from the City of Chicago's public data portal — business licenses, building permits, and building violations — and present them on a single, searchable page per contractor. We do not publish reviews. We do not take money from the contractors we list. We do not speak for the City of Chicago.
The city already publishes every license, permit, and violation — but across three separate datasets, with limited cross-referencing. We stitch them together, contractor by contractor.
The ContractorCheck Score is a weighted blend of license health, permit activity, compliance history, longevity, and typical project scale. It's directional, not prescriptive.
No reviews, no star ratings, no editorializing. We surface the signals the city has already published; you draw your own conclusion.
No pay-to-play. No badges, no promoted rankings, no sponsored placements. A contractor cannot buy a better score.
Reviews invite defamation risk, moderation load, and brand-trust decay. Government data speaks for itself.
We are independent of the Department of Buildings. Errors in city data may appear here; see our corrections policy.
ContractorCheck is published by Arcline Ventures LLC, an Illinois limited-liability company operating a small portfolio of civic-data indexes. Our sister site CleanPlate Chicago applies the same pattern to restaurant inspection data.
When a visitor uses our lead form to request a matched contractor, we earn a referral fee from a third-party home-services network. The contractor being viewed has no influence over who the visitor is matched with, and pays us nothing.
We think this is the cleanest possible alignment: the data stays honest because the business model doesn't depend on flattering any listed contractor.