Who to complain to, state by state
Three separate bodies take complaints about a contractor or an insurer, and which one you want depends on what went wrong and where you live. 51 jurisdictions, each sourced from the agency's own site.
Why it is three and not one
They do different jobs and only one of them is about your money
The licensing board decides whether somebody keeps working in the trade. The attorney general’s consumer division looks at how a business treats everybody, not only what happened to you. The insurance regulator supervises how a claim was handled. Sending a complaint to the wrong one of the three costs weeks and ends in a referral.1
In sixteen jurisdictions there is no statewide contractor license at all, so the first of those three does not exist and a reader who goes looking for it finds a single-trade registry that cannot help them. Each page below says which bodies its state actually has.
Pick your state
All 51 jurisdictions
- Alabama
- Alaska
- Arizona
- Arkansas
- California
- Colorado
- Connecticut
- Delaware
- District of Columbia
- Florida
- Georgia
- Hawaii
- Idaho
- Illinois
- Indiana
- Iowa
- Kansas
- Kentucky
- Louisiana
- Maine
- Maryland
- Massachusetts
- Michigan
- Minnesota
- Mississippi
- Missouri
- Montana
- Nebraska
- Nevada
- New Hampshire
- New Jersey
- New Mexico
- New York
- North Carolina
- North Dakota
- Ohio
- Oklahoma
- Oregon
- Pennsylvania
- Rhode Island
- South Carolina
- South Dakota
- Tennessee
- Texas
- Utah
- Vermont
- Virginia
- Washington
- West Virginia
- Wisconsin
- Wyoming
What to expect
A complaint puts a license under review, not money in your account
Most of these bodies say on their own pages that they cannot order a refund, award damages or compel a repair. That is worth knowing before you spend the effort, because it decides what a complaint is for: a record against the business and pressure that costs them something. If what you need is the money back, small claims is the route that can order it.
Next
Two things to do first
An examiner reads your complaint having never seen the job. The evidence checklist is what makes it followable, and small claims by state is the money route beside it.2
Disclosures
- 1.Satisfy is not a law firm and does not provide legal advice. These pages list public bodies that accept consumer complaints, sourced from each body’s own site. They do not assess any dispute or say what any body will do.
- 2.Which body handles a complaint, what it requires and what it has power to do are set by each state and change over time. Agencies reorganize and move their forms. Confirm on the linked page before relying on anything here, and where a route is absent on a state page it is because we could not confirm it rather than because none exists.