What we're finding
Aggregate results from every report on this site — 134 Spokane-area companies checked so far. Last report added .
Read this before quoting any number below
These figures describe the 134 companies we've checked — not Spokane's contractors as a whole. We built the list from Washington L&I's public register of active construction contractors in Spokane-area cities, taking general contractors first and oldest registrations first. That deliberately over-represents long-established firms and under-represents recent arrivals, so these numbers are not a random sample and shouldn't be read as one.
Each figure below is shown against the group it was measured in. Some are measured across every company checked; others only across the ones we found a state registration for, because you can't tell whether a company has a bond on file if you can't find its registration in the first place.
State registration
4 of 134 companies checked — had no WA L&I registration under the name we searched (3%)
This is not proof they're unregistered. Companies often register under a different legal name than the one they trade under — a parent corporation, for example. It does mean a homeowner searching that name at L&I would come up empty too.
6 of 130 registered companies — had a registration that was not ACTIVE (5%)
Expired, suspended or otherwise not in good standing at the time we checked.
Bond and insurance
Washington requires a registered contractor to carry both a surety bond and liability insurance. The bond is what a homeowner makes a claim against when work goes wrong and the contractor won't put it right. Measured across the 130 companies we found a registration for — the 4 we couldn't locate are excluded, because their bond status is unknown rather than absent.
9 of 130 registered companies — had no bond on file (7%)
9 of 130 registered companies — had no liability insurance on file (7%)
Reputation
42 of 134 companies checked — had at least one red flag with a source behind it (31%)
A red flag is a specific, sourced fact — a lawsuit, a licensing action, a pattern of complaints — not an opinion or a low star rating.
5 of 134 companies checked — had no online presence we could find at all (4%)
No reviews, no news coverage, no complaints on any platform we searched. For an established firm that's unusual enough to be worth asking about.
Did contractors flood in after the fire?
Not in the registration data. This is the question everyone asks, and our own corpus can't answer it — we sorted oldest-first, so recent arrivals are largely absent from it by construction.
So we checked Washington L&I's complete register instead. In the three weeks after the fire began — August 1 to 21, 2026 — 51 new construction-contractor registrations were filed with a Spokane-area business address. The same three weeks averaged 49.6 over the five previous years, ranging from 42 to 62. Statewide the figure was 594, the lowest of the six years compared. There is no post-fire registration surge.
Checked against the state register on August 22, 2026, counting registrations of every status so that older years aren't undercounted by licences that have since lapsed. That correction matters: comparing only currently-active registrations makes recent years look inflated and would have produced the opposite, and wrong, conclusion. A caveat in the other direction — very recent filings may not have reached the public dataset yet, so the 51 could edge up.
What's not on this page
No company is named here, and there is no ranking or “worst offenders” list. This page reports distributions; the naming belongs on the individual reports, where every claim carries the source it came from and the company can ask for a correction.
Browse every company we've checked or read how these reports are put together.