Texas HVAC and Electrical Contractor Lead List: 18,000 Licensed Businesses from TDLR Open Data (Python)

If you sell to trades (equipment distributors, insurance, software, staffing, training), Texas is the biggest market in the country, and its licensing agency publishes the whole register for free. The Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation (TDLR) license file on data.texas.gov is updated regularly and needs no API key. When I ran this on Oct 23, 2026 it returned 9,249 A/C contractor businesses and 8,841 electrical contractor businesses (after dropping individual licensees). Harris County leads with 1,387 A/C contractors, then Dallas (876), Tarrant (601) and Bexar (523). The script import re, requests from collections import Counter ENTITY = re.compile(r"\b(LLC|L\.L\.C|INC|CORP|CORPORATION|CO|COMPANY|LP|LTD|PLLC)\b\.?", re.I) def texas_contractors(license_type="A/C Contractor", county=None): where = f"license_type = '{license_type}'" if county: where += f" AND business_county = '{county.upper()}'" rows = requests.get("https://data.texas.gov/res