About Septic Registry
Most states license septic work and publish who holds the licence. Almost none of them publish it in a form anyone can use. One is a 21-page, three-column PDF ordered by county. One is a tab-delimited licence file with no phone numbers in it at all. One is a table whose rows are not closed, so reading it naively loses half the list. All of it is public, accurate and effectively unusable.
Septic Registry republishes those records as 10,788 company pages and 726 county pages, each carrying the source document, the date it was published and the office that can confirm it. That is the whole product: a verification layer over records that already existed.
What we do not do
- We do not license anyone. The state does. We report what its record says.
- We do not rank, rate or review. There are no stars here and no ordering by anything but the alphabet and the count.
- We do not sell placement. No company can pay to appear, to move up, or to be removed.
- We do not invent data. Every detail is transcribed from a government record, and nothing on a company page comes from the company.
- We publish less than we are given. Several states’ licence files include street addresses and email addresses. We publish neither: at this scale a licence file is full of sole traders listed at home, and a tidy column of contact emails is a spam list rather than a directory.
- We do not buy data. Wisconsin licenses septic installers statewide and sells the list. We left Wisconsin out rather than pay for it, because “free public record” is the only claim this site makes.
How it is paid for
The site carries display advertising. Ads never change which companies appear or the order they appear in, and advertising is kept off the parts of a page a person came to read. If that ever stops being true, the site has stopped being worth using.
Coverage
9 states today: Alabama, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, Virginia. Each is one adapter in the pipeline, and nothing downstream of it knows which state it is looking at, so the next one is a parser rather than a rebuild.
They publish genuinely different things, and the site says so rather than flattening them. Some give a company name, a phone number and a county and nothing else. Some give a licence number, a class, a city and an expiry date but no phone at all. Alabama and Missouri publish a real service area — the counties a licensee may actually work in. Oklahoma records which of four system types each installer may build. A page can only be as good as the record under it, and pretending otherwise would be the whole problem.
Full 50-state coverage is not reachable, and it is worth being clear why: a large number of states do not license septic contractors centrally at all — the licence comes from a county or a municipality, so there is no statewide list in existence. The state-by-state map, including what we cannot get and why.
Contact
Corrections are the most useful thing you can send us: report a correction. Anything else: hello@thesepticregistry.com.