Where this data comes from

Four states, four completely different sources

There is no national septic registry — the EPA does not keep one, because these records are created locally, licence by licence. Every state publishes its own, in its own format, on its own schedule, and a page here can only be as good as the record under it. What each state gives us:

• Georgia — company name, phone and county. Three-column PDFs, reissued roughly every two years.
• Virginia — licence number, class, specialty codes, city, ZIP, expiry date and licensed-since date. No phone number at all. Tab-delimited, republished about every five business days.
• Florida — authorisation number, expiry, city, county and the registered contractor qualifying the business. Generated live from DEP’s database each time we ask.
• North Carolina — company, phone, city, county, certification grade, certificate number, inspector certification and date certified. A 218-page PDF, reposted every few weeks.
• Alabama — business, phone, city, base county and, unusually, every county the licensee is authorised to operate in. A live roster plus one detail page per licensee.
• Missouri — business, phone, city, registration id, installer level, expiry, and the counties served. Two datasets on the state open data portal.
• Oklahoma — business, phone, city, ZIP, county, installer number, and which of four system types each installer may build. One server-rendered table.
• Delaware — company, phone, full address, licence number and licence class, across eight classes from percolation tester to liquid waste hauler. Open data portal.

Two of them publish something better than an address. Alabama and Missouri both record the counties a licensee may actually work in, so those companies are listed under every county they cover rather than only where the office sits — which is the question a homeowner was asking in the first place.

Georgia: reading a three-column PDF

Both Georgia rosters are three-column PDFs. Extracting them as plain text interleaves the columns and produces company names that do not exist, so we place every word by its position on the page, rebuild the columns, and read each column top to bottom. County headings carry across page breaks, and a company listed without a phone number is recorded as exactly that rather than being glued to the next one.

After parsing, every extracted name and phone number is checked back against the text of the source PDF. A value that cannot be found in the source is a parsing bug, not a listing.

Virginia: a licence file, and what we leave out of it

Virginia’s records come from DPOR’s regulant lists, which are tab-delimited and republished roughly every five business days. Septic businesses are identified by the sewage-disposal specialties on a contractor licence — ADS (alternative), CDS (conventional) and the legacy SDS — rather than by guessing from company names.

DPOR also publishes street addresses and email addresses. We publish neither. A licence file at this scale is full of sole traders listed at home, and a tidy column of licensee emails is a spam list rather than a directory. City, ZIP and county are enough to place a business.

Virginia licenses people as well as companies — onsite soil evaluators, sewage system operators and installers. Those 1,598 individuals are listed on county pages with their licence, city and expiry date, and deliberately given no page of their own: someone who passed a state exam has not asked for a profile on a directory site.

North Carolina: certifications, and cleaning up after the board

North Carolina certifies the person, and the board’s list names the company each certified person works for, with a phone number — so one document gives both halves of the directory. Grade levels are carried through because they decide what someone may legally install: a Grade Level II installer may not install the pumped, low-pressure, drip dispersal or pretreatment systems a Grade Level IV installer can.

The source needs real cleaning. 527 rows name a state rather than a county — people certified in North Carolina but based elsewhere. A two-word state or county name overflows its column, producing values like “SOUTH CAROLINABOLT”, and the spill is put back on the front of the surname. Twenty county names are misspelled and are corrected against the Census list, but only where exactly one county is close enough — an ambiguous value is reported, never guessed. Five rows resolve to no county at all; they are kept and flagged rather than dropped.

The board also lists a firm once per certified employee, with whatever phone number that employee gave. Keying on name-plus-phone therefore splits one firm into several, so companies are keyed on name within county, and same-named groups sharing a phone number are merged. A firm with certified staff in several counties is listed in each of them.

Oklahoma: a table whose rows are not closed

DEQ’s certified installer table leaves its <tr> tags unclosed. Reading it row by row silently glues rows together and loses half the list — 149 of 290 on the first attempt. Every row is exactly fourteen cells, so the parser takes the cells in document order and chunks them instead, and refuses to run at all if the cell count stops dividing evenly, rather than quietly parsing a changed table wrong.

County names, as agencies actually write them

The Census spelling is canonical here and the agencies disagree with it in small, consistent ways: Oklahoma writes “LeFlore” where the Census writes “Le Flore”, Missouri drops the stops in “St.” and “Ste.”, and everyone disagrees about capitals. Matching happens on a squashed form that catches all of it — and refuses to answer where two counties would collide, rather than guessing. North Carolina is the one place fuzzy matching is used at all, and it carries a length floor precisely because without one “DARLINGTON” matches Dare.

How records are deduplicated

In Georgia, 412 companies appear on both rosters. Two records merge when the normalised name (case, punctuation, legal suffixes such as LLC or Inc stripped) and the phone number match. Where a record has no phone number, we fall back to name within a single county, which is a weaker match and is scored as such. We never merge on name alone: two unrelated “Smith Septic Service” entries in different counties are two companies until something proves otherwise.

Virginia, Florida and Delaware need none of that guesswork: every record carries a licence number, which is an identifier rather than an inference.

North Carolina, Alabama and Oklahoma need a different fix. All three license the individual and name the business they work for, so one firm appears once per certified employee — each row carrying whatever phone number that employee gave. Keying on name-plus-phone splits one firm into several; keying on name alone merges two unrelated firms sharing a name. So companies are keyed on name within a county, and same-named groups that share a phone number are then merged.

Which pages get published

Not every possible URL is worth existing. A page is only submitted for indexing when it carries enough to be useful on its own:

• County pages need at least three licensed businesses.
• County + licence-type pages need at least three of that type.
• Company pages need a government record, a county, and either a phone number or a licence number.

Everything else is still reachable — a county with one company still has a page, and that page still lists its neighbours — but it is marked noindex and kept out of the sitemap. Currently 559 of 726 county pages, 1044 licence-type pages and 10,096 of 10,788 company pages meet the bar.

How current it is

The newest record republished here was published August 26, 2026. We re-fetch every source on a schedule and compare SHA-256 checksums; when a state publishes a new version, the site rebuilds and every page’s date changes with it.

Licences lapse between publications, which is why every page points at the office that can confirm one rather than asking you to trust this one. How to verify →

What is published, and what is paid for

Everything described above is a government record and is free. A business can also pay to add a website, a public phone number and a line of description to its own page, or to sponsor a county. Those appear in labelled boxes, visually separate from the state record, and they cannot change, reorder or remove a listing. The full list of what is not for sale →

Corrections

If a listing is wrong we want to know which document it should have come from. Report a correction →