Virginia septic licences: DPOR, VDH and who does what

Two agencies, and the one people get wrong

DPOR — the Department of Professional and Occupational Regulation — licenses the contractor. If you want to know whether a company may legally install your septic system, DPOR holds that answer.

VDH — the Department of Health — permits the system itself, through the local health district: the site evaluation, the construction permit, the inspection, and the file that ends up describing your property. VDH does not license the contractor.

VDH does publish a list of septic and well service providers, but it says plainly that the list is built from providers who chose to share their contact details, that it endorses nobody, and that it does not guarantee anyone’s licence status. It points you to DPOR to check that. This site republishes the DPOR records rather than the self-reported list, for exactly that reason.

The specialty code is the whole thing

A Virginia contractor licence is a class — A, B or C, which is about the value of work the firm may take on — plus a set of three-letter specialties saying what kind of work it is. Two of those specialties are septic:

• CDS — conventional sewage disposal systems contracting.
• ADS — alternative sewage disposal system contracting, for the engineered systems used where a conventional drain field will not work.

A firm with a Class A licence and no CDS or ADS on it is not licensed for your septic system, however impressive the rest of the licence looks. That single detail is why this site’s Virginia list contains 440 companies rather than the fifty thousand contractors DPOR licenses in total — and every listing here shows which of the two codes the firm holds.

Businesses are licensed. So are people.

Virginia also licenses individuals to do onsite sewage work, separately from the firm that employs them. There are three:

• Onsite sewage system installers (1,240 licensed) — personally licensed to install systems.
• Onsite sewage system operators (498) — licensed to operate and maintain them, which alternative systems generally require on an ongoing basis.
• Onsite soil evaluators (460) — licensed to evaluate soil and decide what kind of system a site can actually take. On a new build this is the first person you need, not the last.

Each comes in Journeyman and Master grades, and in Conventional and Alternative variants — so “Master Alternative Onsite Sewage System Installer” is a real licence, and it means something specific. We list individual licensees on county pages with the licence they hold and its expiry date.

Checking a licence takes about thirty seconds

Every Virginia listing on this site carries the licence number, and DPOR’s own License Lookup will confirm its status, class and specialties from that number. DPOR republishes its licence files roughly every five business days, which makes Virginia unusually current as public records go.

Also check the expiry date — we show it on every listing. A licence that expires next month is not a problem, but it is worth a question. The full verification steps →

What DPOR publishes that we do not

The licence files include a street address and an email address for most licensees. We publish neither. A great many of these licences are held by sole traders at their home address, and a tidy column of several hundred licensee emails is a spam list rather than a directory. City, ZIP and county are enough to tell you where a business is.