NASCLA (National Association of State Contractors Licensing Agencies) maintains a member roster of state boards. Individual state boards publish their license classifications and fee schedules as PDFs or CSV downloads. Most SleekRank setups start with NASCLA data, augment with state-board PDFs parsed into JSON, and add reciprocity data from the NASCLA reciprocity matrix.

Some states (California, Florida) license general contractors broadly with sub-classifications for specialty trades. Other states (Texas) skip the general license entirely and only license specific trades like electrical and plumbing. Render the board structure as a typed roster so each state page shows the appropriate licensing model rather than forcing one shape on all rows.

State names work directly (california, florida, texas) since there's one contractor-license board per state. For multi-board states (some states have separate general and specialty boards), use suffixes like california-csbl and california-electrical. SleekRank treats each as a unique row, and the URL space stays clean across all fifty states.

A few state boards (CSLB) expose lookup widgets that can be embedded. Most prefer that lookups go through their official portal for tracking purposes. Default to a prominent outbound link to the board lookup, with classification reference tables and bond/insurance requirement details rendered on your hub page for research before verification.

NASCLA maintains a reciprocity matrix that lists which state licenses are recognized in which other states. Add reciprocity_with as an array field per state, and render the matrix on each page so contractors planning multi-state operations see their existing license's portability immediately on each adjacent state's hub page within the corpus.

Some sites (BuildZoom, Houzz) cache lookup data and run per-contractor pages. That's a separate corpus keyed by license number rather than state, often built on top of state-board public-data feeds. SleekRank can run both layers simultaneously: state hubs at /contractor-license/{state}/ and individual contractor pages at /contractor/{license-number}/.

BuildZoom runs a per-contractor lookup product on top of state-board open data. NASCLA is the trade association of state boards, focused on reciprocity and professional development. SleekRank fills the per-state hub layer that neither covers directly. The three layers work together: state hubs (SleekRank), per-contractor lookups (BuildZoom), and reciprocity reference (NASCLA).

SleekRank stores each resolved row in wp_sleek_rank_items at roughly 30-80 KB per state depending on classification depth (California with 44 classes is the largest). Fifty rows is a 2-4 MB MySQL footprint, trivial on any production setup. Most teams pair the corpus with edge HTML caching for instant load times on every research lookup.