Contractor licensing guide
The NASCLA Accredited Examination Explained: What It Covers and Which States Accept It
Quick answer
The NASCLA Accredited Examination Explained: What It Covers and Which States Accept It
The NASCLA Accredited Examination for Commercial General Building Contractors is a business-and-law exam that 17 states accept in place of their own trade exam for commercial general contractors. It tests contract law, project management, and safety, not construction trades. Each state still requires its own application, experience proof, and bond or net-worth filing.
If you already hold a contractor license and are eyeing work in a second state, the NASCLA exam is the single most useful shortcut that actually exists. It will not make you licensed everywhere, but it removes one real barrier: sitting a new trade exam every time you cross a state line.
- 17
- States accepting it for commercial general building
- 1
- Exam, many states business, law, and project management
- 0
- Trades tested it is not a hands-on skills exam
Who runs the exam, and what it actually covers
The National Association of State Contractors Licensing Agencies (NASCLA) develops the Accredited Examination for Commercial General Building Contractors as a shared standard its member states can adopt instead of writing and maintaining their own commercial business exam. The exam is not about carpentry, electrical, or plumbing skill. It tests the business side of running a licensed general contracting operation: contract law and formation, project and risk management, safety and OSHA obligations, estimating and bidding, and business organization and finance. That is the same territory covered by a state’s own Law and Business-style exam, which is exactly why states can substitute one for the other.
The 17 states that accept it
By our classification of the public record (see the 50-state comparison for the per-state sourcing and verification status), these states accept the NASCLA Accredited Examination in place of their own commercial general building trade exam:
| Accepts NASCLA | |
|---|---|
| Alabama | New Mexico |
| Arizona | North Carolina |
| Arkansas | Oregon |
| California | South Carolina |
| Florida | Tennessee |
| Georgia | Utah |
| Louisiana | Virginia |
| Mississippi | West Virginia |
| Nevada |
The US Virgin Islands also participates, though it is a territory and not one of the 50 states. This list is set by NASCLA itself and can change, so verify current participation before you rely on it for a specific application.
Why some states are not on the list
Being absent from the NASCLA list does not mean a state is harder to get licensed in, and it is not always a gap. A state is absent for one of a few reasons:
- It runs its own commercial exam and has not adopted NASCLA’s, often because its state code already tests material the NASCLA exam does not cover in the same detail.
- It requires no state trade exam at all, which describes most of the local-only, specialty-only, and no-license states. There is nothing to substitute because there is no state exam in the first place; see states with no contractor license.
- It licenses residential contractors under a different exam track than the commercial general building scope the NASCLA exam addresses.
How to use it if you are planning a multi-state license
If you already know you want to hold licenses in more than one NASCLA state, sitting the NASCLA exam once and carrying the credential into each application is the efficient order of operations: study once, apply repeatedly. If you are licensed in a single state today and only weighing a possible future move, there is no benefit to sitting it speculatively; wait until a specific second state is on the table, confirm that state still accepts it, and check whether it also expects a state-specific law supplement on top.
Sources: NASCLA participating state agencies list (nascla.org, verified 2026-07-24); this site’s national comparison matrix (state-matrix.json, generated 2026-07-24). See /compare/ for per-state sourcing and verification status.