Working under someone else's licence: what it costs you

This is for a crew that does good work and does not hold its own CSLB licence. You have probably worked out that your fee is higher than the numbers on the recruiting pages, and you would like to know why, and whether you are being taken.

Short version: yes, your fee is higher. It is disclosed before you claim anything, it is the same number on every job, and it is the one charge on this platform you can remove outright. Here is what it is, what it pays for, and how to get rid of it.

The mechanic, in one paragraph

DPOC holds California contractor licence CSLB #999194. Every job runs under this licence — ours, not a subcontractor's. If your crew holds its own active licence, the work runs under yours and no coverage premium applies. If it does not, the work runs under DPOC's, and the platform fee on that job carries a premium for the coverage.

The premium is a fixed number of percentage points added to the platform fee. It lives in DPOC's fee config alongside every other rate on the platform, which is why this post will not quote it at you: config moves and prose does not. Your account page names it in points, and every listing on the job board shows your payout and your net with it already applied, before you claim.

Two things about how it is applied are deliberate and worth knowing. First, the premium sits above your tier's normal fee ceiling rather than inside it, with its own hard cap. Clamped to the tier ceiling instead, a Starter crew already sitting at that ceiling would absorb the premium invisibly — and Starter is exactly where a crew without its own licence sits, so the one crew whose coverage costs the most would be the one crew not charged for it.

Second, the margin DPOC guarantees you on the job is lowered by the same amount. Without that, the margin guardrail — the rule that trims DPOC's own fee to protect your margin — would claw the premium straight back off on most Starter work, and the charge would be theatre. This is the honest version: DPOC protects the margin of a crew on its own licence further than it protects the margin of a crew consuming DPOC's.

What the premium actually buys

A licence is not a certificate on a wall. It is the thing a claim attaches to. On a job running under #999194, that is:

• The bond. It is filed against DPOC's licence, and it exists for the homeowner's benefit rather than the licence holder's.
• The insurance exposure. When something goes wrong on work running under our licence, the claim arrives at our door.
• The board. A CSLB complaint about this work is filed against #999194 — our record, our history, our discipline if it goes badly.
• The finished work. DPOC guarantees the job to the homeowner. If it has to be put right, that promise is ours to keep whether or not the crew is still answering the phone.
• The contract. The agreement is between DPOC and the homeowner, so the homeowner's dispute about price, scope or quality is with DPOC.

That is a real transfer of risk, and the premium is the price of it — not a markup for its own sake, and not a penalty for being new. If you would rather carry that risk yourself and keep the money, you can, and you should. That is what the rest of this is about.

What it costs on a real job

Below is a concrete job, priced by the same engine that quotes the homeowner and paid out by the same engine that pays a crew. Read it as the no-premium case: these are the numbers for a crew working under its own active licence. When DPOC's licence is the one carrying the job, the coverage premium comes off the top of every row.

Do not do arithmetic off this table to work out your own number. The job board shows your payout and your net for your account, on the specific job, before you claim it, and your account page tells you whether the premium is applying to you at all. If either disagrees with anything on this page, believe them — they are reading your record.

The honest recommendation: go and get your own licence

Here is the thing a recruiter would not tell you. If you are good enough to be doing this work, go and get your own CSLB licence. It is a better deal for you than any fee band we can offer, and most of the reasons have nothing to do with DPOC.

• The premium comes off every job, permanently. It is the only charge on this platform that goes to zero and stays there.
• The tiers below Starter's fee band are gated on it. Verified, Pro and Elite each require your own active licence and insurance on file, on top of their job-count, rating and callback requirements. Nobody can hand you those fee bands without one.
• It is yours. It does not belong to DPOC, it does not switch off if you stop taking DPOC jobs, and it is most of the difference between running a crew and being one.
• You can hold the contract. Your own work, your own customers, your own name on the agreement, at whatever price you can win.

What it takes, roughly

Roughly, because the specifics belong to CSLB and they change. Treat this as the shape of the thing and read the board's current requirements before you plan around any of it:

1. Experience. CSLB requires documented journey-level experience in the classification you are applying for, certified by someone able to vouch for it. Start collecting that paperwork now — it is the part crews are least ready for, and the part you cannot buy later.
2. Exams. Normally two: a law and business exam, and a trade exam for your classification. Some applicants qualify for exemptions; check whether you are one.
3. The bond. A contractor's bond filed with the board. Understand it before you buy it — the bond protects the consumer, not you.
4. Workers' compensation. Required once you have employees, and required regardless of employees in some classifications. Find out which side of that line your classification sits on.
5. Application, fees, fingerprinting and a background check, plus processing time. CSLB publishes current fees and current processing times, and we are not going to quote you either.

None of that is free and none of it is quick. It is still the best return available to a crew that intends to still be doing this in five years.

What changes the day your licence goes active

1. Tell DPOC. Add the licence to your account — the account page has the button, and it reaches a person rather than a queue.
2. We verify it against the board's own record and store the expiry date. Verification is the step that matters; a number typed into a form is not a licence.
3. From that point the premium comes off every job you claim. It is not applied backwards — jobs already claimed keep the terms you claimed them under.
4. Your record starts counting toward the tiers that require a licence and insurance on file. The premium coming off is the immediate win; the fee band is the larger one.
5. Keep it current. The expiry date is checked rather than remembered, so a lapsed licence moves you back under DPOC's coverage on its own, without anyone deciding to. Renew before the date, not after it.

If you are mid-application and want to know where you stand, ask. It is a normal question with a normal answer, and it is better asked now than discovered on a payout.

What you can and cannot do under DPOC's licence

This part deserves care, because getting it wrong is how a good crew ends up with a real problem. The general shape of it:

• The licence is DPOC's. You can say accurately that the job runs under DPOC's CSLB licence. You cannot present that licence as yours, put #999194 on your own truck, cards, ads or estimates, or use it to take work that is not DPOC's.
• The contract is DPOC's. The homeowner's agreement is with DPOC. Do not write your own contract for DPOC work, do not take a deposit or a payment directly, and do not settle a change in scope on the driveway — it goes back through the job.
• Permits and inspections run through DPOC on work under our licence. If a job looks like it needs one, raise it before you start rather than after.
• The work you are sent is the work that is covered. A favour on the side of a job — a bit of electrical, a small structural change, something for the neighbour — sits outside all of this.
• Off-platform side deals are the one thing that ends the relationship. A DPOC homeowner taken off DPOC is a job with nothing standing behind it, for them and for you.

How your working relationship with DPOC is classified — the employee-or-subcontractor question — is a separate matter from whose licence the work runs under, and not one a blog post should settle for you. If it bears on your situation, put it to an attorney.

Classifications: a licence has a scope

A California licence is not one blanket permission. It is issued in classifications — a general building classification and a long list of specialty ones — and each covers particular kinds of work. Concrete, for instance, sits in a specialty classification of its own.

That cuts both ways here. Work outside the classifications on DPOC's licence is not covered by DPOC's licence, no matter who is standing on the site; DPOC does not send that work, and you should not accept it on the strength of ours. And when you apply for your own, the classification you choose decides what you are permitted to contract for afterwards — so pick it for the work you intend to do, not the work you happened to do last month. CSLB publishes the full classification list.

The other option, and why it lands on you

The alternative to all of this is the one that has always been available: work unlicensed, off-platform, direct with the homeowner, and nobody takes a fee. It is worth being blunt about where that leaves you.

• Nothing stands behind the job but you. No bond, nobody else's insurance, no company name on the contract. A claim goes to your assets and your family's.
• California's rules on unlicensed contracting are strict, and they are written to land on the person doing the work rather than the person who hired them. Collecting what you are owed can become hard to enforce, and money already paid to you can be at risk.
• A homeowner who knows those rules better than you do has leverage over you for the length of the job. Some of them know exactly that.
• Nothing accrues. No record, no rating, no tier, no credential quietly turning into an asset. Ten years of it and you are precisely where you started.

Working under DPOC's licence costs you points on a fee, disclosed up front. Working under nobody's costs you the entire downside, and you find out the price at the worst possible moment.

And if you are working under our licence today, that is fine — it is exactly what the coverage exists for. Just know what it costs, know it is on the screen before you claim, and know it is the one line on your fee you can delete for good.