What a 13VH number means
13VH08864800
Every business selling or making home improvements on New Jersey residential property has to register annually with the Division of Consumer Affairs. Registration issues a number of this shape — 13VH followed by eight digits — and state rules require it on contracts, estimates, advertising, business cards and commercial vehicles. Flooring is inside the statute by name: it lists wall-to-wall carpeting and attached or inlaid floor coverings among the work that counts.
What the number records
- The business filed proof of commercial general liability insurance of at least $500,000 per occurrence. N.J.S.A. 56:8-142(a)
- It filed for workers' compensation cover, unless exempt by law. N.J.S.A. 56:8-142(a)
- It is on a public register the state maintains and anyone can search.
- It is bound by the written-contract rule for home improvement work over $500. N.J.S.A. 56:8-151(a)
Read from the New Jersey Revised Statutes on : N.J.S.A. 56:8-142(a) · N.J.S.A. 56:8-151(a)
What it does not record
- Any test of skill. Registration is not a trade qualification and involves no examination.
- Any flooring-specific training or manufacturer certification.
- Any assessment of past work, complaints or disputes.
- That the business is still trading. A register entry is a filing, not a heartbeat.
Check it at the source
The State of New Jersey runs the register and publishes a lookup. Search by business name or by the number itself, and you get the current status straight from the authority that issued it — which is the version that counts in a dispute.
New Jersey Division of Consumer Affairs licence verification
This site is a copy of that register, read once, on a date printed at the top of every page. A copy goes stale and the original does not. Where the two disagree, the state is right and this site is wrong — and it should be told: ask for a correction.
Expired entries are not published
The state register is cumulative. It holds every registration ever issued, and most of the entries in it lapsed years ago, because the business behind them closed. When this site read the register it found 145,261 rows, of which 46,374 registrations were active.
A lapsed entry therefore does not mean a trading business let its registration slide. It usually means a business that no longer exists, and the register cannot tell the two apart. Publishing the lapsed list as though it did would put a mark against companies that closed in good order a decade ago, so this site publishes the active slice and nothing else.
If a business you are dealing with is not in the register here, that is not a finding. Check the state lookup — the name may simply not carry a flooring word, which is how this list was drawn. How it was drawn.
Every active registration expires on the same day
Each row carries a valid-until date, and on all 634 entries published here it is the same one — 31 March 2027. New Jersey runs a single statewide renewal cycle rather than dating each business from when it first registered. The date is real and it is reproduced as the state publishes it, but it tells you nothing that distinguishes one contractor from another.
That is not a property of this slice. When the full register was downloaded on the expiry column was read across every active registration in it, and the date was the same on all of them — how that reading was taken. What is kept in this repository is the flooring slice: 936 registrations matched on the name filter, of which 634 entries are published. So the figure above can be checked here; the wider one has to be taken from the reading, or from the state.
It is worth knowing for what it rules out. A late expiry is not a sign of a long-established business, an early one is not a warning, and two contractors with identical dates have nothing in common beyond both being registered. The field that carries information is the status, and the only status published here is active.