How we review and rank Portland electricians

We review public records and what each business publishes about itself. We did not inspect work, call businesses, ask for quotes or hire anyone. Nothing on this site describes the quality of a business's work.

A business is ranked in Portland only if all four gates pass on the run date.

1. Google listing. The business appears in our Google Maps searches for Portland with an electrical-trade category, as its primary category or an additional one.
2. Portland service, from a business source. Its Google Business Profile address is in Portland, or its own website names Portland (or the Portland metro or area) as somewhere it serves. We keep the page URL and the short phrase.
3. Active CCB license. It matches a license in the Oregon CCB Active Licenses dataset. Matching evidence, strongest first: the CCB number shown on the business's own website; the same phone number; the same legal name or DBA plus address. Every match records its method and evidence.
4. Active BCD electrical contractor license. It matches an Oregon BCD license of type C-Electrical Contractor with status Active. In Oregon an electrical contractor needs this BCD license in addition to the CCB license (Oregon BCD).

One entry per CCB license. When several Google listings that pass the first two gates match one license, we use the listing with the most Google ratings. If two have the same count, a Portland address wins, then the lower Google listing number. Ratings are never added together across listings. The other listings stay in the data and in the evidence record, but they are not ranked twice. We rank licensed companies, not single branch offices.

Businesses that fail a gate are not ranked and not named. The ranking page publishes how many listings passed each gate. A failed match is a limit of public data and of our matching. We never describe it as a licensing problem.

• Not listed in the source. If a source does not list a value, such as Google ratings on a listing with none, or a bond or insurance amount the CCB dataset does not show, that part earns 0 points. The page says "not shown in" and names the source. A blank field is not treated as a finding about the business.
• Not retrieved because of a failure on our side. If a request fails (for example, the review-date request), we retry and request the data again. If it is still unavailable, that part is removed for that business only, and its score becomes 100 * earned / available maximum. An unavailable source is never treated as zero. The entry is labeled "partial data" and names the removed part, and the ranking page states how many entries are partial. Rescaling can change the order compared with full data, so partial entries are not fully comparable.
• Not collected for anyone. Complaint history is not part of the formula for any business.

The address, phone number and website shown for each business come from its Google listing or its own website. CCB and BCD records list official mailing addresses. We use those only to match records and never show them as where a business is located.

The license history part measures the time since the matched CCB license was first issued (the dataset's orig_regis_date). The dataset does not show whether the license was held without a break, and a business may be older than its current license. We never present this number as the age of a business.

Businesses are sorted by unrounded score, highest first. Two scores that differ by less than 0.000000001 are a tie, broken in this order:

1. more Google ratings;
2. then the earlier CCB first-issued date;
3. then the lower CCB license number.

Scores display to one decimal, so two businesses can show the same score at different ranks.

No score is changed by hand. The only manual decisions are about data matching: which license belongs to which Google listing. Each one is recorded with its evidence, and every evidence record on the ranking page shows how that business's licenses were matched.

Smiley Electric is a Crewsive marketing client with a separate affiliated feature. Active promoted businesses are excluded from the scored comparison, its source-record list, schema and ranking downloads. Smiley passed the public-record gates; this exclusion is a publishing policy, not a safety judgment. The other businesses retain their computed scores and their positions are renumbered. Publication policy version 2 took effect on November 9, 2026.

No business in the current Portland ranking is a Crewsive client.

• CCB complaint history. The CCB lookup site (search.ccb.state.or.us) and the state's older licensing site (www4.cbs.state.or.us) disallow automated access in their robots.txt files, so we do not collect from them. The CCB open dataset has no complaint column. Every evidence record links to the CCB lookup so you can read complaint history yourself.
• Google review text and reviewer details. We keep only the dates of the newest reviews. Review text is deleted before anything is stored.
• Prices, quotes and quality of work. We did not contact or hire any business, so none of this is measured.

Check any business yourself with the state's own tools:

• Oregon CCB license lookup: license status, bond, insurance and complaint history for any CCB number.
• Oregon BCD license search: electrical contractor and electrician licenses.
• Oregon BCD: work that needs a license: why an electrical contractor needs a BCD license as well as the CCB license.
• CCB Active Licenses dataset and BCD Active Licenses dataset: the open data we pull, on data.oregon.gov.

Our license guide walks through both lookups step by step.

Method version 1.1, used for the run of November 8, 2026. Version 1.1 changed one rule before this site first published: when several Google listings match one license, the listing with the most Google ratings is used. Version 1.0 put a Portland address first, which on this run would have scored some companies from a small secondary listing. Weights and formulas did not change. Any later change to a rule gets a new version number here and in the data files.