Every firm on this site carries one of three labels, and only one of them means we checked. A license can say "Verified via [State DOI name] on [date]," "Self-reported, not yet verified," or nothing at all. That is the entire vocabulary. We do not invent a fourth state that sounds better, and we do not let a firm buy its way into the first one.
Why this matters more on a directory than anywhere else
A directory's entire value is trust you cannot personally audit for every listing. If we let unverified claims sit next to verified ones without a visible difference, the badge becomes decoration instead of information. Public adjusting is also a licensed, bonded profession specifically because unlicensed operators have a long history of taking upfront fees and disappearing after a disaster. A verification system that cannot tell you which firms actually cleared that bar is worse than no system, because it creates false confidence.
What "verified" actually checks
When you see "Verified via [State DOI name] on [date]," it means we confirmed the license against a state government source on that date, not once, ever, in the past. Specifically, that check confirms:
- The license number exists and is currently active, not expired, suspended, or revoked
- The license type matches what the firm claims (public adjuster, not just a general agent or claims license)
- Where the state discloses it publicly, any concluded disciplinary history tied to that license number
It does not mean we called references, watched the firm work a claim, or vouched for their negotiating skill. Verification is a floor, not an endorsement.
How the check gets made
States are not uniform here, and we are honest about the gap. Texas publishes its full roster of licensed agents and adjusters as structured open data through the Texas Open Data Portal, which makes it possible to check a license programmatically against a real government dataset rather than a manual lookup. Florida's Department of Financial Services runs a public search tool at licenseesearch.fldfs.com where a license can be looked up by name, license number, or National Producer Number. Other states expose a web-based lookup rather than open data; where that exists, we query it directly and record the result. Where a state has no queryable lookup at all, a listing stays in the self-reported category until a manual check catches up.
Every verification we run is stored with the license number, the status returned, the date we checked, and the source URL, so a "verified" badge always traces back to a specific check on a specific day.
