How this site is built
An independent search layer over one public file. Not affiliated with the Board of Accountancy or the State of Washington.
Scope: everything, on purpose
All 51,317 records the Board publishes are loaded and searchable — lapsed, retired, inactive, suspended and revoked included. Only the 25,984 currently licensed to practise appear on the town, state and cohort pages.
That split is deliberate, and it is the main thing this site does differently. A lookup that loads only current licences answers « has this person’s licence lapsed? » with nothing found, which reads like reassurance. Here it answers lapsed, and here is the date.
Two registers, not one
The Board publishes people and firms in separate files, and this site loads both: 51,317 personal records and 2,356 firm registrations, of which 1,430 are current. They are kept apart because the source keeps them apart — nothing links a firm to the people licensed at it, and inventing that link would be the most useful thing we could do and the least honest.
Their numbers are also in separate sequences, so a single number can match a firm and a person. The search returns both rather than choosing.
⚠️ What we deliberately do not publish on a page
Board orders. 80 of the 51,317 records carry a
link to a signed order on the Board’s own site. No page on this site
attaches an order to a named person: pages carry counts, and the link appears
only on the individual record, which is drawn in your browser from the part of
the URL after the # and cannot be indexed.
The reason is precise. The Board publishes each order as a document, and the document is the only thing that can say what happened. Putting « order published » next to a name on a rankable page would create, for 80 named people, a permanent searchable accusation that the Board itself has not created — its PDFs are not indexed by name. We link; we do not characterise.
Note the limit in the other direction too: the Board has published orders as documents only since 1 January 2020. An older matter does not appear in this file at all, so an empty count is not a clean record.
⚠️ What the address does and does not mean
The Board records one place per licence holder — where it writes to them. It is not necessarily where they practise, and a town page is not a list of local firms.
And 9,578 of the 25,984 people in practice have no state recorded at all — 36.9%. They are counted on no town page and no state page. We would rather leave a visible hole than fill it by guessing.
How the pages are chosen
A town gets a page when at least 20 licence holders in practice are recorded there: 91 of 358 qualify, covering 91.4% of Washington-based CPAs. A state page needs 25; a town-and-cohort page needs 30. Below those thresholds a page names a handful of individuals and describes nothing.
Every CPA sits in exactly one town and exactly one renewal cohort, so the crossed pages divide their parent rather than overlapping it — checked before the generator was written, not after.
Source and freshness
One file: Washington State Certified Public Accountants, published by the Washington State Board of Accountancy on data.wa.gov, public domain, first posted 2017-10-12. The Board updates it nightly. Our copy is from 2026-08-21, and about 206 new licences are issued each month, so it drifts.
The oldest licence still in practice was first issued in 1959.
Although this information is updated nightly, the information found through this service is not guaranteed to be accurate or timely. The Board does not guarantee the use of this information for any purpose and as such, the information obtained from this database should not be considered an official endorsement of any individual or firm. For anything a decision depends on, check with the Board.