How we rank
Every score on RatedHomeContractor is calculated by the same formula from public, dated information. The formula is below in full. Nobody, including our own company and its clients, can pay to change a score or a rank.
1. Who gets listed
- The business must clearly serve the city it is listed in (its own website, address or service-area page says so).
- The business must have a working website or enough public information for us to verify basic facts. Low-confidence records are not published.
- HVAC and gas fitting: gas work in BC legally requires a Technical Safety BC (TSBC) licence, so in these categories we only list businesses whose licence we confirmed on the official TSBC registry. A licence number on the business's own website is not enough.
- Plumbing: plumbing is not yet a compulsory-certification trade in BC, so a verified licence is shown when available but is not required.
2. The score (0 to 100)
| Review quality (max 30) | We use a Bayesian average: the rating is blended with a neutral 4.0 as if the business had 20 extra average reviews. This stops a 5.0 from 3 reviews beating a 4.8 from 400. An adjusted rating of 3.0 or lower gets 0 points; 5.0 gets full points, linear in between. |
|---|---|
| Licensing (max 20) | 20 points if confirmed on the TSBC registry. 12 points if the business publishes a licence number we have not yet confirmed. 8 points if it only claims Red Seal / SkilledTradesBC certification. 0 if we found no evidence (this never means "unlicensed"). |
| Review volume (max 15) | Scaled on a logarithmic curve. 500 or more reviews gets full points. |
| Information completeness (max 15) | Website 5, phone 3, street address 3, list of services 4. |
| Track record (max 10) | 1 point per year since founding, up to 10. We use the founding year, not "years of experience" claims. |
| Emergency availability (max 10) | 10 points if the business itself advertises 24/7 service. |
Every profile shows its full score breakdown and the source of the rating used.
3. Rated vs. not yet rated
A business only gets a rank number if we read its rating directly on Google or HomeStars. Without it, the score would mostly reflect missing data rather than quality, so these businesses are shown below the ranked list, alphabetically, marked "not yet rated". This is not a judgement about their work.
4. Review sources
We only score ratings we read directly on an independent platform: Google first, then HomeStars. Where the only rating we found is a review widget on the business's own website, we show it with that label, but it scores 0 points and the business is not yet rated until we can read its rating on an independent platform. We never publish reviews we wrote, paid for or edited.
5. Ties and order
Ranked businesses are ordered by score, highest first. Equal scores are ordered alphabetically.
6. Updates
Information is re-checked at least monthly. Each profile shows the date it was last checked.
7. What we do not check
We do not check insurance, WorkSafeBC coverage, permits, pricing, or the quality of individual jobs. A high score is not a guarantee.
8. Paid plans never change the score
- Featured businesses appear in a separate box labelled "Sponsored" at the top of a page (at most 3 per page). They also keep their normal position in the ranked list, decided only by the formula.
- Business Confirmed is a paid check of business details. Its badge lists exactly what was checked. It adds no points.
- Photos, descriptions, services or service areas added by the business owner are shown as "From the business" and are never used in the score.
- The licence check on the Technical Safety BC registry is free for every business.
See Disclosures for every way we make money.
Methodology version 1.0 (2026-10-06). Changes to this methodology are dated and listed here.