A Houston Contractor Took Your Deposit and Disappeared. Here's What to Do
The state agency most Houstonians think handles these complaints hasn't existed since 2010. What follows is the actual path: documentation, TDLR complaint, DTPA demand letter, Harris County Justice…
A Houston Contractor Took Your Deposit and Disappeared. Here’s What to Do
The state agency most Houstonians think handles these complaints hasn’t existed since 2010. What follows is the actual path: documentation, TDLR complaint, DTPA demand letter, Harris County Justice Court, and beyond.
A Houston homeowner hires a contractor to reroof a storm-damaged house in Meyerland. She pays a $6,000 deposit. The contractor pulls no permit, shows up twice, then stops answering calls. She googles “file complaint against contractor Texas” and lands on references to the Texas Residential Construction Commission. She calls around. Nobody picks up — because that agency was abolished by the Texas Legislature in 2010.
This happens constantly in Houston. The information vacuum around it is real. When the TRCC dissolved, residential general contractors in Texas became entirely unlicensed at the state level. The standard advice to “report them to their licensing board” is simply wrong for most situations. There is no licensing board for general residential contractors in Texas. There is, however, a specific sequence of steps that gives you real options — and most people who’ve been burned never find them.
Stop and Build Your File Before You Do Anything Else
Before you make a single call or send a single email, spend an hour getting your documentation in order. What you gather right now determines how far you can push every subsequent step. I know that feels backward when you’re furious and want to act immediately. Do it anyway.
Screenshot every text message, voicemail transcript, and email exchanged with the contractor. Today. Even the ones that felt casual — courts regularly admit text threads as evidence of verbal agreements about timing, scope, and cost.
Find your written contract. If you have one, read it for an arbitration clause, a governing-law provision, and language about deposit refundability. If all you have is a written estimate you signed, or an unsigned one you paid against, save that too. If there was no written agreement at all, sit down now and write out a dated timeline of the verbal conversation while memory is fresh: what was promised, when, for how much, by whom. A contemporaneous account carries weight that a later reconstruction doesn’t.
Pull your bank or credit card statement showing the deposit — amount, date, method, payee name. If you paid by credit card, call your issuer today about a chargeback. A dispute filed within the card network’s window is sometimes the fastest money recovery available and runs parallel to everything else here. Don’t let that clock expire while you’re working through other channels.
Then visit the Houston Permitting Center’s public portal at houstonpermittingcenter.org and search the contractor’s name and your property address. Did they ever pull a permit for your job? This matters for two reasons. If work was performed without a required permit, you may face a code violation on your property regardless of what happens with the contractor. And a contractor who accepted money to do permitted work and never pulled the permit has handed you a concrete, provable element of breach.
Find Out Whether Your Contractor Was Actually Licensed and by Whom
The answer depends entirely on what trade they were doing.
Texas licenses specific trades at the state level, and those licenses matter enormously to your options. The Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation (TDLR) covers electricians, HVAC mechanics under the Air Conditioning and Refrigeration Contractors program, irrigators, mold assessors and remediators, and several other specialty categories. Search the TDLR license verification tool at tdlr.texas.gov/LicenseSearch by name and business name. If they hold a TDLR license, that license is something they can lose. If they hold no license and did general contracting work, you’re dealing with an unregistered person — common in Texas, entirely lawful, and genuinely frustrating, because the administrative complaint path narrows. The civil and criminal routes described below remain fully available.
Plumbers are licensed separately through the Texas State Board of Plumbing Examiners at tsbpe.texas.gov, which runs its own complaint process. If your dispute involves a plumber, that’s where you file — not TDLR.
General residential contractors — the person hired to manage a full remodel, add a room, reroof a house — are not licensed by any Texas state agency. When the Legislature killed the TRCC in 2010, no equivalent body replaced it. Harris County and the City of Houston don’t require general contractors to hold a municipal license either, though the city requires permits for most structural work. That gap is what lets bad actors operate here with almost no professional consequences outside of civil court and criminal law.
File a TDLR Complaint If Your Contractor Holds a License It Can Lose
If your contractor holds a TDLR license — they were the HVAC installer, the electrician, the irrigator — file a complaint through TDLR’s online portal at tdlr.texas.gov/complaint.htm.
Submit the form and upload your supporting documentation: contract, payment records, communication history, permit records. You’ll get a case number. TDLR can discipline, suspend, or revoke a license and impose administrative fines. It cannot order the contractor to return your deposit or pay damages. That part is on you to pursue separately.
Expect several months for resolution. TDLR has significant complaint volume and limited investigative staff. The main thing a successful TDLR complaint accomplishes — beyond whatever discipline is imposed — is a permanent, searchable record. That record protects the next homeowner from the same contractor. File it even if you’ve already decided to pursue civil remedies.
File the Texas Attorney General’s Consumer Protection complaint in parallel at texasattorneygeneral.gov. The AG’s office doesn’t litigate individual small-dollar disputes. But it tracks patterns, and serial offenders — contractors who defraud multiple homeowners — draw AG attention when complaints accumulate. It takes fifteen minutes and has, in past cases, contributed to enforcement action when the pattern became undeniable.
Send a Texas DTPA Demand Letter Before You Sue
Most homeowners skip this step. That’s a mistake.
The Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act creates pressure that no other remedy matches. Under Texas Business and Commerce Code §17.505, you must send written notice at least 60 days before filing a DTPA lawsuit. The notice needs to describe the complaint in reasonable detail, identify the acts you believe were deceptive or false, and state your actual economic damages, attorney fees, and any other relief you’re seeking.
You don’t need a lawyer to write this letter. Three things do the work: identify yourself as the claimant and the contractor as the defendant; describe what happened in plain factual terms (paid deposit on this date, contractor agreed to do this work, contractor stopped communicating); state the specific dollar amount you want back. That’s it.
Send it by certified mail, return receipt requested, to every address you have — business address, registered agent address if they operate as an LLC, personal address if you know it. Keep the certified mail receipt and the green card when it comes back. These become evidence.
Why does this matter? Two reasons. First, it creates a formal 60-day window where some contractors, on receiving official written notice citing the DTPA, quietly settle rather than face litigation. A $6,000 dispute that would cost real money to litigate in district court looks very different to someone who’d rather write a check and move on. Second — and this is the part worth understanding — if the case does go to trial, Texas law allows recovery of up to three times your economic damages if the court finds the violation was knowing or intentional. A contractor who took your deposit with no intention of doing the work falls into that category. The statute also provides a basis for attorney fee recovery, which changes the math considerably if you’re weighing whether to retain counsel. For more on navigating complex commercial and consumer disputes, this piece fits naturally in our legal & finance coverage.
Take Your Case to Harris County Justice Court
If the contractor doesn’t respond to your demand letter with a satisfactory offer, Harris County Justice Court handles civil disputes up to $20,000. The Texas Legislature raised that ceiling from $10,000 in 2020 — a meaningful change that now covers most deposit losses Houston homeowners face.
Harris County has eight Justice Court precincts. Which one to file in turns on where the contractor resides or where the contract was performed — in most home contractor cases, that means the precinct covering your neighborhood. Find yours and access the filing portal at jp.hctx.net. Filing fees run roughly $46 to $101 depending on claim amount. You don’t need an attorney.
Once you file, the court issues citation for service on the contractor. This is where a genuinely disappeared contractor creates a real problem. Courts typically require personal service — a constable or process server physically delivering papers to the defendant. If the contractor has changed addresses and closed their business, you may need to work through the constable’s office and request alternative service from the judge. Document every address you’ve tried. Courts aren’t unsympathetic to plaintiffs pursuing clearly evasive defendants, but you have to show the effort.
If you get a judgment and the contractor still doesn’t pay — some won’t — a Justice Court judgment can be used to pursue collection: garnishing bank accounts, placing liens on property. Every address, business registration, vehicle, and asset you documented earlier feeds that process. The documentation work at the beginning isn’t just for building your case. It’s for collecting after you win it.
One geography note: if you live in Fort Bend County, Sugar Land, or Missouri City, you file in Fort Bend County Justice Court. Montgomery County residents file in their county’s JP courts. Harris County court has no jurisdiction over defendants or contracts located entirely outside the county.
File a Criminal Complaint When the Facts Support It
Taking a deposit and vanishing — when done intentionally — violates Texas law. Texas Penal Code §31.04 covers theft of services: obtaining services by deception with intent to avoid payment. Many contractor deposit cases fall within felony range under Texas theft statutes. A contractor who took $15,000 from three different homeowners has committed felony theft even if no individual claim exceeds the misdemeanor threshold.
File a police report with the Houston Police Department. Bring your full documentation file. Get the case number.
For cases at the felony threshold, contact the Harris County District Attorney’s Consumer Fraud Division. Criminal prosecution of individual contractor fraud is uncommon — the system isn’t a collection mechanism, and prosecutors prioritize cases with multiple documented victims or significant public harm. Most single-victim cases don’t move forward. Know that going in.
What the police report and DA complaint actually do: they create a durable official record that supports your civil case, they add to pattern documentation that can trigger prosecution when this contractor has victimized others, and they signal to the contractor — if they’re still reachable — that this has moved beyond a civil dispute. Some contractors, on learning a criminal report has been filed, become considerably more interested in a refund. Not most. But enough that it’s worth the hour.
When to Hire an Attorney and How to Afford One
For disputes above the $20,000 small claims ceiling, cases where the contractor operated through an LLC that complicates collection, or situations where DTPA treble-damages exposure is significant, it’s worth talking to a lawyer.
The entry point for Houston residents is the Houston Bar Association Lawyer Referral Service at hba.org/lrs or 713-228-0735. For a $20 fee, you get a 30-minute consultation with a licensed attorney in the relevant practice area. That half-hour is usually enough to assess whether your case is viable, understand what pursuit would actually cost, and decide whether to retain counsel. It’s a genuinely useful service and probably the fastest way to get an honest read on your situation. If your dispute has broader commercial dimensions, our guide to finding and hiring a Houston business attorney for commercial contracts covers how to evaluate and vet counsel for that work.
The economics of DTPA cases differ from typical small-dollar disputes. Under Texas Business and Commerce Code §17.50, a prevailing consumer in a DTPA suit may recover attorney fees from the defendant. That fee-shifting provision changes the math for plaintiffs’ attorneys. A case that would never work as a contingency matter in ordinary contract litigation becomes financially viable under DTPA if the underlying facts are strong. When you consult an attorney, be direct: does your situation actually support a DTPA framing? You need actual damages, a representation that was false or misleading, and a causal link between the deception and your loss. A contractor who promises a completion date they knew was impossible, claims credentials they don’t hold, or takes a deposit with no intention of performing likely meets that bar.
If you’re dealing with a judgment that sits uncollected because the contractor has an LLC and no obvious assets, that’s a separate specialty — debtor-creditor work, sometimes called judgment enforcement. Ask the referral service specifically for an attorney with that background. Not every litigator does collection well, and the two skills don’t always travel together.
The Houston Risk Calendar
Houston has two concentrated seasons for transient contractor fraud, aligned directly with the weather events that drive sudden, large-scale demand for repair work.
April through June is spring storm season. Hail and wind events generate rapid demand for roofing and siding work across the metro. Fraudulent operators flood the market fast, target neighborhoods with visible storm damage, and disappear once they’ve collected enough deposits. Meyerland and neighborhoods along the Southwest Freeway corridor have historically seen concentrated fraud in May and June. If you’re in those areas and a stranger is knocking on your door the week after a hailstorm, that is not coincidence.
June through November is hurricane and tropical storm season. After Harvey in 2017, documented fraud concentrated heavily in Meyerland, Kingwood, the Beaumont Highway corridor, and East Houston — the neighborhoods that took catastrophic flood damage and had large numbers of homeowners desperate for any available contractor. That geography tracked exactly where the work was, and where the fraud followed.
Five things should stop you before money changes hands:
Any contractor who won’t provide a written contract before accepting a deposit. Any contractor who insists on a cash deposit — particularly a large one — before work begins. Any contractor who doesn’t pull the required permit before starting structural, electrical, or mechanical work (you can verify this through the Houston Permitting Center before they start). Any contractor who provides only an out-of-state or untraceable phone number with no verifiable local address. Any contractor who pressures you for an immediate decision, citing limited availability or expiring insurance pricing.
These aren’t judgment calls where you weigh the risk. They are stops. The contractor who’s legitimate will wait. The one who won’t is telling you something.
Every Houston Resource in One Place
TDLR Complaint Portal — tdlr.texas.gov/complaint.htm Files complaints against contractors holding TDLR licenses (electricians, HVAC mechanics, irrigators, mold assessors and remediators). Does not cover unlicensed general contractors. Cannot recover money; can discipline or revoke licenses.
TDLR License Verification — tdlr.texas.gov/LicenseSearch Confirms whether your contractor holds any TDLR license and whether it’s current, suspended, or lapsed.
Texas State Board of Plumbing Examiners — tsbpe.texas.gov For disputes involving licensed plumbers. Separate from TDLR; operates its own complaint and discipline process.
Harris County Justice Court Filing Portal — jp.hctx.net Civil claims up to $20,000. Filing fees approximately $46–$101 by claim amount. Determine your precinct by the contractor’s residence or location of the contract performance.
Houston Permitting Center — houstonpermittingcenter.org Verify whether permits were pulled for your job. Unpermitted work creates a separate code compliance issue on your property that exists regardless of what happens with the contractor.
Houston Bar Association Lawyer Referral Service — hba.org/lrs | 713-228-0735 $20 for a 30-minute attorney consultation. The right first call for DTPA claims, district court litigation, and judgment collection questions.
Texas Attorney General Consumer Protection — texasattorneygeneral.gov Doesn’t litigate individual cases but tracks patterns. File here to contribute to records that can trigger AG action against serial offenders.
Harris County DA Consumer Fraud Division Contact through the Harris County District Attorney’s Office for felony-threshold fraud cases. Confirm current contact information directly before filing — the division’s intake process has changed more than once.
Houston Police Department File the initial report for deposit theft at your district station. Bring full documentation. Get a case number to support civil proceedings and DA referral.
Verify agency contact information before filing. The Houston Bar Association Lawyer Referral Service is the right first call for any dispute where the facts are complicated or the dollar amount exceeds the small claims ceiling.
