Yes. And it is the only city in this metro where the answer is yes. Michigan licenses no snow-removal trade at the state level, so for most of West Michigan “licensed contractor” is a phrase with no legal content behind it. In East Grand Rapids there is a real permission, issued by the City Clerk, and the city publishes the list of who holds one.
This site holds no such license and needs none — it arranges introductions rather than plowing. The obligation described here belongs to the contractor who does the work.
East Grand Rapids Code § 7.90, “Snow Removal Contractor License Requirements,” reads:
“No snow removal contractor shall advertise its snow plowing services in the city, represent itself to be a licensed snow removal contractor within the city, solicit or enter into contracts for snow plowing service with residents of the city, or operate such business or service within the city, without first obtaining a license from the City Clerk’s office.”
Read the verbs, because they are the point. The license is not merely a permit to plow. It is required before a contractor may advertise in the city, before it may describe itself as licensed there, before it may solicit, and before it may enter into a contract with a resident. A company that has taken a deposit from an East Grand Rapids homeowner without a license has already crossed the line, whether or not a blade has touched a driveway.
The companion provision is § 10.9, which states that no person shall move or deposit snow in such a manner as to interfere with an adjoining owner’s use of a driveway or access walk, and gives the City Manager authority to issue enforcement regulations.
On its own that is an ordinary nuisance rule. What makes it consequential is the link back to § 7.90: a licensed contractor’s license can be revoked by the City Clerk for violating it. So in East Grand Rapids, pushing a driveway’s snow onto the neighbor’s apron is not just a complaint — it is a threat to the contractor’s ability to work in the city at all for the rest of the season.
Note also what § 10.9 does not do. It sets no hours deadline for a property owner to clear a sidewalk. East Grand Rapids regulates the contractor tightly and the homeowner loosely — the reverse of Grand Rapids next door, which runs a 24-hour clock on owners and licenses no plow contractors at all.
The city maintains a published list of licensed snowplowing contractors. That is unusual and genuinely useful: in a trade where “licensed and insured” is boilerplate almost everywhere in Michigan, here it is a claim you can verify in under a minute against the city’s own page.
If you own property in East Grand Rapids, two questions are worth asking any contractor before signing:
No equivalent requirement was found in Grand Rapids, Kentwood, Wyoming, Walker, Grandville or Hudsonville. Their business-licensing chapters were not exhaustively searched, so the honest statement is that none surfaced — not that none exists.
Michigan’s Occupational Code licenses a specific set of occupations — accountants, barbers and cosmetologists, hearing aid dealers, morticians, architects, engineers and surveyors, landscape architects, residential builders and maintenance-and-alteration contractors, real estate brokers and appraisers. Snow removal appears nowhere in it. Neither does landscape maintenance; landscape architecture, a design profession, is a different thing.
So outside East Grand Rapids, a snow contractor in this state has no license to show you, and any firm implying otherwise is describing something that does not exist. The things that are real and worth asking about are general liability coverage, commercial auto coverage on the plow trucks, and workers’ compensation — Michigan is not a monopolistic workers’ comp state, and coverage is required once a private employer has one employee working 35 or more hours a week for 13 or more weeks in the preceding year, or three employees at one time including part-time.
This site publishes no license number anywhere, deliberately. A referral service has none to publish, and inventing a credential would be the same error the rest of this market makes with pricing.
Say the address and whether the walk is in scope. Licensing status in the city is the contractor’s obligation and worth confirming against the city’s own list.
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