Business Licenses

A subset of Business licenses for for-profit and non-profit entities operating in Alaskan communities where licensee has designated the physical location as being a single DCRA recognized community and has identified the physical state as AK. For those specific records the (geographic) location has been set to the DCRA centroid of the community. The primary purpose of this feature service is for linking business licenses in the DCRA Community StoryMap Applications to communities with populations under 2500. Data updated monthly from the Alaska Department of Commerce, Community, and Economic Development, Division of Corporations, Business and Professional Licensing (DCCED-CBPL). See CBPL Business License Download link on this page for source of data represented in CSV format. Please take time to understand the limits of this data before using it for any sort of economic or statistical analysis - some of the known limitations are: Physical address entry by applying licensee is fairly open and not standardized - generally about only 67% of the physical addresses in source data map to an Alaskan community in the DCRA domain of known communities. If the physical address does not have a state designated - or state is designated but not AK then business license row is not mapped. Point locations given have not been geolocated - mostly due to the fact that batch geocoding in communities without addressing is weak as well as costly for the amount of points involved for the update interval. Therefore all addresses for a community are located at the default DCRA Community centroid - which often will be a building - but generally is not the building of the business listed. Most important! For any business that operates in more than one location - it is likely only one business license record exists - and for large businesses typically the physical address is where their main office is. For example: The Alaska Commercial Company website circa 2026 (license 1014289) lists store locations in 35 communities (with multiple locations in some communities) - but their business license physical address is tied to their non-retail central distribution location at the Anchorage Airport. So the only point feature for license 1014289 is a point located at the DCRA Community centroid for Anchorage - nothing indicates (in this dataset) that there are multiple retail locations statewide. Source: Alaska Department of Commerce, Community, and Economic Development, Division of Corporations, Business and Professional Licensing This data has been visualized in a Geographic Information Systems (GIS) format and is provided as a service in the DCRA Information Portal by the Alaska Department of Commerce, Community, and Economic Development Division of Community and Regional Affairs (SOA DCCED DCRA), Research and Analysis section. SOA DCCED DCRA Research and Analysis is not the authoritative source for this data. For more information and for questions about this data, see: Alaska DCCED CBPL