Who Is Actually Licensed for Auto Glass in New Orleans

New Orleans requires an occupational licence to trade. We pulled all 295 licences in the motor-trade categories and read them one by one. Under Automotive Glass Replacement Shops there are 3.

The three

That is the entire category. One has been licensed since 2001, one since 2008, and one since 2022.

One detail worth stating because it is on the register and not an opinion: Safelite Auto Glass/Diamond Auto Glass carries the phone number (614) 210-9000. The 504 area code is New Orleans; 614 is not. Its listed city is Kenner. That is a national operation with a local licence, which is perfectly legal and worth knowing when you think you are calling a shop down the road.

The other seven glass licences

A second category, Glass and Glazing Contractors, holds 7 more. This is mostly architectural glass — storefronts, mirrors, shower screens — rather than vehicles, but several of these businesses are old and local enough to be worth naming.

The oldest goes back to 1965. For context, that business has held a New Orleans licence for longer than most of the people reading this page have been alive.

What a licence does and does not tell you

Being clear about this matters, because it would be easy to read this page as an accusation and it is not one.

A licence is not a quality rating. The register records who registered and paid, not who does good work. A shop licensed since 1965 might be excellent or might be coasting. The date tells you it has been there, which is information, not a recommendation.

A missing licence is not proof of anything either. A business may be licensed in Jefferson Parish and working legitimately across the line. Categories get chosen loosely when a licence is filed and then never revisited. A one-van operator may be filed under something generic.

What it is good for is the question you can ask on the phone: are you licensed in Orleans Parish, and under what name? Anyone doing this properly can answer in one sentence. It is a cheap question, and the answer tells you who you are dealing with.

How we did this

We downloaded the city's Active Occupational Licenses dataset in full — 16,336 active records — and filtered it to every motor-trade category: glass, body and paint, general repair, mechanical and electrical, parts, tires, towing, oil change, transmission, exhaust and car washes. That gave 295 businesses. 274 of them carry usable coordinates and were placed inside the city's own neighborhood boundaries; 21 are recorded at 0,0 and were left unplaced rather than guessed at from the ZIP code.

Names come off the register in capitals with trade abbreviations, so they are converted to normal capitalisation. Nothing else about them is changed. Where a field is blank on the register, this site shows a dash — never a zero and never a guess.

Source: City of New Orleans open data — Active Occupational Licenses (iqay-p646) and NOPD Calls for Service, one dataset per year. Window: January 2024 through September 16, 2026. Incidents are placed inside the city's own 72 Neighborhood Statistical Areas (exvn-jeh2). The licence register was read in full on September 16, 2026. How we use city data.