A cidb certificate shows that a firm was registered on the day it was printed. To verify a cidb registration you run the register yourself, on the day you appoint, and match three things to the contract in front of you. Grade against value, class of works against scope, and status against today's date.
Two of those three fail far more often than the first. The first is the only one most clients check.
Where is the cidb register of contractors?
The public register of contractors sits at portal.cidb.org.za. It is free, it needs no log-in, and it takes either a contractor name or a CRS number. Ask for the number rather than the certificate, because a number can be looked up by anybody and a PDF is a picture of a moment that has already gone.
Get the address right, because there is a wrong one. The older registers.cidb.org.za contractor search path asks for a username, a password and a captcha. Most clients who land there conclude the register is closed to them and go back to reading the certificate, which is the outcome this whole page exists to prevent.
Match one, the grade against the contract value
cidb grading runs from 1 to 9 and each grade carries a maximum tender value. The cidb's own register overview puts them at R1 million for grade 2, then R3 million, R6 million and R10 million to grade 5. Above that come R20 million, R60 million, R200 million, and no limit at grade 9.
Grade 1 is the one to be careful about, and the cidb is the reason. Its register overview leaves the grade 1 tender value blank. Its requirements for grading page puts the grade 1 maximum at R500 000. The designation filter on its live portal reads R0 to R200 000, and that same filter starts grade 2 at R500 000, leaving a gap between the two that nobody has explained. If a grade 1 appointment is what you are sizing, that figure has to come from the cidb in writing about your job, not from this page or any other.
Those bands are why a R2 million contract cannot go to a grade 2 firm, and why a grade 8 firm on the same job is not the reassurance it looks like. Grading rests on two determinants rather than one: construction works capability, which is track record, and available capital. The largest job a firm completed in the past five years has to clear a threshold for each grade, so the digit is a rough answer to whether they have done work this size before.
Match two, the class of works against your scope
This is the match that fails, and it fails quietly.
A cidb grade is held per class of works. The cidb grades each class on the projects the firm completed in that class, so a firm can hold a high grade in one class and nothing in another. The primary classes are General Building, Civil Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering in Building and Electrical Engineering in Infrastructure. Specialist classes sit alongside them, including asphalt works, corrosion protection, demolition and blasting, and fire prevention and protection systems.
The letters carry more information than the digit. Electrical Engineering in Building covers electrical systems inside premises, from the point of control to the point of consumption. Electrical Engineering in Infrastructure covers generation, transmission and distribution across a grid, meaning power stations and substations. A firm holding one is not registered for the other, and to a bid evaluation committee that reads as non-compliance rather than as a technicality.
Public buyers write the requirement out in both parts. Public Works advertised the replacement of a generator at the Constitutional Court in Johannesburg, reference JHB 26/04, which closed on 16 September 2026. The requirement read that the required CIDB is 3 EB or higher. Grade and class together. A grade 7 CE contractor did not qualify for that work and never would have, because CE is not EB.
Read your own scope the same way before you look anybody up. If the job is a switchboard replacement in an occupied office, the class is the question and the grade is the easy part.
Match three, the status on the day
A register search answers as at the moment it is run, and nothing about a contractor's own diary changes that.
So run the search on the day you award, not on the day you shortlisted. On a procurement that takes eight weeks from advert to appointment, a registration that was current at tender close can have lapsed by signature. Print the result, write the date on it and file it. That page, not the certificate, is the thing you relied on.
Four things a certificate does not prove
- That the work sits inside their designation. The certificate shows what they hold. It does not read your scope.
- That the registration is still live. A printed date is not a current status, and nobody writes to tell a client when one changes.
- That nothing has been published about them since. The cidb issues gazette notices removing contractors from the register, and those sit on its own site rather than in the search result.
- That the appointment itself is lawful. Clients almost never think about this one and it is the expensive one.
A registered firm can still be an unlawful appointment
On 5 August 2026 the Special Tribunal, sitting before Judge Margaret Victor, declared the arrangements between eThekwini and three low cost housing providers constitutionally invalid and set them aside. Nothing in the findings turns on whether those firms were registered.
The problem was how they got there. Two of the three were originally subcontractors to the appointed provider. The SIU found they had been appointed and continued in the programme without prior public advertisement, and without any recommendation by a Bid Evaluation Committee or a Bid Adjudication Committee.
Verifying a contractor is not verifying a process. The register tells you a firm may lawfully build. Your own procurement record is the only thing that tells you that you may lawfully have appointed them, and a municipality, a body corporate and a managing agent each carry that separately.
Arabella verifies contractors once and keeps that verification current, so grade, class and status have already been read against a scope from the client's side rather than presented from the contractor's. What that covers is set out on the client page, and the register changes we read each week sit in insights.
On Monday
Take the last three contractors you appointed and look all three up by name on the register. Not their certificates. The register.
Next to each result write two things: the class of works the firm holds, and the class the job you actually gave them fell into. If those two columns fail to match on any line, you have found it in your own file rather than in somebody else's audit, which is the cheapest place it will ever be found.
