My contractor wasn't licensed at all, does that hurt my case?

Counterintuitively, this generally strengthens your position rather than weakening it. Under Business and Professions Code section 7031, a contractor who was legally required to hold a license but didn't generally cannot maintain a lawsuit against you to collect payment, even for work that was actually performed and done well. That same statute also frequently allows a homeowner to recover the entirety of what they paid an unlicensed contractor, essentially treating the whole arrangement as unenforceable in the contractor's favor.

The real tradeoff, however, is that an unlicensed contractor has no license bond behind him, since bonds are tied to holding an active license. That means any judgment you eventually win depends entirely on the contractor's own personal assets, bank accounts, wages, or property, rather than on a bonding company that's specifically obligated to pay valid claims. It's worth knowing this distinction matters for the "small jobs" exception too: unlicensed individuals can legally perform work where the total labor and materials come to under $500, so if your job genuinely fell under that threshold, the licensing violation doesn't apply at all.