Contractor Definition
A contractor is in a legal sense one who enters into a binding agreement to perform a certain service or provide a certain product in exchange for valuable consideration, monetary, goods,services, even barter arrangements. In the building trades, a contractor is one who is engaged in the construction or building related services for a client. The construction site is overseen by a "Prime", General, or Specialty contractor, who may perform the work with employees, subcontractors or any combination there of.
The term contractor is also applied to a private company, such as a military contractor, or a school bus contractor, each of which provides products or services to a government.