Every city in the US publishes its building permit records. Whether you're a contractor sizing up a market, a homeowner checking your neighbor's project, or an investor scouting renovation activity, you can pull up the actual permit filings yourself — usually for free.
The trouble is that no two cities do it the same way. Some have polished portals. Some bury the data inside a CSV link nobody updates. Some make you go to a counter in person.
This is a practical guide to looking up permits, what each portal can do, and what to use when the city portal isn't enough.
Why permit records are public
Permits are public records by design. They've been public for as long as cities have issued them. The reasoning is straightforward: building permits represent work happening on private property that affects safety, taxes, and the neighborhood. Anybody should be able to verify that work is legal.
In practice, "public" looks different in every city. A few publish their permit feed as structured open data (Socrata, ArcGIS, custom portals). Others publish it as a static report. A handful still require an in-person records request.
How to look up a permit in major cities
A quick city-by-city tour of where to find permit data yourself:
- San Francisco — DBI's Permit Tracking portal. The underlying data also lives on SF's open data portal under "Building Permits."
- Los Angeles — LADBS Online Permit Status. Search by address, permit number, or contractor.
- Seattle — Seattle Services Portal. The data is also on the City's open data portal as a daily-updated dataset.
- Austin — Austin Build + Connect. The open data version (Issued Construction Permits) is the easiest to filter at scale.
- Chicago — Chicago Data Portal, "Building Permits" dataset. Updated daily.
- New York City — DOB NOW and the BIS system. NYC also publishes "DOB Permit Issuance" as open data, updated daily.
- Boston — ISD's permit search.
- Pittsburgh — Pittsburgh PLI Permit Search.
- Columbus — Citizen Access Portal.
- Washington DC — DCRA's Property Information Verification System.
If your city isn't here, search for [your city] building permit search and look for the result on a .gov domain. There's almost always one.
What you can find on a city portal
Every permit record includes the basics:
- Address. Sometimes lot/parcel rather than street address, especially for new construction.
- Permit type. Building, electrical, plumbing, mechanical, demolition, etc.
- Status. Filed, under review, issued, completed, expired.
- Issue date. When work was legally allowed to start.
- Description / scope of work. What's being done. Quality varies wildly.
- Estimated valuation. What the work is supposedly worth. Sometimes accurate, sometimes a placeholder.
- Applicant. Usually the contractor or owner who filed.
- Owner. The property owner on file (in some cities).
The detailed permit document — drawings, calcs, attached forms — usually requires a separate request, and sometimes a fee.
What city portals are bad at
City portals are built to answer one question: is there a permit on this address? They're not built for anything else.
In particular, here's what most portals won't do well:
- Search across cities. Each portal is its own island.
- Filter by valuation range or scope keywords at scale. You can do basic filtering, but exporting and filtering thousands of records in Excel gets painful fast.
- Notify you when a new permit is filed. A few cities offer email subscriptions; most don't, and the ones that do usually only let you watch a specific address.
- Translate the scope language. Permit descriptions are full of city-specific abbreviations and reference numbers. You learn to read it eventually but it's not friendly.
- Show you owner contact info. That lives in the assessor's record, not the permit. You usually have to look it up separately.
For a one-off lookup, the city portal is fine. For ongoing work — tracking a market, finding leads, watching renovation activity — the portals start to fall apart.
When to use a third-party tool
A few legitimate use cases push you past city portals:
- You want to monitor more than one city. Doing five or ten city portals manually doesn't scale.
- You want alerts on new filings. Most portals don't do this, or do it badly.
- You want the data filtered, normalized, and joined with property records. The raw municipal data is messy. Same permit type goes by different names in different cities; descriptions need parsing; addresses need standardization.
- You want owner contact info attached. That's a join with the assessor record, which most portals don't do for you.
There are several tools that do this — including ours. The honest pitch: if you're a contractor or investor who looks at permits more than a few times a month, a tool will save you many hours. If you're doing one lookup a year, the city portal is fine.
What to do with permit data once you have it
For most people, the answer is one of three things:
- Verify work on a specific property (homeowners, agents, neighbors).
- Find new leads (contractors, suppliers, lenders).
- Track market activity (investors, market researchers, policymakers).
The first one is what city portals are good at. The second two are what they're not good at.
If you're in the second or third bucket — you're looking at permits to find work or to understand a market — start a free account and we'll send you the permits as they're filed, across every city we cover. No credit card, no commitment.