Building permits from across the US

What the permit data is

The dataset brings together 54 million+ building permits from 1,500+ city and county building departments in all 50 states and DC. Every permit links back to the office that issued it, so you can always go from a record to its source.

What each permit includes

Each permit carries the same normalized fields wherever it was issued: the address, the permit type, the status, and the dates it was filed, issued and last updated. The declared value, contractor, owner and applicant are included wherever the issuing office records them, and a contractor lookup shows the work on record under a contractor's name.

Every permit has a stable ID that stays the same from one day to the next, and the permits for one building are grouped into a project. When a permit's status, dates or value change, the change is recorded, so you can see its history and ask for the permits added or changed since your last check instead of reading the whole dataset again.

From a state down to a parcel

You can work at the level of a state, a metro area, a county, a city, a ZIP code or a single parcel. You can also draw an area on a map or search within a radius of a point to find the permits around a property, a branch or a supply yard.

Who uses it

Software and analytics teams build products and models on permit records. Researchers use permit types, dates and declared values to study how building activity differs across places and over time.

Contractors and suppliers find new work near where they operate, such as a roofing supplier pulling every reroof and new-home permit filed this week near its yards. Investors watch construction activity in the markets they follow and compare the kinds and values of work being permitted.

Lenders check the permits for work on the properties they finance. Insurers review the roof, electrical and plumbing permits at a property before quoting a policy.

How it is delivered

The API lets you search and filter by location, dates, permit type, declared value and the firms named on each permit. Area feeds give you every permit in a metro, a state or the whole country with no monthly count.

Daily bulk files deliver Parquet snapshots plus a file of each day's changes to load into your own systems, and signed webhooks send new and changed records as we record them.

How to get it

The Developer API is free for 1,000 permits a month, with paid tiers above that. Usage counts distinct permits, so reading a permit again is free. Area feeds start at $299 a month for a metro. Early signals and project timelines sit on top of the permit data as a separate product, described on the Signals page.