Building permit data sources, explained

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There is no national building-permit database. There are roughly 20,000 permit-issuing offices in the United States, and each one publishes — or doesn't — in its own way. PermitBoards currently tracks 9,782 permits from 28 live jurisdictions, and this post explains, from that registry work, where permit data actually comes from and why honest coverage claims are so rare in this business.

The four ways permit data gets published

• Open-data portals (Socrata / CKAN): the cleanest route. Cities like New York, Chicago, Austin, and Boston publish permit registers as queryable datasets with real date fields. Most of our live feeds start here.
• Map services (ArcGIS): many cities publish permits as map layers. The fields are usually there, but the date semantics vary — one city's layer dates by issue date, another (Fort Worth) has no issue-date column at all and has to be read by status date.
• SQL / GIS APIs (for example CARTO): Philadelphia's permits are queryable through its map-data API — complete, but with no published job-value field.
• Portal-only: a large share of jurisdictions keep permits behind a search portal built for looking up one address at a time. Some of those portals' terms allow automated reading; some don't say; some are the only route and require asking. We don't read what we're not allowed to read — those markets stay on the waitlist, publicly.

Our 28 live sources break down as: 12 arcgis, 11 socrata, 4 ckan, 1 carto.

Why coverage varies so much

Of the markets in our registry, 30 are not live, and the reasons are boringly specific: feeds that stopped updating months ago, datasets whose dates are stored as text so no reliable recent window exists, layers that publish no address or no job value, and portals whose terms need review first. A coverage map that just says "nationwide" is hiding all of that. Ours prints the reason, in plain language, next to every market that isn't live — see the coverage map.

Freshness is the city's, not ours

Even a perfect feed inherits the city's publishing speed. Most of our sources publish daily. Memphis' feed lags about 12 days — its newest record in our latest pull is from Oct 30, 2026 — so its pages say so. San Francisco's dates are the creation dates the city publishes, because approval dates are sparse in that feed. Fort Worth's dates are status dates, because the city publishes no issued-date column. Every PermitBoards market page carries its feed's status and its real latest dates, so a subscriber can judge the runway for themselves.

What we do with the records

Every feed is normalized into one schema — permit id, address, date, type, work description, published job value, and the owner and contractor names where the city publishes them — then sorted into trade lanes by the permit's own words. Fields a city doesn't publish stay empty and are labeled "not published" on our pages; we never fill a gap with an estimate and call it data. That discipline is the product: a smaller board you can trust beats a bigger one you can't.