A building permit record is what a local authority creates when someone applies to build. Most of them are public, none of them are standardized, and there is no national system. The thing most guides leave out: the great majority of records in any permit feed are applications, not permits. That is either the most useful property of this data or a trap, depending on what you are trying to do with it.
What a building permit record actually is
Before almost any construction work of consequence, somebody files with a local authority. A building permit is the authority's approval for that work, and the record of the filing is created the moment the application arrives — well before any approval exists.
A typical record identifies the job with a reference number, a filing date and a description of the work in the words of whoever filed it. It states the property involved and, usually, a declared value of the work. It carries a status. And it names the parties: the applicant, often the contractor, sometimes the owner.
In most jurisdictions these records are public, which is the property everything else rests on. Anyone can look up what is being built in a given city. That is a deliberate feature of how construction is regulated, not a leak, and it is why a published field specification is possible at all — the underlying facts are not secret and we have never claimed they are.
What is not simple is everything after "anyone can look it up." Looking up one project in one city is easy. Building a picture of an entire market, or of a dozen markets, is a different exercise, and the reason is who issues these records — which is worth understanding before evaluating any provider of them.
Who issues permits, and why there is no national system
Permitting is local. Cities, counties and townships each run their own building department, each with its own portal, its own vocabulary and its own rules about what it publishes. There is no federal permit registry and no state-level clearing house that consolidates them. The number of separate authorities in the United States runs into the thousands, of which we currently cover 300+.
Two consequences follow, and both catch buyers out.
A jurisdiction label is not a market. County departments frequently permit only the parts of a county outside incorporated city limits, because the cities inside run their own departments. So a file labeled with a county name may exclude the largest city in that county entirely — which is not an error in the file, it is how the authority is structured. Anyone comparing "county to county" without checking this is comparing two different things — a distinction we set out at length in the market-level piece.
The same job is recorded differently everywhere. One authority files a roof replacement as a property type plus a sub-type. Another uses a work class string. Another assigns a numeric category code. Another puts it only in free text. None is wrong; no two are compatible. We wrote about that reconciliation problem in more detail separately, because it is the part of this work that actually takes engineering.
Permit data is not one dataset. It is several thousand small datasets that happen to describe the same kind of event, maintained by organizations with no obligation to agree with one another.
Most permit records are not permits yet
This is the part almost every guide to permit data omits, and it is the single most useful thing to know before you build a process on it.
A record is created when an application is filed. It then moves through review, sometimes approval, sometimes issuance, sometimes inspections, and eventually closure — or it dies somewhere along the way. Every one of those states sits in the same feed, under the same field, and a record that says "Submitted" and a record that says "Issued" look identical until you read the status.
Pooled across 64,798 records carrying a status value, from five county and city authorities, here is where they actually sit.
| Stage | Share | What it means | Names it goes by |
|---|---|---|---|
| Applied | 38.6% | Filed with the authority. Nothing has been reviewed or approved. Intent only. | Applied · Submitted · Submitted – Online · Application Received |
| In review | 16.3% | Under examination, or waiting on the applicant for something. | In Review · Under Review · On Hold · Additional Info Required |
| Approved, awaiting issue | 27.4% | Cleared review but not yet issued, often pending fees. Close to certain, not yet formal. | Ready for Issuance · Approved · Fees Due |
| Issued | 13.0% | The permit exists. Work is authorized and may have started. | Issued |
| Work under way | 0.5% | Inspections logged against the permit. | Active · Inspections |
| Closed | 1.4% | Work finished and signed off. | Complete · Completed · Closed‑Complete · Finaled |
| Withdrawn or denied | 2.4% | Dead. Never became a permit. | Withdrawn · Voided · Cancelled · Denied · Expired |
| Other or unmapped | 0.3% | Authority-specific values that do not correspond to a stage in this model. Low volume, and worth checking in your own markets. | Varies by authority |
Pooled across 64,798 records carrying a status value, from five county and city authorities in three states, all record types included. The column sums to 99.9% after rounding. Shares are of all records with a status, not of issued permits. The right-hand column lists the literal values these authorities publish — including their own spellings.
Add the first three rows and 82% of the feed has not been issued. Only 13% carries an issued status. If your mental model is "a permit means work is happening," that model is wrong about four records in five.
Whether this is good news depends entirely on what you are doing. For anyone selling into a project — a supplier, a subcontractor chasing a general contractor, anyone who needs to be in the conversation before decisions are made — the pre-issue records are the valuable ones, because they are earlier. How much earlier depends on the stage, and that is the reason the table above is worth reading rather than skimming.
The 55% sitting at applied or in review is where a project genuinely has not finished choosing anybody. The 27% approved and awaiting issue is later than that: it has cleared review, and a project that has cleared review has usually settled its contractor even if the material package is still open. Filter to the stage your process actually needs rather than treating all 82% as equally early. One further caveat worth carrying: on hard-bid work the record is often filed by the winning contractor after award, so an early filing date does not always mean an early stage — a distinction we set out alongside the argument about reaching buyers before the spend is committed.
For anyone who needs certainty that work is real — verifying a site is active, confirming a project proceeded — the pre-issue majority is noise, and you should filter to issued and expect a much smaller file. Roughly one record in eight, on this sample.
The mistake is not choosing one or the other. The mistake is not knowing which one you are holding, and a sample will show you the distribution for your own markets in about ten minutes. The status field is populated on effectively every record, so this is always checkable.
Want the status distribution for your own jurisdictions? We will pull real records from the authorities you sell into so you can see how much of the file is applications and how much is issued work.
Request a sample or call 888-888-1214What building permit data cannot tell you
A guide that only lists what a dataset contains is a brochure. Four limits worth stating plainly, because they decide whether this data fits your process at all.
A record carries a permitting status. It does not carry bid stage, award, or whether subcontracts have been let. Nothing in a permit filing tells you whether a general contractor has bought out a package. Any provider offering to filter on that is describing something other than public records. The field list is the fastest way to check what a provider actually has.
Declared job value is not material spend, and the ratio between them varies enormously by category. It is a good proxy for project scale and a poor one for your addressable share of it. Some authorities also publish a value on every record including zeroes, which will quietly skew any average you take.
No feed contains every project in a market. Some work does not require a permit. Some authorities publish little, and a few publish almost nothing. A record confirms that a filing happened; the absence of a record does not confirm that nothing is happening. Which of those gaps matters depends on what you sell.
A filing is evidence that a project reached the point of being filed. It is not evidence of what an owner intends next, who they will hire, or how they finance it. Repetition by the same owner is a reasonable basis for cultivating them, and is not a pipeline. That distinction is easier to see once you have looked at real rows.
Getting it at scale: build or buy
For one jurisdiction, build. Genuinely. Most authorities publish a searchable portal, the records are free, and if your business lives in one county you do not need a vendor — you need a bookmark and twenty minutes a week. Anyone telling you otherwise is selling something, and which buyer you are should decide that, not a vendor.
The calculation changes at the second jurisdiction, and it changes non-linearly. Each new authority is not another copy of the first one: it is a different portal, a different export format, a different status vocabulary, a different definition of what counts as commercial, and its own habit of changing all of that without notice. The work is not the scraping. The work is that the reconciliation never finishes, because three hundred authorities generate a steady trickle of small breakages forever. What we deliver is the output of that maintenance, not access to the records themselves.
So the honest version of the build-or-buy question is not "can we get this data" — you can, it is public. It is whether maintaining a normalization layer across every market you sell into is a thing your business wants to own permanently. For most suppliers and builders it is not, in the same way most companies do not run their own payroll software. What that costs is worth comparing against the engineering time honestly, not against zero.
Why Alliance Data Solutions
Everything above is true of any complete permit dataset. The case for this one, in the same terms.
Coverage counted honestly. 300+ jurisdictions across 39+ states, counted by issuing authority rather than by state — because a state is not a market and, as section two covers, a county label is not always a whole county. The list is published rather than summarized as a claim.
One specification, not three hundred. Records are deduplicated, scored on how many of their up to twenty fields carry a value, and filtered to the record types, categories and thresholds you set — before delivery, not after. The specification is public so you can hold us to it.
Timing that suits pre-issue records. A record filed at its source is generally available the next day, and within a few days for authorities that publish on slower cycles. Given that most records are applications, next-day matters more here than it would for a feed of completed work — timing is the whole argument of the supplier piece.
Delivered how your team works. CSV, Excel or SFTP, cut to your specification, on the cadence set in your agreement. API access is on the 2026 roadmap and is not live today. Published plans run from a single metro up to multi-state; nationwide programs and data licensing are custom-quoted.
And the limit, stated the same way it is stated everywhere else on this site: this is public building activity, assembled, deduplicated, scored and filtered at national scale. It is not a proprietary intelligence network and we do not claim one. What makes it worth buying is that doing it yourself across three hundred authorities never finishes, not that the underlying filings are secret.
Common questions
What is building permit data?
It is the record a local building authority creates when someone applies to do construction work. A record typically identifies the job, the filing date, the type of work, the property, a declared value, the status of the application and the parties who filed it. In most jurisdictions these records are public. There is no national permit system, so each record exists only in the system of the authority that issued it.
Is a building permit record the same as an approved permit?
No, and the difference matters more than almost anything else about this data. Across 64,798 records carrying a status value, from five county and city authorities, 82% had not been issued: they were applied, in review, or approved and awaiting issue. Only 13% carried an issued status. A permit feed is mostly a record of intent, not of work under way.
How many building permit authorities are there in the United States?
There is no single official count, but permitting is handled at city, county and township level, which puts the number in the thousands. No authority sits above them to standardize what they publish or how. Alliance Data Solutions currently covers 300+ jurisdictions across 39+ states, counted by issuing authority rather than by state.
Can you get building permit data for free?
Yes, for one jurisdiction at a time. Most authorities publish a search portal, and anyone can look up records in a single city or county at no cost. What is not free is doing that across hundreds of authorities on a repeating schedule and reconciling the results into one consistent specification, which is the part that takes engineering rather than patience.