Four sources, and they trade off against each other along the same two axes: how early you hear, and how many markets you can cover. Relationships are earliest and narrowest. Authority portals are free and cover one jurisdiction at a time. Bid boards are wide and late. Aggregated records are early and wide, and cost money. Which you need is a function of how many markets you work in, not how good you are at any of them.
Start with the free answer
If you work in one city or one county, you do not need to buy anything. Go to your building authority's website, find the permit or record search, and bookmark it. Most publish every filing as it happens, searchable by date, type and address, at no cost — what those records contain is worth understanding before you start. Twenty minutes a week will tell you what is being built in your market.
That is not a throat-clearing preamble before the sales pitch. It is the correct answer for a large share of the firms searching this question, and any article on the subject that does not say so first is not being straight with you. The records are public because construction is regulated in public. Nobody has to sell them to you, and the fields they carry are the same ones any provider would be reselling.
The rest of this article is about what happens when that answer stops being enough — which happens for a specific, identifiable reason, at a point you can see coming — and which depends entirely on how many authorities you need.
The four ways to find construction projects
Nearly every method reduces to one of four. Most firms use two or three, usually without having decided to.
| Source | Cost | How early | Markets | Where it stops |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Relationships | Free | Earliest of all | Very few | It does not scale, and it grows only where you already know people. Every firm's best source and every firm's ceiling |
| Authority portals | Free | At filing | One at a time | Each authority is a separate site with its own search, vocabulary and export. Two is fine. Ten is a part-time job |
| Bid boards and ITB platforms | Subscription | At invitation | Many | You are seeing the job at the same moment as everyone else invited, on a bidder list assembled without you |
| Aggregated records | Subscription | At filing | Many | You still have to do the outreach. It buys you earlier information across more markets, not a pipeline |
The highlighted row is what this company sells, which is worth saying plainly rather than letting the table imply it.
The two free sources are genuinely the best on timing. A relationship tells you about a project before it is filed at all; a portal tells you the day it is filed. Nothing you can buy beats either on that axis. What money buys is breadth — the same filing-stage timing across more jurisdictions than one person can watch.
Nothing you can buy will tell you about a project earlier than a relationship will. What it buys is the same earliness in markets where you do not have one.
Which is why the four sources are complements rather than competitors, and why deciding which leads are worth calling matters more than adding another source. A firm with strong relationships in two metros and an aggregated feed across eight is using both correctly. A firm that buys data and stops calling people has bought a spreadsheet, and whichever kind of firm you are determines which mix makes sense against what any of it costs.
Where the free answer stops working
The free approach fails at a specific point, and it is not gradual.
One authority is a bookmark. Two is a habit. Somewhere around the fifth or sixth, checking portals stops being a task somebody does on Monday and becomes a thing that quietly does not get done — because every authority is a different website, with a different search form, a different vocabulary for the same work, and a different idea of what an export looks like. Reconciling those differences is the part that never finishes.
The scale of the problem is larger than most people assume. On its last fixed universe, the US Census Bureau's Building Permits Survey canvassed roughly 20,100 permit-issuing places nationwide. Two things about that count are worth knowing: it includes only residential permitting, and it deliberately collapses overlapping city and county offices into a single entry where we would count both. The true number of authorities issuing something is higher still. Visiting one portal a week would take 387 years to get through them once.
Nobody attempts that, and nobody should. What actually happens is that firms check two or three portals properly and guess about everywhere else.
There are roughly twenty thousand permit-issuing places in the United States. No contractor needs all of them. Every contractor needs the right ones.
The saving grace is that construction activity concentrates heavily. The clearest published measure of that is residential, because residential is what gets tracked at national scale. In 2025 the ten states issuing the most single-family permits accounted for 61.8% of the 909,280 issued nationwide, with Texas alone at 140,002; the top ten states for multifamily held 60.5% of 516,886 units. Commercial permitting is not published in a comparable national series, but it concentrates for the same reasons — population, employment and capital follow one another — and a small set of jurisdictions carries a very large share of the work either way.
Which turns the coverage question from a race into a selection problem. Nobody is going to cover 20,100 authorities, and a provider claiming to should be asked which ones. What matters is whether the specific jurisdictions you sell into are in the set, and how quickly what they publish reaches you — not how large a number appears on somebody's homepage.
Curious what your markets produce? Tell us the jurisdictions you work in and we will show you the record volume and the commercial share, before you commit to anything.
Request a sample or call 888-888-1214Finding a project is not one moment
The question "how do I find projects" implies there is a point at which a project becomes findable. There is not. A project becomes progressively more visible, and each stage suits a different kind of firm.
Nothing public exists. The only access is a relationship with the owner, the developer or the architect. This is where negotiated work is won, and no data source reaches it — a point worth being blunt about, because plenty of marketing implies otherwise.
The first public signal. Someone has committed enough to put it in writing with an authority. Across five authorities, 82% of records had not yet been issued — they were applied, in review, or approved and awaiting issue. That is the earliest thing you can buy.
The bidder list has been set and the invitation goes out. Wide visibility, and the point at which you are competing on price against everyone else who received it. Useful for pricing work; late for winning it.
Fences, cranes, a sign on the hoarding. By now the trade packages are largely bought out. Reaching out here positions you for the owner's next project rather than this one, which is a legitimate strategy and a slow one.
Most firms find projects at stage three and wish they had found them at stage two. The gap between those two stages is what the material supply argument and the subcontractor bid-list argument are both really about, from different sides.
What none of these will give you
Whichever route you take, four things stay out of reach. Worth knowing before you pay for any of them.
No public record shows bid stage, award, or which trade packages have been let. A filing tells you a project exists, not who is winning it. Any provider offering to filter on award status is describing something other than public records.
Some work needs no permit. Some authorities publish very little. A county authority frequently excludes its largest city, because that city runs its own department. A record confirms a filing happened; no record does not confirm that nothing is happening. Reading a market properly means knowing which authorities you are missing.
Contact details appear where the issuing jurisdiction publishes them, and jurisdictions differ enormously in what they release. What "verified" means is worth asking of any provider before you buy from them.
Finding a project and winning one are different problems with different solutions. Every source above puts you in front of more opportunities; none of them improves what you say when you get there. If your close rate is the constraint, none of this is your fix — and we would rather say so than sell you a list.
Why Alliance Data Solutions
If the aggregated-records row is the one that fits, here is the case for this one against what is normal in the category.
Coverage counted by issuing authority. 300+ jurisdictions across 39+ states, counted by the body that issues the record rather than by state — because a state is not a market and a county label is not always a whole county. The list is published rather than summarized as a claim.
Filing-stage timing. A record filed at its source is generally available in a delivered file the next day. Given that most records in any feed are applications rather than issued permits, that timing is what keeps you at stage two rather than stage three.
One specification across all of them. Records arrive deduplicated, scored on how many of their up to twenty fields carry a value, and filtered to the categories and thresholds you set. Reconciling three hundred authorities into one vocabulary is the work; the field list is published so you can hold us to it.
Published pricing, monthly billing, no contract. Plans run from a single metro up to multi-state, with the numbers on a page rather than a call. For a firm testing whether this is worth doing at all, that is the difference between an afternoon and a procurement exercise.
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. If you work one market, the free answer in section one is the right one and we would rather you used it.
Common questions
How do contractors find construction projects to bid on?
Four sources, and most firms use more than one. Relationships bring the earliest work but do not scale. Local building authority portals publish filings for free, one jurisdiction at a time. Bid boards and invitation-to-bid platforms aggregate opportunities but reach you after the bidder list is set. An aggregated records feed covers many jurisdictions at filing stage. The right mix depends on how many markets you work in.
Can you find construction projects for free?
Yes. Almost every building authority publishes a searchable record of filings at no cost, and for a contractor working one city or county that is genuinely the right answer — a bookmark and twenty minutes a week. The free approach stops working when you cross into a second and third jurisdiction, because each authority has its own portal, its own vocabulary and its own export format.
How early can you find out about a construction project?
A building record is created when the application is filed, which is usually well before any invitation to bid exists. Across five county and city authorities, 82% of records had not yet been issued — they were applied, in review, or approved and awaiting issue. That is the earliest public signal available. Anything earlier than a filing is a relationship, not a record.
Are bid boards enough to find construction projects?
They are useful and they are late. By the time an invitation to bid appears, the general contractor has already chosen who is being invited, and every other firm that saw the notice is pricing the same job. Bid boards are a good way to price work you were invited to. They are a poor way to become someone who gets invited.