How to Look Up Building Permits in Orlando

Why you'd want the permit history

• Buying a home: confirm that additions, remodels, and major repairs were permitted and finaled.
• Selling or refinancing: unpermitted work surfaces in inspections and appraisals — know before the buyer does.
• Insurance and disputes: a dated permit record is the evidence that work was done to code.
• Finding the contractor: the licensed contractor is named on most Orlando permits.

Step by step, using the city's own tools

1. Start at permitlookup.cityoforlando.net — the city's own lookup address, which forwards to whichever system it currently runs. Linking the city domain rather than the vendor's means the link survives the city changing vendors, which it has already done once.
2. Search by address. Each permit shows the permit number, the work type, the processed and issued dates, the status, the declared construction cost, and the contractor — name and, on more than half of Orlando's filings, a phone number.
3. The city publishes the same records as open data at data.cityoforlando.net (Permit Applications), which is what PingPermit reads — over a million rows, refreshed daily.
4. digitalpermits.orlando.gov is the separate portal for applying and submitting plans, not for looking up somebody else's permit.

Things that trip people up

The big one is jurisdiction: a great many addresses with an Orlando mailing address are in unincorporated Orange County, and those permits are the county's, not the city's — they will not appear here at all. Winter Park, Maitland and Edgewood are separate municipalities with their own building departments for the same reason. And the newest rows in the city's open data are impact-fee records (transportation and school), which carry no contractor and a zero cost; they are filings, but they are not jobs.