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What each city publishes — and what it doesn't

What 19 US jurisdictions actually publish in their building permit data: whether each names a contractor, declares a project value, gives a phone number or records a completion date — measured on current filings, with every source linked.

Building permits are public record. PingPermit reads each jurisdiction's own published dataset directly, scores what it finds, and shows the result — it does not buy lists, scrape private sites, or guess. Every source below is linked, so you can check any lead against the city's own record.

What each jurisdiction actually publishes

Permit records are not standardised. Two cities can both publish "building permits" and disagree about whether anyone is named on them, whether the job has a price on it, or whether you can tell a finished permit from an open one. Below is what each of these 19 jurisdictions fills in, counted over the filings we currently hold for it. All 19 publish an address, a work description and a filing date. 11 name the contractor or applicant on most filings, 5 on some and 3 on none. 14 publish a declared project value on most filings. 5 publish a phone number for anyone. 13 record a completion date, so in the other 6 no permit can be reported as finaled.

Each percentage is the share of the permits in hand for that market, which is the most recent 45 days of filings and, in a busy jurisdiction, rather less. It describes current filings, not the jurisdiction's whole archive — a city can name a contractor on most of this month's permits and on half of everything it has ever published. No filing in the current window carries a contractor or owner name in Los Angeles, CA, Detroit, MI, or Montgomery County, MD. No filing in the current window carries a declared project value in Northern Kentucky, KY or Philadelphia, PA. No filing in the current window carries a phone number in San Francisco, CA, Chicago, IL, Seattle, WA, Los Angeles, CA, Northern Kentucky, KY, Marin County, CA, Philadelphia, PA, Nashville, TN, Detroit, MI, Louisville, KY, Las Vegas, NV, Cincinnati, OH, New Orleans, LA, or Montgomery County, MD.

Recomputed on every request from the filings we currently hold — this reading: 2026-10-03. The same table as JSON: /sources.json.

Free to use with attribution (CC BY 4.0). Cite it as: PingPermit, “What each city publishes in its building permit data”, 2026-10-03, https://pingpermit.com/sources. Each jurisdiction has its own anchor, so you can link one row: https://pingpermit.com/sources#chicago.

What we do to it

Each permit is read as the jurisdiction filed it: address, work description, declared valuation, status and dates, plus the contractor or applicant where the jurisdiction publishes one. We normalise the status wording, tag the trades that would bid the work, and rank each permit against the rest of its own market. Nothing is invented — if a city publishes no valuation or no contractor, the lead says so rather than filling the gap.

See it against your own market

Pick your city and read this week's filings before you decide anything.

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