US Building Permits API & Contractor Leads

Building permits issued in seven US cities, in one clean format: New York City, Chicago, San Francisco, Seattle, Cincinnati, Austin and Baton Rouge. Project value, work type, description, address, the contractor who pulled the permit (with phone in Austin), the owner where the city publishes it, and a link to the permit page. Find solar, roofing, remodel, ADU, pool, HVAC and new construction jobs the day they are permitted.

No login, no API key, no proxies: the data comes from the official open-data portals of each city, updated daily.

Who uses it

• Suppliers and distributors (lumber, roofing, solar panels, HVAC equipment, windows, concrete): which contractors are starting which jobs, and how big they are.
• Subcontractors and trades: new construction and remodel permits to bid on, with the general contractor's name.
• Home services and solar installers: homes that just pulled a roofing, solar or remodel permit.
• Real estate, lenders and analysts: construction activity by ZIP code, new housing units, project values.

What you get

One record per permit (New York City publishes one row per work type, San Francisco one per address, Cincinnati one per sub-permit; they are joined here).

Field	Example
source, jurisdiction	austin, Austin, TX
permitNumber, permitType, workClass	2026-129044 PP, Plumbing Permit, Commercial / Remodel
workTypes	Tags from the type and description: new-construction, addition-remodel, roofing, solar, adu, pool, hvac, electrical, plumbing, demolition, signs
description, status	CHANGE OF USE TO RESTAURANT with remodel, Active
appliedDate, issuedDate	2026-06-03, 2026-10-01
projectValue	The declared project cost in USD, where the city publishes it
address, city, state, zip, latitude, longitude	Where the work is
housingUnits	Units added or proposed (Seattle, San Francisco, Cincinnati, Austin)
contractorName, contractorPhone, contractorLicense, contractorTrade	RGV Plumbing, 9562225388 (Austin publishes phones)
applicantName, ownerName	Where the city publishes them
contacts	Chicago: every named contact with its role (owner, architect, general contractor, electrical, plumbing...)
permitUrl, sourceUrl, retrievedAt	The permit's page at the city (Seattle, Cincinnati, Austin), the dataset, and when it was read
change	With Only new: new or updated

The run's OUTPUT record has the totals per city, the count per work type, the cities skipped by a filter and the attribution.

Example record (shortened):

{
  "source": "austin",
  "permitNumber": "2026-129044 PP",
  "permitType": "Plumbing Permit",
  "workTypes": ["addition-remodel", "plumbing"],
  "description": "CHANGE OF USE TO RESTAURANT with remodel",
  "issuedDate": "2026-10-01",
  "address": "902 E 5TH ST UNIT 105",
  "zip": "78702",
  "contractorName": "RGV Plumbing",
  "contractorPhone": "9562225388",
  "permitUrl": "https://abc.austintexas.gov/web/permit/public-search-other?t_detail=1&t_selected_folderrsn=13781792"
}

Input

Solar and roofing permits issued this week in New York City and Austin:

{
  "sources": ["new-york-city", "austin"],
  "issuedWithinDays": 7,
  "workTypes": ["solar", "roofing"],
  "maxResults": 50
}

Field	What it does
sources	new-york-city, chicago, san-francisco, seattle, cincinnati, austin, baton-rouge. Empty = all seven.
issuedWithinDays	The date window, 30 days by default.
workTypes	New construction, addition/remodel, roofing, solar, ADU, pool, HVAC, electrical, plumbing, demolition, signs.
keywords	Other words in the permit type or description, e.g. kitchen, restaurant, elevator, EV charger.
minProjectValue	Only permits with a declared cost of at least this many dollars.
zipCodes	5-digit ZIP codes, or the first 3 digits for a wider area.
onlyWithContractor	Only permits that name a contractor.
maxResults	Newest first, across all cities (1,000 by default).
onlyNew + memoryName	For scheduled runs: only permits not saved before, or whose status, value or contractor changed.
appToken	Optional free Socrata app token, if a portal refuses requests.

Projects worth a million dollars or more, all seven cities, last 30 days:

{
  "minProjectValue": 1000000,
  "issuedWithinDays": 30
}

New construction and ADU permits in San Francisco and Seattle with a contractor:

{
  "sources": ["san-francisco", "seattle"],
  "workTypes": ["new-construction", "adu"],
  "onlyWithContractor": true,
  "issuedWithinDays": 30
}

A daily feed of roofing permits in Austin ZIP codes 787xx (schedule it in Schedules):

{
  "sources": ["austin"],
  "workTypes": ["roofing"],
  "zipCodes": ["787"],
  "onlyNew": true
}

Only new or updated permits

Turn on Only new and schedule the task. Each run saves only the permits that earlier runs of the same search did not save, plus the ones whose status, value or contractor changed since. The memory lives in a key-value store named us-building-permits-state in your own Apify account and forgets permits issued before the date window. Give a Memory name to share it between tasks, or a new one to start over.

Pricing

Pay per event: you pay only for permits saved to the dataset. Permits left out by your filters and permits already saved by an earlier run are free. Set a maximum cost for a run and the Actor stops cleanly when it is reached.

Measured on 2026-10-02: the last 7 days of all seven cities were 3,562 permits, read in about 13 seconds. In the last 30 days there were 687 solar permits, and 938 projects worth a million dollars or more.

Use it from AI agents (MCP)

Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor and any other MCP client can run this Actor as a tool: add https://mcp.apify.com?tools=digital_influx/us-building-permits as a remote MCP server and sign in with your Apify account. It is also one of the tools of US & UK Public Records MCP (digital_influx/public-records-mcp), by the same author, made for agents.

Good to know

• What each city publishes differs. Contractor names: New York City, Chicago, Cincinnati, Austin and Baton Rouge almost always, Seattle sometimes, San Francisco not in this dataset. Phones: Austin only. Owners: New York City, Chicago and Baton Rouge. Project values: most permits, except Austin trade permits.
• Chicago does not publish the ZIP code of the work site, so it is skipped when you filter by ZIP code (the OUTPUT says so). Its contacts list every named party.
• Work types are found by words in the permit type and description, so a few permits are tagged loosely (a sign permit for "signal" work, a roof mentioned in a scaffold permit).
• Minimum value: where the city stores the cost as a number (Chicago, Seattle, Austin, Baton Rouge) the portal filters it; elsewhere the Actor reads the window and filters it, which takes a little longer.
• Requests: one per second per portal, as their robots.txt asks. Without an app token the portals share a request limit per IP address; if a run reports a refused request, add a free Socrata app token.

Sources and attribution

• New York City: NYC Department of Buildings (DOB), "DOB NOW: Build – Approved Permits", NYC Open Data, dataset rbx6-tga4. Each record carries the date it was read (retrievedAt); the Actor joins the rows of each permit issuance into one record, drops placeholder owner names ("PR", "Not Applicable") and renames the fields.
• Chicago: City of Chicago, "Building Permits", Chicago Data Portal, dataset ydr8-5enu. This site provides applications using data that has been modified for use from its original source, www.cityofchicago.org, the official website of the City of Chicago. The City of Chicago makes no claims as to the content, accuracy, timeliness, or completeness of any of the data provided at this site. The data provided at this site is subject to change at any time. It is understood that the data provided at this site is being used at one's own risk.
• San Francisco: Department of Building Inspection, "Building Permits", DataSF, dataset i98e-djp9 (Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and License).
• Seattle: City of Seattle, "Building Permits", dataset 76t5-zqzr (public domain).
• Cincinnati: City of Cincinnati, "Cincinnati Building Permits", dataset uhjb-xac9 (public domain).
• Austin: City of Austin, "Issued Construction Permits", dataset 3syk-w9eu (public domain).
• Baton Rouge: City of Baton Rouge and Parish of East Baton Rouge, "EBR Building Permits", dataset 7fq7-8j7r (public domain).

None of these cities endorses this Actor or any business in its results.

Questions or ideas?

Want another city? Open an issue on the Issues tab: we answer within a few days.