US Building Permits Scraper: Contractor Leads

What does US Building Permits Scraper do?

US Building Permits Scraper pulls newly issued building permits from 7 US city and county open-data portals into one clean table: address, work description, job value, permit type, status and the contractor company on the job. A permit is a public signal that money is about to be spent at a specific address: a new roof, a kitchen remodel, a pool, solar panels, a tenant build-out, a teardown. Filter by keyword (solar, roof, pool, ADU, HVAC), job value, property type and date instead of learning seven different portals.

Try it now: click Start. The prefilled input returns up to 40 recent roof, solar, remodel, addition and pool permits worth $10,000 or more across every covered city, in about 30 seconds, for about $0.49.

Who uses building permit leads?

• Contractors and subcontractors looking for jobs in progress: roofers, electricians, HVAC, plumbers, pool and solar installers, landscapers, painters, cleaners.
• Building material suppliers and equipment rental selling to the contractor named on the permit.
• Home services and insurance (security systems, home warranties, insurance agents) reaching properties with fresh work.
• Real estate investors, lenders and market analysts tracking renovation and new construction by ZIP code.
• Proptech and data teams that want a normalized permit feed without maintaining city-specific parsers.

Which cities are covered?

Key	Jurisdiction	Permits in a recent week	Contractor company	Job value
austin	Austin, TX	~650	yes, with phone	on building permits
chicago	Chicago, IL	~400	yes, all trades	yes
new-orleans	New Orleans, LA	~300	yes	yes
san-francisco	San Francisco, CA	~200	no	yes
cincinnati	Cincinnati, OH	~110	yes	yes
montgomery-county-md-residential	Montgomery County, MD	~100	no	yes
seattle	Seattle, WA	~35	rarely	yes
montgomery-county-md-commercial	Montgomery County, MD	~20	no	yes

Counts are for September 23 to 29, 2026, and include each city's publishing lag of one to three days. We add a jurisdiction only when its open-data license clearly allows redistribution. Want a city? Open an issue.

What data do you get?

Field	Example
jurisdiction, jurisdictionName	austin, Austin, TX
permitNumber, id	2026-122424 BP, austin:2026-122424 BP
permitType, workType, category	Building Permit, Addition and Remodel, commercial
description	372 SF addition to an existing restaurant and remodel of existing building.
status	Active
appliedDate, issuedDate	2026-03-31, 2026-09-17
address, city, state, zip	2159 S LAMAR BLVD, AUSTIN, TX, 78704
latitude, longitude	30.2474, -97.7726
estimatedCost, squareFeet, housingUnits	48000, 1772, 1
contractorCompany, contractorPhone, contractorTrade	2400 Construction LLC, General Contractor
otherCompanies	other trade contractors, applicants, architects and engineers on the permit
sourceUrl, dataset, attribution	links to the city record and dataset

Sample output

Real permits issued in September 2026, filtered to roof, solar, remodel and addition work of $10,000 or more:

City	Issued	Work	Job value	Contractor
Chicago, IL	2026-09-25	Reroofing, 16,400 sq ft	$262,809	ADVANCED ROOFING SYSTEMS, INC.
Chicago, IL	2026-09-25	Small-scale solar PV system	$23,810	SUNRUN INSTALLATION SERVICES
San Francisco, CA	2026-09-25	Interior remodel and horizontal addition	$223,000	(not published by SF)
Seattle, WA	2026-09-22	Roof tear-off and replacement	$21,152	Four Seasons Roof
Austin, TX	2026-09-17	Restaurant addition and remodel	$48,000	2400 Construction LLC

One full record:

{
  "id": "austin:2026-122424 BP",
  "jurisdiction": "austin",
  "jurisdictionName": "Austin, TX",
  "permitNumber": "2026-122424 BP",
  "permitType": "Building Permit",
  "workType": "Addition and Remodel",
  "category": "commercial",
  "description": "372 SF addition to an existing restaurant and remodel of existing building.",
  "status": "Active",
  "appliedDate": "2026-03-31",
  "issuedDate": "2026-09-17",
  "address": "2159 S LAMAR BLVD",
  "city": "AUSTIN",
  "state": "TX",
  "zip": "78704",
  "latitude": 30.24740108,
  "longitude": -97.7726128,
  "estimatedCost": 48000,
  "squareFeet": 1772,
  "housingUnits": 1,
  "contractorCompany": "2400 Construction LLC",
  "contractorPhone": "5126562163",
  "contractorTrade": "General Contractor",
  "otherCompanies": [{ "role": "Applicant", "name": "2400 Construction LLC" }],
  "sourceUrl": "https://abc.austintexas.gov/web/permit/public-search-other?t_detail=1&t_selected_folderrsn=13774130",
  "dataset": "https://data.austintexas.gov/d/3syk-w9eu",
  "attribution": "City of Austin Open Data Portal"
}

In Apify Console the Output tab has three views: Permits, Contractors (for supplier and B2B outreach) and Property (address, coordinates and job value for mapping). Download any run as CSV, Excel, JSON or XML.

How to get building permit leads

1. Click Start with the prefilled input, or pick cities, keywords (for example solar, roof, pool, ADU, HVAC, tenant improvement), a minimum job value and residential or commercial.
2. Pick a window: permits issued in the last N days, or an exact date range.
3. Open the Output tab and export the table, or send it to your CRM or a spreadsheet.
4. Save the input as a task and schedule it daily with Only permits not delivered before switched on, so each morning's run has only new permits.

Input examples

Everything issued in the last 7 days, capped per city:

{ "daysBack": 7, "maxResultsPerJurisdiction": 200 }

Solar installs in Austin and San Francisco this month:

{ "jurisdictions": ["austin", "san-francisco"], "daysBack": 30, "keywords": ["solar", "photovoltaic", "PV"] }

Commercial jobs over $250,000 with a named contractor, for a supplier's sales team:

{ "daysBack": 14, "category": "commercial", "minCost": 250000, "requireContractor": true }

Daily roofing feed that never repeats a permit:

{ "daysBack": 3, "keywords": ["roof", "reroof"], "onlyNew": true, "feedName": "roofing" }

How much does it cost?

You pay per permit returned. Filters run before you are charged, and there is no subscription or platform usage fee on top.

Event	Free and Starter plans	Scale plan	Business plan
Permit	$0.012	$0.011	$0.01
Run start	$0.01	$0.01	$0.01

What that looks like in practice:

Use	Permits	Cost
The prefilled first run	up to 40	about $0.49
Daily feed: solar permits, every city	about 300 a month	about $4 a month
Daily feed: roofing permits, every city	about 800 a month	about $10 a month
Daily feed: every permit, every city	about 7,800 a month	about $94 a month

Set Max results in total, or a maximum cost per run in the run options, to cap any single run. Apify's free plan includes monthly credit you can spend on this Actor.

Run it as a daily permit feed

• Only permits not delivered before (onlyNew) skips permits the same feed already returned in the last 60 days. The list lives in a key-value store in your own account, so overlapping windows never bill you twice.
• Feed name (feedName) keeps separate lists for separate schedules, for example austin-solar and chicago-roofing.
• Cities publish with a lag of one to three days, so "daysBack": 3 plus onlyNew on a daily schedule catches late arrivals without duplicates.
• A per-city summary of each run (rows read, permits saved, any source errors) is saved in the run's key-value store under SUMMARY.

Integrations and API

• Google Sheets, HubSpot, Salesforce, Slack, email: through Apify integrations, Make, Zapier or n8n.
• Webhooks: fire on every finished run to push permits into a CRM, dialer or map.
• AI agents over MCP: add https://mcp.apify.com?tools=greatwork/us-building-permits to Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor or any MCP client and ask for "solar permits issued in Chicago this week".
• REST API, Python and JavaScript clients:

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/greatwork~us-building-permits/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=$APIFY_TOKEN" \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"jurisdictions": ["seattle"], "daysBack": 7, "keywords": ["ADU", "accessory dwelling"]}'

from apify_client import ApifyClient

client = ApifyClient("<YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN>")
run = client.actor("greatwork/us-building-permits").call(run_input={"daysBack": 7, "keywords": ["solar"]})
for permit in client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items():
    print(permit["jurisdictionName"], permit["address"], permit["estimatedCost"], permit["contractorCompany"])

FAQ

How fresh is the data?

Cities publish on their own schedules, usually daily with a lag of one to three days. The Actor reads each portal live on every run.

Why is the job value sometimes missing or $1?

Job value is whatever the applicant declared. Austin publishes value only on building permits, not on trade permits, and some express permits carry placeholder values like $1. Minimum job value drops permits with no value.

Do you return homeowner names?

No. Owner and individual applicant names are never returned. Only contractor, architect and engineer companies are kept.

Can you add my city?

Probably, if its permits are on an open-data portal with a license that allows redistribution. Open an issue with the city name.

Is it legal to use building permit data?

Every source is an official government open-data portal, and each dataset's license allows reuse (see the table below). Chicago's terms ask for an attribution notice, which every Chicago record carries. When you contact contractors, follow the rules that apply to you, such as CAN-SPAM and TCPA.

How it works and limits

• Reads each city's official open-data portal through its public Socrata API. No login, no browser and no scraping of permit-search websites.
• If one portal is down, the run continues with the others and reports which one failed. If every selected source fails, or a full week returns nothing, the run fails on purpose so you notice.

Data sources and terms

Source	License
City of Austin Open Data	Public Domain (U.S. Government)
DataSF	Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and License
City of Seattle Open Data	Public Domain
City of Chicago Data Portal	City of Chicago Data Terms of Use
City of Cincinnati Open Data	Public Domain
City of New Orleans Open Data	CC0 1.0 Public Domain Dedication
Montgomery County, MD dataMontgomery	Public Domain

Chicago records carry the City's required notice in their attribution field: 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.

This Actor is independent and is not affiliated with or endorsed by any of these governments.

More lead feeds by Great Work

Actor	What you get
SEC Form D Scraper	Companies that just raised private money, with phone, amount raised and investors
FMCSA New Carrier Leads	Trucking companies registered in the last few days, with phone, email and fleet size

Support

Found a bug or need a city? Open an issue on the Issues tab and we usually reply within one business day. For a custom feed or a bulk historical export, email hello@greatwork.company.