NYC DOB Permits - Building Permits & Contractor Leads

Every building work permit issued by the New York City Department of Buildings, 1,001,125 of them, current through this week.

Each permit names the contractor who pulled it, their licence number and licence class, the estimated cost of the job, the property owner, the full scope of work, and the exact tax lot it covers. It is the freshest public record of construction activity in the city - which is why it is the first thing roofing, solar, HVAC, GC and insurance teams pull.

Low cost

From $0.00006 per record Pay-per-event: you are charged per record delivered, and nothing for the query.

What you get

Field	Meaning
jobFilingNumber / workPermit / sequenceNumber	The job, and the individual work permit under it
workType	Trade - General Construction 209,703 / Plumbing 154,206 / Sidewalk Shed 110,427 / Solar 21,236 and 17 more
permitStatus	Permit Issued 361,957 / Signed-off 639,168
filingReason	Initial Permit 679,994 / Renewal Permit Without Changes 258,355 / Renewal Permit with Changes 55,713
applicantBusinessName / applicantLicense / licenseType	The contractor - name, licence number, and class (GC 717,284 / P 163,355 / F 68,860)
estimatedJobCosts	Estimated job value - populated on 99.99% of permits (text at the source, delivered for you to rank on)
ownerName / ownerBusinessName	Property owner
jobDescription	The scope of work, in the filer's own words
issuedDate / approvedDate / expiredDate	Issue, approval and expiry
houseNumber / streetName / borough / zipCode	The address
bbl / bin / block / lot	The tax lot and building
communityBoard / councilDistrict / censusTract / nta	Administrative geography
latitude / longitude	Coordinates (99.4%)

Modes

• search (default) - permits matching your filters.
• permit - one work permit number, or every row under one job filing.
• aggregate - one count row per group: by trade, borough, status, filing reason, licence type, ZIP, community board, council district or issue year.

Examples

New solar permits in Brooklyn - workType=Solar, borough=Brooklyn:

2026-09-16  204 SOUTH 1 STREET, Brooklyn       BEST ENERGY POWER 2015 LL   238117
2026-09-16  737 TROY AVENUE, Brooklyn          CENTURION SOLAR ENERGY       22400
2026-09-16  543 CHRISTOPHER AVENUE, Brooklyn   TOM PETERSEN ARCHITECT, LLC  31668
2026-09-15  1475 EAST 89 STREET, Brooklyn      SOLAR CONTRACTING LLC        56000
2026-09-15  527 EAST 38 STREET, Brooklyn       SOLAR PRO INC                33499.98

Big jobs filed this week - recentDays=7, then sort on estimatedJobCosts. The city stores the figure as text, so it is delivered on every record for you to rank on rather than filtered for you.

Everything filed against one property - bbl=1010930129 returns every permit ever issued on that tax lot.

Every permit under one job - mode=permit, jobFilingNumber=M08004166-I1. Jobs routinely run past fifty rows (this one is 87; the largest seen is 323), so nothing is cut off - the run reports truncated if a job ever exceeded the window.

Which trades are busiest this year - mode=aggregate, groupBy=workType.

Permit volume by borough - mode=aggregate, groupBy=borough:

Manhattan      389,755        Bronx           96,800
Brooklyn       261,648        Staten Island   57,804
Queens         195,118

One row is a permit event, not a job

The 1,001,125 rows cover 579,647 distinct job filings - 1.73 rows per job. A single job raises many permit rows, and one work permit number recurs across trades, so there is no one column that identifies a row on its own.

That distinction matters when you size a market. "A million building permits" would overstate the number of jobs by roughly 70%. Counted as permit events, this file is exactly that; counted as jobs, it is 579,647. mode=permit with a jobFilingNumber shows the difference directly - you get every row under that one job.

Source

Counts below are a live snapshot - the feed is refreshed most days, so exact figures move between reads. The order of magnitude and the ratios are stable.

New York City Department of Buildings, published on data.cityofnewyork.us as DOB NOW: Build - Approved Permits - public open data, no login and no key. The feed adds roughly 166,000 permits a year.

Two things about this file are worth knowing before you rely on a field.

The borough column is spelled two ways. The city stores each of the five boroughs in both uppercase and title case - MANHATTAN on 326,478 rows and Manhattan on another 63,277, and the same split across Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and Staten Island. Filtering the raw column for Manhattan silently loses about a sixth of Manhattan. Boroughs are normalised here, so borough=Manhattan returns all 389,755.

There is no revoked or expired status. The feed carries exactly two - Signed-off and Permit Issued. A permit that was revoked is not marked as such; it is absent or still shows as issued. Treat a permit record as evidence that a permit was filed and issued, not as a statement about the current state of the work.

One more: a permit's expiredDate is legitimately in the future, often by a year or more. It is an expiry, not a lapse.

Output

Every record carries the same key set regardless of mode - the permit fields plus recordType, and the aggregate columns (groupKey, groupCount, groupBy) which are "" outside aggregate mode.

Related actors

• NYC DCWP Licenses - the city's business-licence register, keyed on business unique id.
• NYC Property Valuation - assessed values and the five-phase valuation trail for these same tax lots.
• Chicago Permits - the same idea for Chicago.