TX Austin Building Permits - the City's Full Consolidated Permit File

The City of Austin publishes its entire building-permit file - every permit issued since 1921 across the five offices the city consolidates into one register - as open data. This actor turns that register into a charged-per-record lookup and filter tool that carries what the national building-permit aggregators don't: the contractor behind each job.

Built for: construction lead-gen (which contractor is pulling work where - and how to reach them), homebuilder & development research, property diligence, and permitting-activity analysis by council district or office.

What it covers

2,374,365 permits - the complete consolidated file, active and historical:

Office	Permits
Electrical	687,175
Plumbing	545,459
Building	519,982
Mechanical	505,238
Driveway / sidewalks	116,511

Each permit carries the job's depth - the contractor company, contact name, phone, address and city (populated on about half the file - 1.19M records with a real contractor company, and the reason this actor exists), plus:

• total job valuation - a real numeric column, so you can range-filter it server-side: 491,957 permits are valued at $50k+, 22,639 at $1M+
• housing units (77% covered) - 32,432 building permits carry more than one unit = the multifamily signal
• number of floors, condominium flag, existing / new / remodel square footage
• permit class (residential vs commercial), work class (new / remodel / repair / addition...), council district (91%), jurisdiction - Austin full-purpose vs the ETJ / extraterritorial belt
• the applied / issued / status / expires / completed date chain, street address + latitude/longitude, and the work description

Status & live work

Statuses are the city's own words, and they're mostly terminal: Final (2,004,536 - completed) / Expired (169,150) / VOID (153,260) / Active (28,085) / Withdrawn / Cancelled. The long tail mixes office notes ("Cancelled - Contractor Required", "Inactive Pending Revision") that a naive parser trips on.

Live work has its own lane: the city flags every permit issued in its last-30-days window - the recent mode hands you that exact fresh slice (~4,981 permits right now), so you can watch what's being pulled this month without dumping 2.4M rows.

Typical questions

• "Every permit D R Horton / KB Home pulled in Austin - current and historical."
• "Show recent building permits valued over $1M with the contractor's phone."
• "Where are the multifamily projects (5+ units) going in, by council district?"
• "What did each office issue last month?"
• "Every permit on this address."
• "Aggregate the register by office or council district."

Inputs

Input	What it does
mode	rows (default) / recent (last-30-days live work) / aggregate
permitType	office: electrical / plumbing / building / mechanical / driveway
contractor	contractor company or contact name (fuzzy)
status	Active / Final / Expired / VOID / Withdrawn / ... Blank = any
permitClass / workClass	residential/commercial + new/remodel/repair...
address / councilDistrict	where the work is
valuationMin/To	total job valuation range (numeric, filtered server-side)
housingUnitsMin	minimum housing units (multifamily finder)
issuedFrom/To / appliedFrom/To	date-range filters
groupBy	aggregate over office / class / status / council district / work class / year
maxResults	cap records (default 200)

Default run = the 200 most recently issued permits - fast for the daily auto-test. For a targeted query add a filter; for a broad view use aggregate (a handful of summary rows, not a 2.4M-row dump).

Low cost

From $0.0001 per record - billed only for the rows you use, at the platform floor. Cost scales with what you pull, not with the size of the register - and because each record is metered individually there's no per-run charge cap to hit on a big pull.

Austin's permit file is a "just download the CSV" dataset that hides real traps: the status column mixes terminal words and office notes (Final vs "Cancelled - Contractor Required" vs "Inactive Pending Revision") so a substring filter drags in the wrong records; the contractor and valuation fields are filled on only part of the file and there is no honest way to know which rows carry them without counting every column; the five offices each assign their own permit numbers (so the register is not one clean sequence); and the city publishes no daily refresh marker, so "what changed today" has to be read off the issue-date stream, not a delta column. Normalizing that into a register where a contractor / valuation / recent query returns exactly the permits you mean is the actual product. Every pull is integrity-checked against the feed's known shape, so a degraded source fails loudly instead of returning bad rows.

Source

• City of Austin Open Data: Building Permits - the city's consolidated register. Reflects the city's record as of each pull; not an endorsement of any contractor or project.