US Building Permits API: 7 Official City & County Sources

Get newly issued building permits from seven official US city and county open data portals in one JSON schema. Every source carries an explicit public-domain style licence, confirmed from the portal's own dataset metadata.

source	Jurisdiction	Dataset	Licence
san-francisco	San Francisco, CA	Building Permits	Open Data Commons PDDL
seattle	Seattle, WA	Building Permits	Public Domain
austin	Austin, TX	Issued Construction Permits	Public Domain U.S. Government
cincinnati	Cincinnati, OH	Cincinnati Building Permits	Public Domain
montgomery-county-md	Montgomery County, MD	Residential Permit	Public Domain
new-orleans	New Orleans, LA	Permits	CC0 1.0
cambridge-ma	Cambridge, MA	Building Permits: New Construction	Open Data Commons PDDL

Use it for construction market research, new-project alerts by trade, solar and roofing market sizing, or AI agents that need to answer "what is being built in this city right now?".

Output

One item per permit:

{
  "id": "new-orleans:26-31990-SATT",
  "source": "new-orleans",
  "jurisdiction": "New Orleans, LA",
  "state": "LA",
  "permitNumber": "26-31990-SATT",
  "url": "https://data.nola.gov/d/rcm3-fn58",
  "attribution": "City of New Orleans, Safety and Permits, https://data.nola.gov/d/rcm3-fn58 (CC0 1.0)",
  "category": "sign",
  "permitType": "Attached Sign",
  "propertyUse": "Business Use",
  "siteType": "non_residential",
  "status": "Permit Issued",
  "appliedAt": "2026-10-29",
  "issuedAt": "2026-10-30",
  "address": "1413 Upperline St",
  "city": "New Orleans",
  "zip": null,
  "latitude": 29.92498,
  "longitude": -90.10758,
  "housingUnits": null,
  "valuation": null,
  "contractorCompany": null,
  "workTags": [],
  "matchedKeywords": [],
  "scrapedAt": "2026-10-31T09:00:00+00:00"
}

Field	Meaning
category	One of new_construction, alteration, demolition, roofing, electrical, mechanical, plumbing, sign, other. Worked out from the permit type columns
permitType	The source's own permit type wording
propertyUse	The source's own use or occupancy wording. Cincinnati uses building code classes such as I-1
siteType	non_residential when the property use is confirmed as commercial, institutional or industrial. Otherwise residential_or_unknown
address, latitude, longitude	Work site, for non_residential permits only. null for homes and for anything not confirmed. See "Personal data" below
city, zip	City and ZIP code of the work site, for every permit where the source gives them
valuation	Published project value in USD. A published 0 is returned as null
contractorCompany	Business name only, and only where the source has a company column. See "Personal data" below
workTags	Topics found in the source's work description: solar, battery, ev-charger, generator, roof, hvac, pool, adu, kitchen, bathroom, deck, foundation, windows, siding, fence, sprinkler, elevator, tenant-improvement
matchedKeywords	Which of your keywords matched
url	The official permit page for non_residential permits where the source links one. Otherwise the dataset page

Input

Field	Default
cities	all	Any of the source values above
publishedWithinDays	7	Permits issued in the last N days. 0 = no date limit
permitTypes	none	Any of the category values
minValuation	none	Minimum published value in USD. Permits with no published value are dropped
nonResidentialOnly	false	Keep only non_residential permits, the ones with a street address. Skips Montgomery County and Cambridge
keywords	none	Work description or permit type contains any keyword
maxItems	200	Total for the run, shared evenly across cities. You pay per result

A default run takes under a minute. Schedule it weekly, or daily with publishedWithinDays: 3, and remove repeats using id.

Personal data

This Actor is built not to return personal data:

• No names, phones or emails. Owner, applicant, contractor-contact, architect and engineer columns are never requested from the source.
• No free-text descriptions. Real description fields contain private email addresses and staff names and phone numbers, so they are used only for keyword search and workTags, and are never returned.
• Contractor companies are filtered. Company columns sometimes hold a person's name, such as Company/Person, Person DBA Company, or just a person. Only the part containing a business word (LLC, Inc, Plumbing and similar) is returned. Others come back as null. A trade name that itself contains a name, such as Jane Doe Plumbing, is still returned as a business name.
• No home addresses. A street address or exact coordinates on a house permit would identify a household, so address, latitude and longitude are null and url points to the dataset page unless the property use is on a per-source list of confirmed non-residential uses. Apartments, mixed use, blank uses and unknown values are treated as homes. City and ZIP code are still returned.

The permit number is kept so you can check a permit with the issuing government. This Actor is not suited to door-to-door or mail lists of homeowners.

Limitations

• Sources lag by one to three days, so a small day range can be empty for some cities. Quiet sources are normal: Cambridge issues a few new-construction permits a week.
• Coverage differs by source. Montgomery County covers residential permits only and Cambridge covers new construction only. New Orleans has no ZIP column.
• Most permits have no street address. Most permits are for homes, and Montgomery County and Cambridge never return one. Set nonResidentialOnly for address-ready results.
• Some fields are often empty. Recent Cincinnati permits have no coordinates, about a third of recent Austin permits have none, and most Austin permits have no valuation, so minValuation removes most of Austin. San Francisco, Seattle, Montgomery County, New Orleans and Cambridge rarely or never give a contractorCompany.
• Valuation is not comparable across cities. It is what the applicant or city published, and trade permits often have none.
• category reflects the permit type, not the work. San Francisco files most jobs as alterations, so to find San Francisco roof work use the roof keyword or workTags, not the roofing type.
• permitTypes is applied after reading, at most 20,000 rows per city. Use a shorter date range if the log says the limit was reached.
• Chicago, New York City and Los Angeles are not included, because their licence terms could not be confirmed.
• If one source is down, the run still succeeds with the others. See RUN_SUMMARY for per-source counts and errors.
• Not affiliated with any of these governments. Always check the official record before relying on a permit.

Data sources and attribution

Each item carries its own attribution field with the publisher, dataset link and licence, so you can keep the credit when you pass the data on.

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日本語

米国の 7 つの市・郡の公式オープンデータから、発行された建築許可を同じ形式で取得します。許諾はポータルのメタデータで確認し、パブリックドメイン相当のものだけを使っています。氏名・電話・メールと自由記述は出力しません。番地と座標は、商業・公共の建物と確認できた許可だけに出します。住宅と、用途が確認できない許可は、市と郵便番号までです。