US Building Permits Scraper

Unofficial tool. Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by any city, county, or government agency.

Pull recent building and construction permits from public city open-data portals and get them back in one shared format, whichever city they came from. It's for contractors, suppliers, solar, roofing and HVAC sales teams, real-estate analysts and researchers tracking construction activity.

Cities covered: San Francisco, CA · Seattle, WA · Austin, TX · Cincinnati, OH · Baton Rouge / East Baton Rouge Parish, LA.

Input: city, issue-date range, and optional permit type, status and minimum valuation filters, plus a maximum number of results.

Output: city, permit number, permit type and work class, work description, status, application, issue and completion dates, site address and ZIP, valuation, housing units, contractor business name, coordinates and a source link.

No owner or applicant name, phone or email fields are returned. Work descriptions are filtered to remove person names, phone numbers and emails, and anything that slips through can be reported through the removal-request line below. No contractor contact details either: no contractor phone, email or street address, only the business name. Each city's data license and attribution are listed below.

Construction permit data sources, licenses and attribution

City	Dataset	License (as shown on the dataset page)	Attribution
San Francisco, CA	Building Permits (i98e-djp9)	Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and License	Source: DataSF. City and County of San Francisco, Department of Building Inspection (data.sf.gov).
Seattle, WA	Building Permits (76t5-zqzr)	Public Domain	Source: City of Seattle (data.seattle.gov).
Austin, TX	Issued Construction Permits (3syk-w9eu)	Public Domain U.S. Government	Source: City of Austin, Texas - data.austintexas.gov.
Cincinnati, OH	Cincinnati Building Permits (uhjb-xac9)	Public Domain	Source: City of Cincinnati (data.cincinnati-oh.gov).
Baton Rouge / East Baton Rouge Parish, LA	EBR Building Permits (7fq7-8j7r)	Public Domain	Source: City of Baton Rouge / Parish of East Baton Rouge, Permits and Inspections (data.brla.gov).

Every row also carries sourceLicense, sourceLicenseUrl, sourceAttribution and datasetUrl. No city seals or logos are used, and no city has endorsed this tool.

Building permits input

• cities: any of san-francisco, seattle, austin, cincinnati, baton-rouge (empty = all five). maxResults is split evenly across them.
• issuedFrom / issuedTo: YYYY-MM-DD (default: the last 30 days)
• lastNDays: optional, permits issued in the last N days, counted back from today's UTC date when the run starts. Overrides issuedFrom / issuedTo, so a saved task never goes stale.
• permitTypes: words matched against permit type and work class only, e.g. new, roof, demolition, electrical, residential
• statuses: the city's own status values, e.g. issued (SF, Seattle, Cincinnati), Active / Final (Austin). Baton Rouge publishes no status and is skipped (free filter-unsupported row).
• minValuation: minimum stated project value in USD
• maxResults: up to 20,000

There is no free-text or name search: you can't search by contractor, owner or applicant name.

Permit data output fields

city, cityKey, permitNumber, permitType, workClass, description, status, appliedDate, issuedDate, completedDate, siteAddress, zip, valuation, housingUnits, contractorBusinessName, contractorTrade (Austin only), latitude, longitude, permitUrl (Seattle, Austin, Cincinnati), datasetUrl, sourceLicense, sourceLicenseUrl, sourceAttribution

City notes: San Francisco publishes no contractor name, so contractorBusinessName is empty there. In Baton Rouge, a person's name the city appends after the business name is removed. Baton Rouge ships no project description (description is always null there), for privacy: the city's free-text notes can contain owners' names. Fields a city doesn't publish are null.

Free status rows (not charged): no-results, invalid-input, api-error, filter-unsupported, free-plan-limit, charge-limit-reached.

Example: {"cities":["seattle","austin"],"issuedFrom":"2026-10-01","permitTypes":["new"],"minValuation":100000,"maxResults":20}

Ready-made examples

• New Construction Permits Over $1M, 5 Cities: newly issued new-construction permits with a stated project value of $1M or more across the five supported cities, last 30 days.
• Roofing Permits in Seattle, Latest: recently issued roofing permits in Seattle, last 30 days, newest first.

Unofficial examples. Not affiliated with or endorsed by any company or agency named above.

Privacy, limits and compliance

• Only explicitly listed fields are requested from each portal and returned. Owner, applicant and contact columns are never downloaded.
• Email addresses and phone numbers in work descriptions are replaced with [email removed] / [number removed].
• Person-name patterns in work descriptions (e.g. Name (Owner), Owner: Name, Mr./Ms. Name, Name called in) are replaced with [redacted]. Baton Rouge descriptions are not output at all.
• A contractor business name can sometimes be a sole proprietor's own trading name, as published by the city.
• Removal requests: email theuser@mail.grokbot.com with the city and permit number, and we will remove or suppress the record in this Actor's output.
• Data comes from each city's public Socrata open-data API, paced at about 3 requests a second with a contact User-Agent. No API key.
• Data is as published by each city and can be incomplete or late. Check the city's record before relying on it.
• Free-plan accounts get up to 100 results per run.

Pricing. Pay per result: $1.80 per 1,000 permits ($0.0018 each), the same price on every plan, no start fee. Free status rows are never charged.