US Building Permits Watch

Search building permits across eight US cities, or return only the permits issued since your last run. Categories and trade tags are normalised, so one input can ask for solar permits in Austin, Los Angeles and San Francisco. No API key is required.

This Actor is not affiliated with or endorsed by any of the cities below.

What you get

Field	Meaning
city, state, permitNumber	City and the permit id (New York is job filing plus work permit)
permitTypeRaw, permitCategory, tags	City type, one normalised category, and trade tags (solar, roof, hvac, pool, adu, ev)
workDescription, status	Description and status as published
appliedDate, issuedDate, valuationUsd	Dates (YYYY-MM-DD) and the city's job-value field
address, zip, lat, lon, parcel	Site location and parcel id when the city publishes them
contractorCompany, contractorLicense, contractorPhone	Contractor details when the city publishes them
ownerName, applicantName	Only if you turn on Include owner and applicant names
sourceDataset, sourceUrl, retrievedAt	Portal, record link, and the time the row was read

Categories: new_construction, addition_alteration, demolition, electrical, mechanical, plumbing, roofing, solar, pool, adu, ev_charger, other.

How to use it

• Search. Set Issued from and Issued to. The run returns matching permits and does not move the watch cursor.
• Watch. Leave both dates empty and schedule the Actor (for example every weekday morning). The first run looks back 3 days, or 14 days for Los Angeles, because LA's feed lags the calendar. Later runs return permits issued after the saved cursor. The named key-value store permits-watch-state keeps, per city, only the last issued-date cursor and the permit ids from that day.
• Filters. City, normalised category, keywords, and minimum valuation. Valuation fields mean different things in each city; do not rank cities against each other by valuationUsd.
• Charge limit. If a run hits the buyer's maximum charge, permits that were not stored are not marked as seen. The next run can deliver them. A permit is charged at most once per successful push.

A city portal that fails (after retries on HTTP 429 and 5xx) is reported as source_unavailable for that city. The other cities still finish, and the failed city's cursor stays where it was.

How much does it cost?

Pay per permit: $0.0015 for each permit event, and no start fee. A permit that is not stored is not charged. A weekday watch of a few hundred new permits is well under a dollar. Runs use 128–256 MB and do not use proxies.

Each request asks Socrata only for the columns this Actor maps, with a server-side date filter. It does not download a full city dataset.

Cities and licences

City	Dataset	Terms
New York	data.cityofnewyork.us/rbx6-tga4 (DOB NOW: Build – Approved Permits)	See the NYC attribution below
Chicago	data.cityofchicago.org/ydr8-5enu	Disclaimer required; see below
Los Angeles	data.lacity.org/pi9x-tg5x	Provided "as is"; see below
Austin	datahub.austintexas.gov/3syk-w9eu	Portal metadata: Public Domain U.S. Government
Seattle	cos-data.seattle.gov/76t5-zqzr	Portal metadata: Public Domain
San Francisco	data.sf.gov/i98e-djp9	ODC PDDL 1.0
Cincinnati	data.cincinnati-oh.gov/uhjb-xac9	Portal metadata: Public Domain
Baton Rouge	data.brla.gov/7fq7-8j7r	Portal metadata: Public Domain

New York source and version

Source: City of New York, Department of Buildings, dataset DOB NOW: Build – Approved Permits, Socrata id rbx6-tga4. Version: the dataset as retrieved at retrievedAt on each row. NYC Administrative Code §23-502(d) requires a third party to identify the source and version of Open Data. This README and the fields sourceDataset, sourceUrl and retrievedAt are that identification.

Chicago disclaimer

The City of Chicago requires this disclaimer wherever an application built on its data can be accessed:

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.

Chicago's terms also include an indemnity clause, and the City may require a user to stop using the data. Read https://www.chicago.gov/city/en/narr/foia/data_disclaimer.html before you republish Chicago rows.

Los Angeles

Los Angeles publishes this data "as is". From https://data.lacity.org/terms-of-use: "This site and all materials contained on it are distributed and transmitted 'as is' without warranties of any kind, either express or implied, including without limitation, warranties of title or implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose." The City does not warranty the completeness, accuracy, content or fitness of any public data set on the site. No separate ban on reuse was found in that page; access is still subject to those terms.

Good to know

• No key. An optional Socrata app token is sent as X-App-Token if you have one. Without it, requests share the portal's IP pool and can be throttled.
• Person names stay off unless you opt in. Contractor business names are part of the public permit record and are included when the city publishes them.
• Los Angeles lag. On 4 Oct 2026 the newest LA issue date in the feed was 26 Sep 2026. The first watch lookback for LA is 14 days so that lag does not hide the latest issued permits.
• :updated_at on these eight datasets is a bulk refresh stamp (many unrelated permits share one timestamp). Watch mode filters on the issued date after the saved cursor instead, and keeps only that day's ids.

FAQ

Do I need an API key? No.

Why did one city return source_unavailable? That portal answered with an error after retries. The run still succeeds. That city's cursor is unchanged, so the next run tries it again.

Why is valuation missing or tiny? Some cities leave the cost blank, and Austin's total_job_valuation is sometimes a placeholder. The number is the city's field, not a normalised construction cost.