US Building Permits Scraper - 8 City Open-Data Portals

Built for contractors, suppliers, roofers, solar installers and anyone who follows new construction: newly issued building permits from the official open-data portals of New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Austin, San Francisco, Seattle, New Orleans and Cincinnati, returned in one schema. Filter by issue date, keyword (roof, solar, pool, HVAC…) and minimum job value, up to 10,000 permits per city.

One permit is not one portal row, and paying per row would cost you money for nothing. Measured against the live portals on 2026-09-10: in the last 7 days New York returned 2,168 rows for 1,829 permits (15.6% extra rows — one row per trade) and San Francisco 251 rows for 231 permits. You get one row per permit.

Four of the eight portals store the job value as text, so a numeric filter there is a string comparison. Asking for permits over $1,000,000 in the last 30 days, a text comparison matched 9,997 New York permits, 4,479 in Los Angeles, 1,122 in San Francisco and 767 in Cincinnati — numbers that are wrong in ways you cannot see. The value is compared as a number here.

And the README tells you which city publishes which field, measured on the newest 200 portal rows per city on 2026-09-10 — for example a contractor name on 100% of New York permits, 10% of Seattle's and not published at all in Los Angeles or San Francisco; a job value on 12% of Austin's (often placeholders) against 100% in New York. Portals publish one to five days after issue, so the newest permit is dated, not assumed.

A rejected search is never reported as "no permits". A mistyped filter comes back from the portals as HTTP 400 with a technical message; here a rejected search, a search with no results and a portal that could not be reached each get their own row with the reason.

No API key, no browser, no proxy — every row comes from the city's own published dataset, with a link back to it. Export as JSON, CSV or Excel.

What the portals get wrong, and what this Actor does about it

All numbers below were measured against the live portals on 2026-09-10.

The portals' behaviour	What you get here
The same permit appears on several rows. In the last 7 days New York returned 2,168 rows for 1,829 permits (15.6% extra rows - one row per trade on the permit), San Francisco 251 rows for 231 permits (one row per address), Cincinnati 107 rows for 101 permits (one row per line item)	One row per permit. New York's trades become a workTypes list, San Francisco uses the permit's primary address, Cincinnati's line items are added up (and also listed one by one in valuationLinesUsd). sourceRowCount says how many portal rows were combined. You are charged once per permit, not once per portal row
Four portals store the job value as text. Asking for permits over $1,000,000 in the last 30 days, a text comparison matched 9,997 New York permits, 4,479 in Los Angeles, 1,122 in San Francisco and 767 in Cincinnati. Compared as numbers the real counts were 699, 63, 35 and 12	The minimum value is always compared as a number
Every city names its columns differently - the issue date alone is called nine different things across US portals	The same column names for every city
In Chicago most permits list the property owner first, and contractors appear under many different contact types ("CONTRACTOR-ELECTRICAL", "GENERAL CONTRACTOR", "TENT CONTRACTOR"...)	contractorName is taken from any contractor-type contact and never from an owner-type one, including "OWNER AS GENERAL CONTRACTOR"
When owners pull their own permit, the portal's contractor field can hold the owner's name	The owner columns are never returned. In New York, Chicago and New Orleans, where the portal also publishes the owner, a contractor name identical to the owner's is left out
Some job values are placeholders such as 1 or 0 (common in Austin and present in San Francisco)	Values are kept as published and valuationIsPlaceholder is true for anything of $1 or less, so you can filter them out
Portals can change while they are being read, which shifts page boundaries	Results are read in a fully fixed order, and a row that arrives twice is counted once; if that happens, a row says the data changed during the run
A mistyped filter comes back as HTTP 400 with a technical message, which is easy to mistake for "no permits"	A rejected search, a search with no results and a portal that could not be reached each get their own row with the reason. None of them is charged

What each city publishes

Share of recent permits with each field, measured on the newest 200 portal rows per city on 2026-09-10:

City	Contractor name	Job value	Application date	ZIP
New York City	100% (permit holder's business)	100%	not published	100%
Los Angeles	not published	100%	56%	100%
Chicago	98%	89%	100%	not published
Austin	96%	12% (often placeholders)	100%	100%
San Francisco	not published	99%	100%	100%
Seattle	10%	100%	91%	93%
New Orleans	92%	100%	100%	not published
Cincinnati	97%	100%	100%	99%

A few things to know about individual cities:

• New York renewals. When a permit is renewed, New York issues it again under the same permit number with a new filing; that renewal is its own row, and permitType says so ("Renewal Permit Without Changes" / "Renewal Permit with Changes"). About a third of New York's recent permit rows are renewals.
• Cincinnati keywords. Cincinnati publishes only a permit category (HVAC, Alteration, Plumbing Permits...) rather than a written description, so a keyword such as roof can only match category names there - searched over the last 365 days, roof, solar, pool and deck matched nothing in Cincinnati.
• Cincinnati line items. Line items are added into valuationUsd. In a small share of permits two line items carry the same amount, which may be the project total repeated; valuationLinesUsd lists every line so you can check.
• Publication delay. Portals publish permits one to five days after they are issued (on 2026-09-10 the newest permits were from 09-08 in New York, 09-05 in Los Angeles and 09-08 in Cincinnati), and New York published no permits at all for 09-05 to 09-07. The last few days of any search fill in over the following week.

Input

Field	Default	What it does
cities	-	Any of nyc, la, chicago, austin, sf, seattle, nola, cincinnati. If none is chosen, Austin and Chicago are searched
daysBack	30	Permits issued in the last N days, counting today (1-365)
issuedFrom / issuedTo	-	Exact issue-date range as YYYY-MM-DD, instead of daysBack
keyword	-	Keep permits whose description or type contains this text, such as roof or solar
minValueUsd	-	Keep permits with a declared job value of at least this many dollars. Permits with no declared value are left out when this is set - in Austin that is most permits
maxPermitsPerCity	200	Newest permits first, up to 10,000 per city

Example - roofing permits over $20,000 issued in the last two weeks in New York and Chicago:

{ "cities": ["nyc", "chicago"], "daysBack": 14, "keyword": "roof", "minValueUsd": 20000 }

Output

Two real rows (from the portals on 2026-09-10). The New York permit was spread over two portal rows, one per trade:

{
  "city": "New York City", "cityKey": "nyc", "state": "NY",
  "permitNumber": "Q01360158-I1-MS",
  "issuedDate": "2026-09-08",
  "appliedDate": null,
  "permitType": "Initial Permit",
  "workTypes": ["Earth Work", "Mechanical Systems"],
  "description": "VERTICAL & HORIZONTAL EXTENSION OF EXISTING ONE FAMILY AND CONVERTING TO TWO FAMILY. OBTAIN NEW C OF O",
  "permitStatus": "Permit Issued",
  "address": "43-21 220 PLACE, Queens",
  "zip": "11361",
  "latitude": 40.762651, "longitude": -73.761407,
  "valuationUsd": 1650030,
  "valuationIsPlaceholder": false,
  "valuationLinesUsd": [],
  "contractorName": "STREAM ROCK CONTSRUCTION*",
  "sourceRowCount": 2,
  "sourceDataset": "https://data.cityofnewyork.us/d/rbx6-tga4"
}

{
  "city": "Chicago", "cityKey": "chicago", "state": "IL",
  "permitNumber": "101071485",
  "issuedDate": "2026-09-09",
  "appliedDate": "2025-07-08",
  "permitType": "PERMIT - NEW CONSTRUCTION",
  "workTypes": [],
  "description": "SPR 2019 CBC ERECT A 4 STORY, 9 DWELLING UNIT MIXED USE SPRINKLERED MASONRY BUILDING WITH AN ELEVATOR. ...",
  "permitStatus": "ACTIVE",
  "address": "2053 W IRVING PARK RD",
  "zip": null,
  "latitude": 41.95401572558783, "longitude": -87.68086669907031,
  "valuationUsd": 1275000,
  "valuationIsPlaceholder": false,
  "valuationLinesUsd": [],
  "contractorName": "MIREX ELECTRIC & CONSTRUCTION,",
  "sourceRowCount": 1,
  "sourceDataset": "https://data.cityofchicago.org/d/ydr8-5enu"
}

Text such as contractor names is returned exactly as the city published it, typos included. A value the city does not publish is null, never a guess. Contractor names are the contractor of record as the city lists it; for sole traders that can be a person's name.

Rows whose status is not ok (no-permits, bad-input, city-skipped, failed, incomplete) explain themselves in note and are never charged.

Pricing

Pay per permit returned. A permit the portal spreads over several rows is one permit and one charge. Rows that only explain an empty, rejected, skipped or failed search are free.

Sources

NYC Open Data (DOB NOW: Build - Approved Permits), Los Angeles Open Data (Building Permits), City of Chicago Data Portal (Building Permits), Austin Open Data (Issued Construction Permits), DataSF (Building Permits), Seattle Open Data (Building Permits), New Orleans Open Data (Permits), Cincinnati Open Data (Building Permits). This Actor is not affiliated with any of these cities.