US Building Permits: NYC, Chicago, LA, SF, Seattle & Austin

Get newly issued building permits from the official open-data portals of six major US cities: New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle and Austin. That covers new construction, alterations, remodels, roofing, solar, electrical, plumbing, mechanical, demolition, signs and more, all in one consistent format. Each row includes the city, permit number, permit type, work description, status, issue date, address, ZIP, neighborhood or area, job valuation, coordinates, the contractor company where the city publishes one, and city-specific fields such as housing units, square feet, floors, zoning, BIN/BBL and fees. No login or API key is needed.

Who is it for?

• Contractors, roofers, solar installers and suppliers looking for fresh project leads.
• Building-material, insurance and home-service companies tracking construction activity by ZIP.
• Real estate investors and analysts watching new development, ADUs and demolitions.
• Journalists and urban researchers studying housing supply.

How to use it

1. Choose one or more cities (the default is NYC, Chicago and LA).
2. Set Issued in last N days (the default is 30) or a start and end date.
3. Optionally add keywords for the work description (solar, roof, pool, ADU), ZIP codes and a minimum valuation.
4. Set Max results per city and click Start. Results are newest first.

Input example

{"cities": ["new-york", "austin", "seattle"], "keywords": ["solar"], "lastDays": 30, "maxResultsPerCity": 200}

Output example

{"city": "New York City", "permitNumber": "Q01462230-I1-SL", "permitType": "Solar", "description": "Solar Panel Installation on Roof", "status": "Permit Issued", "issuedDate": "2026-10-27", "address": "134-11 133 AVENUE", "area": "Queens", "zip": "11420", "valuationUsd": 41121.0, "contractorCompany": "T&S ENERGY LLC"}

How much does it cost?

Pay-per-event: a small fee per permit returned, plus a tiny per-run start fee. There is no subscription and no separate platform usage cost. For example, 1,000 permits cost about $0.50. Searches with no matches and error rows are not charged. Use Max results per city or Maximum cost per run to cap your spending.

Use it through the API, integrations or AI agents

Run it from the Apify API, on a schedule, or connect it to Make, Zapier, n8n or Google Sheets. AI agents can find and call it through the Apify MCP server. Output is clean JSON with the same fields on every run.

FAQ

Is it legal? Yes. Each city publishes permit data on its official open-data portal (Socrata) for public reuse. To avoid personal data, the tool never returns owner names, applicant names or phone numbers. A contractor name appears only when it looks like a business (for example INC, LLC, Construction or Electric).

How fresh is it? Most cities update daily. New York City and Chicago usually show permits issued the day before.

Why do some fields differ between cities? Each city publishes different columns. Shared fields are always in the same place, and city-only extras (for example Chicago fees or LA square footage) are added as extra fields.

Why is Chicago's ZIP empty? Chicago's permit dataset has no ZIP code, so the ZIP filter is skipped for Chicago.

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