City Building Permits: Chicago, New York, Austin, Seattle, Los Angeles

Building permits issued in five large US cities, read straight from each city's official open-data portal and put into one table: what work was permitted, its category, the estimated cost, the contractor company, the address and coordinates, and a link to the record. Filter by category, cost, ZIP code, keyword or contractor, and schedule it daily with change tracking to get only permits you have not received yet.

A run over the latest 7 days of all five cities is about 5,000 permits (New York about 2,000, Los Angeles and Austin about 1,200 each, Chicago about 600, Seattle about 120).

What you get for each permit

Field	Meaning
city, permitNumber	City and the city's own permit number
issuedDate, appliedDate, expiresDate	Dates as the city publishes them (New York gives no application date)
category	One of NEW_CONSTRUCTION, ALTERATION_ADDITION, DEMOLITION, ELECTRICAL, PLUMBING, MECHANICAL, SIGN, SITE_SAFETY, OTHER
categories	All categories of the permit (a New York permit can cover several work types)
permitType, workType, propertyClass	The city's own permit type, work type and residential/commercial class, unchanged
description	The city's description of the work
estimatedCost, costBasis	The city's cost or valuation figure in USD, and which column it came from
housingUnits, squareFeet	Where the city publishes them
address	Street, city, state, ZIP
contractors	Contractor company name and trade
status	The city's permit status
isRenewal, filingNumber	New York renewal flag and job filing number
latitude, longitude	Coordinates as the city publishes them
cityRecordUrl, sourceRecordUrl	The city's own permit page (Austin, Seattle) and the exact record on the open-data portal
changeStatus, firstSeen	With tracking: FIRST_RUN, NEW or SEEN

Categories

Each city names its permits differently, so category is mapped from the city's own permit and work types (built from every value the portals used over the last 120 days; permitType and workType keep the originals):

• Chicago: new construction, renovation/alteration, wrecking/demolition and sign permits by type; Express Permit Program permits by their work type (electrical work, solar, plumbing, masonry, reroofing, porches, garages and so on). Elevator permits and reinstated permits are OTHER.
• New York (DOB NOW: Build): by work type. General construction, structural and foundation work are ALTERATION_ADDITION, because these permits do not say whether the job is a new building; full demolitions are DEMOLITION; solar is ELECTRICAL; sprinklers and standpipes are PLUMBING; sidewalk sheds, scaffolds and construction fences are SITE_SAFETY.
• Austin: electrical, plumbing and mechanical permits by type; building permits by work class (new and shell = new construction, demolition, everything else = alteration).
• Seattle and Los Angeles: by permit type. Grading, pools and non-building structures in Los Angeles are OTHER.

Date window

daysBack counts back from the newest issue date each city has published, so every city returns its latest days even when its portal is behind: Chicago, New York, Austin and Seattle trail issuance by about one to two days, and Los Angeles refreshes weekly and trails by about a week. With fromDate/toDate you get the same calendar dates for every city instead. The status message and the run summary show each city's window.

Some permits reach the portals later than that: in September and October 2026, 9% of New York permits appeared more than 7 days after their issue date. For daily monitoring, use daysBack 31 with trackChanges and onlyNew, so late additions are still returned once.

Costs

estimatedCost is each city's own figure: Chicago's reported cost, New York's estimated job cost, Austin's total job valuation, Seattle's estimated project cost and Los Angeles' valuation. Austin fills the job valuation for few permits, so for repair, remodel and addition permits that leave it blank the remodel valuation is used (costBasis says which). A cost of 0 or 1 is returned as empty: the cities enter those when the cost is not given or is on another filing (New York lists new buildings at 0), and real costs between 2 and 10 dollars do not occur. Most Austin trade permits and new buildings carry no cost, so minEstimatedCost leaves them out.

Personal data

No owner, tenant, applicant or filing representative names, addresses or phone numbers are collected; those columns are not even requested. contractors lists the contracting company only: Chicago's contacts whose type names a contractor (owners acting as their own contractor are left out), New York's permittee business name, Austin's and Seattle's contractor company. Los Angeles publishes no contractor, and Chicago publishes no ZIP code for the permit address, so contractorKeywords with Los Angeles and zipPrefixes with Chicago are refused rather than silently returning nothing for that city.

Filters

cities, daysBack or fromDate/toDate, categories, minEstimatedCost, zipPrefixes, keywords (description, permit type and work type), contractorKeywords, includeRenewals (New York), trackChanges, onlyNew, allowPartial, maxItems. Rows alternate between the cities, newest first within each city, so when maxItems cuts the list every city keeps an equal share.

Things to know

• If one city's portal fails, the other cities are returned and the failed one is named in the status message and summary (turn allowPartial off to fail the whole run instead).
• If a portal has not been refreshed for longer than usual (7 days, 14 for Los Angeles), that city fails instead of returning stale permits as current.
• A New York permit that covers several work types is listed once per work type by the city; here it is one row with the work types joined.

Data

The cities' own open-data portals, read through their public APIs with one request per second as the portals ask: City of Chicago Building Permits; NYC Department of Buildings DOB NOW: Build Approved Permits; City of Austin Issued Construction Permits; Seattle Department of Construction and Inspections Building Permits; Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety Building Permits Issued from 2020 to Present. No login and no scraping of search pages.