How to read a building permit: the fields that matter for finding work

Permit records differ from city to city, but the useful parts are the same. A field-by-field guide to permit numbers, types, statuses, dates, values and contractors, and what each one tells a business.

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Where permit records come from

Cities and counties issue building permits and keep the records. Many publish them on an open-data portal, updated anywhere from every hour to once a week, and each portal has its own field names. The same new pool can be a 'Residential Pool', a 'BLD-POOL' or a line in a long description, depending on the city.

The fields, one by one

Permit number: the city's own reference, useful when you call the building department.
Type and work class: the city's category (building, electrical, plumbing, mechanical) and whether the work is new, an addition, an alteration or a repair.
Description: free text written by the applicant or the clerk. Often the most informative field, and the least consistent.
Status: applied, issued, under inspection, finaled or closed, expired, withdrawn. Issued means work can start; finaled means it passed its last inspection.
Dates: applied, issued and final dates mark the start and end of the job. Cities differ in which ones they publish.
Valuation: the declared cost of the work. Useful to rank jobs by size, though often declared low.
Address and parcel: where the work is. Some cities publish coordinates, others only the address.
Contractor: the business doing the work, often with its state license number.

What permits don't tell you

A permit is a plan, not a guarantee: some are never started, some are cancelled, and some work is done without one. Declared values are estimates. Dates depend on the city's own process, so the same job can look a week older in one city than in another.

How FirstDig reads them

FirstDig reads each covered city's permit feed about once an hour, maps its fields to one common format, places each permit on the map and sorts it into trades by its type and description. Names of property owners and applicants are removed before anything is stored: a business gets the address, the work, the dates, the value and the contractor's business name.

The numbers right now

In the 30 days to 2026-10-28, 112,910 permits were filed in the 98 cities and counties FirstDig covers.

New York, NY: 8,796
Miami-Dade County, FL: 5,561
Los Angeles, CA: 5,298
Austin, TX: 4,581
Fort Worth, TX: 4,495
San Antonio, TX: 4,443

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