US Building Permits Scraper

US Building Permits Scraper: new permits from 14 US cities and counties in one table

Pick the cities, set an issue date, and add a filter if you want one: permit type, scope of work, contractor, status or declared value. You get one row per permit with the number, type, status, issue date, address, scope of work, declared value, contractor and the city's own record link, under the same field names in every city. The awkward part: every city publishes different columns, so a roll that cannot answer one of your filters is skipped, free, with a row saying why, and big cities such as San Francisco, Boston, Houston and Philadelphia are not in it at all.

🔍 What US Building Permits Scraper does

A permit issued this week is a job starting next month. Each roll is read newest first, so issuedAfter turns the run into a feed of what was just approved.

Before anything is fetched, the run works out which rolls can answer your filters. A roll that cannot, such as one with no postal codes when you filter on a postal code, is skipped with a free FILTER_UNSUPPORTED row naming the roll and the filter. It is never sent a looser question and billed for the answer.

Your row budget is split evenly across the rolls first. Whatever a short roll does not use goes to the ones that still have permits.

No phone numbers, email addresses or owner names are read, even where a city publishes them. Orlando's only free-text field is usually the homeowner's name, so it is not read, which is why Orlando comes back with no scope of work. On Chicago only contacts typed as a contractor are read.

Two rolls are narrower than their name. Seattle covers building permits only, not its electrical, trade or land-use permits. Nashville publishes a rolling recent window rather than its full history.

📥 What you give it

A roll that carries decades of history holds far more old permits than new ones, so set issuedAfter if you only want what is current. The counts move as cities publish.

{
  "jurisdictions": ["seattle", "raleigh", "cleveland"],
  "issuedAfter": "2026-09-01",
  "permitTypeContains": "ROOF",
  "minValueUsd": 10000,
  "maxItems": 200
}

An input with nothing in it, such as {} sent through the API, returns one free sample row so you can see the shape first.

📤 What you get back

A real row from a real run:

{
  "ok": true,
  "charged": true,
  "recordType": "permit",
  "jurisdiction": "Seattle, WA",
  "jurisdictionKey": "seattle",
  "permitNumber": "7088872-CN",
  "permitType": "Addition/Alteration",
  "workClass": "Non-Residential Institutional",
  "status": "Issued",
  "issuedDate": "2026-09-28",
  "appliedDate": "2026-06-24",
  "expiresDate": "2028-03-28",
  "statusDate": null,
  "address": "3919 OKANOGAN LN NE",
  "city": "SEATTLE",
  "state": "WA",
  "zip": "98195",
  "description": "Shoring and excavation for future Institutional building [UW CHEMICAL SCIENCES] per plan",
  "declaredValueUsd": 1885061,
  "contractorName": null,
  "contractorLicense": null,
  "contractorLicenseType": null,
  "contractorTrade": null,
  "buildingAreaSqFt": null,
  "housingUnits": null,
  "parcelId": null,
  "latitude": 47.65377801,
  "longitude": -122.30999134,
  "recordUrl": "https://services.seattle.gov/portal/customize/LinkToRecord.aspx?altId=7088872-CN",
  "publisher": "Seattle Department of Construction and Inspections",
  "scrapedAt": "2026-09-30T02:37:45.865Z"
}

🧾 Reading the output

Three kinds of row can share a dataset.

To keep only permits, filter on recordType == "permit". A diagnostic about one roll names it in jurisdiction.

▶️ How to run it

1. Open US Building Permits Scraper and click Try for free. 2. Pick your cities in Jurisdictions. The form arrives with Seattle and Austin chosen. 3. Set Issued on or after. It arrives set to 2026-09-01, so move it to the date you care about. 4. Add a filter such as Permit type contains or Declared value over if you want one, and set Maximum rows. 5. Click Start, then download the dataset as CSV, JSON or Excel.

💰 How much does it cost?

$1.85 per 1,000 permits, which is $0.00185 a permit, flat on every Apify plan. The 200-permit example above comes to about 37 cents.

You pay for permit rows and nothing else per row. The sample row and every diagnostic row are free, and so are rolls skipped for a filter they cannot answer, records missing a permit number or an issue date, and repeats inside one run. If you set a maximum charge on the run, it stops at that figure instead of going past it.

💡 What people use it for

• A roofing, solar or HVAC contractor watching what has just been permitted in their own area, filtered with permitTypeContains.
• A supplier sizing next quarter from what has actually been approved: count new-build permits above a declared value.
• A lender or proptech team spotting renovation work on a property before it reaches a listing.
• Anyone who has been checking four city portals by hand every Monday morning and would rather have one table.

🚧 What it does not do

• Fourteen jurisdictions, not fifty states. San Francisco, Boston, Philadelphia, Denver, Phoenix, Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, San Diego, Miami, Detroit, Baltimore, Washington DC, Kansas City and Honolulu are not covered. The cities that were checked and left out mostly had rolls that were stale, too thin to be a permit record, or split into one dataset per year.
• No contact details. No phones, emails or owner names, and nothing joined to parcel or assessment data.
• No normalised vocabulary. Types and statuses stay in each city's own words.
• No fields a city does not publish. A missing contractor or value is null, never filled in.
• Only as fresh as the city. A permit revised after the roll was last refreshed still reads as it did, and each city refreshes on its own schedule.
• Repeats across runs are billed again. Inside one run a permit is charged once. On a schedule, de-duplicate on jurisdictionKey, permitNumber and permitType.

🧭 Which property data scraper do you need?

❓ Questions people ask

How current is the data? Whatever the city last published. On most rolls that means permits issued within the last day or two, and a long weekend shows up as a gap.

Can I get a daily feed of new permits? Yes, and it is the main way people run it. Schedule it with a recent issuedAfter and de-duplicate against what you already have.

Why is contractorName empty on some rows? The city did not publish one. Los Angeles and Cincinnati never name the contractor, and Seattle rarely does.

Why is the same address in there several times? One job often needs several permits: building, then electrical, plumbing and mechanical. Each is its own permit and its own row.

Can I look up one specific permit? Yes. Put its number in permitNumbers and every other filter is ignored.

Do I get phone numbers or owner names? No, on purpose, even on rolls that publish them.

🆘 If something breaks

Open the Issues tab on the actor page and send the run ID with the input you used. The errorCode, jurisdiction and details on a diagnostic row usually name the reason already.