Metro issued-permit changes

Public sample15 Aug 2026 vs 22 Aug 2026 · 783 dated copies held, 7 Jun to 22 Aug 2026

One real permit from each of the six cities that has a page here. Every one of these is in the copy we sealed on 22 Aug 2026 and was not in the copy we sealed on 15 Aug 2026.

Across those six cities in that week, 694 permits entered our copy and 52 sat on both copies with a different status word. Each city page below prints its own rows, its own counts and its own gaps, and rebuilds every day.

The Scottsdale row reached our copy on 17 Aug and the other five on 22 Aug, and that is not a mistake. Scottsdale’s board lands in one batch rather than a few permits a day: all 21 of its arrivals turned up in the copy we sealed on 17 Aug, and nothing has entered it in the five days since. Its page says so in those words, and recounts the days every time it rebuilds.

Nothing left the list, and that is a finding

People expect a change feed to show things leaving. This one does not, and we would rather say why than quietly leave the column out.

We compared every pair of copies we hold: 771 pairs across all 12 boards. In none of them is there a permit that was in one copy and not in the next. These boards add and they update, and once a permit is on them it stays. So the honest product here is what entered and what changed status, and the count for anything leaving is zero, printed as zero.

Doing this yourself — and why you should

This page used to say there was no public archive to go back to. That was wrong, and it is why this feed is no longer for sale. Counted off the cities’ own free boards on 25 Aug 2026:

• Austin2,372,018 rows, back to 20 Sep 1921 — and a built-in “issued in the last 30 days” marker, which is close to the thing we were charging for.
• New York City3,990,092 rows, back to 1 Jan 2007.
• San Francisco1,294,263 rows, back to 8 Nov 1906.
• Chicago845,148 rows, back to 3 Jan 2006.
• Seattle192,525 rows, back to 3 Jul 1986.
• ScottsdaleNot checked. We do not know, and we are not going to guess.

That is 8,694,046 rows of free public history across five of the six cities, and you can ask any of those boards what was issued last week without us. We do hold 783 dated copies going back to 7 Jun 2026, holding 1,720,069 sealed permit rows — but that is a record of what each board showed on a given day, which is a much smaller thing than this page was charging for.

What we hold

• A what-entered file for the cities you pick, if you askNamed permits, not totals. No charge.
• Permit number, address, permit type, city issue date and the day it reached our copyPlus the contractor, in the cities that publish one.
• Status changes between the two copies, and the days we could not collectA skipped day is named, never quietly closed over.
• Nothing to cancelThere is no subscription and no charge.

How it works

1. You email us and say which cities you sell into. There is nothing to buy on this page.
2. We reply with what we hold for those cities, what those boards fill in, and what they leave blank — and we point you at each city’s own free board first.
3. A person emails you the file at no charge. There is no checkout link, because there is nothing to buy.

Who published the data in this feed

• Every permit in this feed was published by a city or county permit board, not by us. The twelve boards are named on the coverage page. We keep dated copies of what each one put out; the permits, the addresses and the wording inside those rows are theirs.
• Some of the permits in this feed were published by the City of Austin, Texas. Austin puts this data in the public domain and asks — asks, not requires — that proper credit be given. So, plainly: this feed uses material published by City of Austin, Texas - data.austintexas.gov.
• Some of the rows counted in this feed were supplied by Marin County, California. Their permit data carries a share-alike licence, which asks for a set notice wherever their material is shown. This is that notice, in the wording the licence itself gives:
• Contains information from Building Permit, which is made available here under the Open Database License (ODbL).
• Some of the rows in this feed were supplied by Montgomery County, Maryland. Their terms of use do not ask to be credited; they require anyone using their data to carry a set form of words. This is that wording, printed word for word as the county wrote it, spelling and all:
• "The data made available here has been modified for use from its original source, which is Montgomery County, Maryland ("the County"). THE COUNTY MAKES NO REPRESENTATIONS OR WARRANTIES AS TO THE COMPLETENESS, ACCURACY, OR TIMELINESS OF ANY DATA. THE COUNTY EXPRESSLY DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES, WHETHER EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING ANY IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. THE COUNTY MAKES NO REPRESENTATION OR WARRANTY AS TO THE WEBISTE OR APPLICATION USING DATA DRAWN FROM DATA.MONTGOMERYCOUNTYMD.GOV OR FOR THE USEFULNESS OR INTEGRITY OF THE WEB SITE OR APPLICATION. The data is subject to change and possible deletion, temporarily or permanently. It is understood that the information contained in the web feed is being used at one's own risk."

What this page cannot tell you

Pages in this feed

Six cities have a page. Each one rebuilds every day out of the newest sealed copy.

The counts on these cards are the newest sealed copy at the time this page was written. The city pages carry the live ones.

Questions people ask

This data is public and free. What is this page for, then?

Nothing is charged for here any more. What we hold is a dated copy of what each board showed on a given day — and five of the six cities keep their own history free, so you will rarely need ours.

Correction, 25 Aug 2026: this paragraph used to say that every one of these boards overwrites the rest, and that there was nowhere to fetch Austin last Friday. That is false. Austin serves 2,372,018 permit rows going back to 1921 and marks the ones issued in the last 30 days for you. Four of the other five cities serve their own history too. What we hold is a dated record of what each board displayed on a given day, which is a real but much narrower thing — and not something we are willing to charge for. It is free to ask.

Do you tell me who is building it?

In four of the six cities, sometimes. In two, never.

New York City puts a contractor on every permit we hold. Austin does on 93% of them and Scottsdale on 94%. Seattle does on 7%. Chicago and San Francisco publish a house number and a street and no builder at all, so those two pages can tell you where the job is and not who is on it. Where a city leaves the field blank, the cell reads “not given” rather than being filled in.

Do you name the property owner?

No. Not on any page here, and not in any file we send.

New York’s own public permit file carries the owner’s name and our collector never copies it across. These pages name the permit, the address and, where the city gives one, the contractor. If you need owner names, we are not the supplier.

Are you allowed to collect this?

Every board here is an open-data file the city publishes itself for anyone to read.

Eleven of the twelve come from the city’s own open-data service, read through the public interface it publishes for that purpose, by a collector that says who it is. Scottsdale is read from the city’s own public permit search. We do not log in anywhere, we do not pretend to be a browser, and where a source tells us to stop we stop on the day we find out and say so on the page.

Do you have my metro?

We hold twelve boards and six of them have a page. That is nowhere near the country, and we say so on the page rather than in a reply.

The coverage page lists all twelve, including the six we seal and have not written pages for yet: Baton Rouge, Cambridge, Cincinnati, Los Angeles, Marin County and Montgomery County. If the metro you need is not on that list, we do not hold it. Email us and we will tell you, in the reply, rather than start collecting it and bill you for the wait.

One of those twelve, Marin County, is not in any file we hand out. We collect it, we count it on the coverage page and we credit it there, and it stays out of every file that leaves here. Marin publishes its permits under a licence that lets anyone we hand a copy to pass that copy on. If Marin is what you came for, say so: today we cannot hand you those rows.

How do I know these rows are real?

Check one. Take permit 2026-064019 BP at 6308 MC MURTRY ST from the table above and look it up on Austin’s public permit file. Every row on this page is a real permit on a real city board, and both dates are the days we sealed our copies.

The days we could not read a board are named, not closed over. Austin, for one, has 71 dated copies across the 77 days from 7 Jun to 22 Aug 2026, so 6 of those days have no copy at all, and each city page prints its own number. A change that happened and reversed inside one of those gaps is not in the file, and we say that instead of implying a quiet week.

You are a small company. What happens to my file if you stop?

Three answers, and none of them is a promise that we will not.

There is nothing to cancel, because there is nothing to pay. Every file we send is a plain file you keep, not a login, so everything we ever sent you still opens if we shut down tomorrow. And we are not going to tell you we have a certification or a famous client list, because we do not have either.