What entered the Chicago permit list this week

What this page is123,691 rows held · newest sealed read 2026-09-05

• 179 permits are in the copy we sealed on 5 Sep 2026 and were not in the one we sealed on 29 Aug 2026, 7 days earlier. The board went from 2,327 permits to 2,506.
• 140 of them carry a city issue date on or after 29 Aug 2026, the day of the earlier copy. 39 carry an older one: the city had already issued those and they only reached our copy afterwards. Both numbers are here because new to us is not the same as issued this morning.
• Half of them showed up in our copy within 2 days of the date the city stamped on the permit, and the slowest took 11 days. The oldest of them was issued 12 days before the newer copy.
• 5 permits sat on both copies with a different status word: ACTIVE to COMPLETE (5).
• Nothing left the list. All 2,327 permits in the 29 Aug 2026 copy are still in the 5 Sep 2026 copy, so the count of permits that were on one and not the other is 0.
• All 184 permits counted on this page clear the bar we set for a named row: a permit number plus an address or a contractor.

Real rows out of our sealed copies

These are rows we read out of dated copies we keep ourselves. The live source shows today only, so once a row moves, what it said before is gone from the place you would go to look.

Who published the data on this page

• Every permit on this page was published by the Chicago permit board, not by us. We keep dated copies of what they put out; the permits, the addresses and the wording inside those rows are theirs.

What this page cannot tell you

• In our copy is not issued today. A permit counted here is one that is in the 5 Sep 2026 copy and was not in the 29 Aug 2026 one. That is first seen by us. 39 of the 179 carry a city issue date older than the earlier copy.
• The address and the contractor are today's values, not the sealed ones. The dated copy we seal carries the permit number, the status, the issue date, the type and the ZIP. The street address and the contractor come from the live table the collector keeps, joined on the same permit, so if the city corrected one of those after we sealed the copy you are reading the correction.
• Chicago does not give a contractor name at all. The file carries a house number and a street and no builder, so this page can tell you where the job is and not who is on it. If naming the builder is the whole reason you would buy this, say so before you pay.
• No property owner is named. These pages name the permit, the address and, where the city gives one, the contractor. They do not name a person who owns a building. Every address on this page is cut back to the street: we print 1801 W ST Johns Ave, never the flat or unit number the city prints after it. A suite or a PMB stays, because an office is not a home. Nothing has been removed from the city's file or from our copy of it -- this is a rule about what we republish, not about what we hold.
• The status words are Chicago's own. We print them exactly as the copy sealed them and we do not translate them, so they cannot be lined up against another city's words.
• 145 permits in the newest copy carry no status word at all. The city left the field empty. We cannot tell you whether those jobs are running.
• 6 days between 9 Jun 2026 and 5 Sep 2026 have no sealed copy. Nothing was collected on those days, so a change that happened and reversed inside one of those gaps is not on this page.
• This is the city's published board, not the city's whole record. We hold what Chicago put on its public permit file on the day we read it. A permit the city never published is not here, and we cannot tell you how many of those there are.

More from this feed

• Up one level: Metro issued-permit changesThe whole feed, its price, and how the file arrives.
• What is and is not in this feedEvery source we read for it, how often, and the ones we refuse to collect.