Metro permits: the places we hold and the places we do not

What this page is2,013,335 rows held · newest sealed read 2026-08-30

• We hold 12 permit boards. 6 of them have a page on this site: Austin, Chicago, New York City, San Francisco, Scottsdale, Seattle.
• 879 dated copies in all, 7 Jun 2026 to 30 Aug 2026, holding 2,013,335 sealed permit rows between them.
• Across the six cities with pages, 629 permits entered our copy in the week to 30 Aug 2026 and 52 changed status.
• 0 permits left the list in that week. Across all 867 pairs of consecutive sealed copies in this store, for all 12 places, the count of permits present in one copy and absent from the next is zero. The collector adds and updates; it does not drop.
• 4 of the 6 cities with pages give a contractor name on at least some permits. 2 give none at all, so those pages can tell you where the job is and not who is on it.

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 counted on this page was published by a city or county permit board, not by us. The twelve boards are named in the first table above. 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 here 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 page uses material published by City of Austin, Texas - data.austintexas.gov.
• Some of the rows counted on this page 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 counted on this page 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

• 6 boards in this store have no page here yet. Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Cambridge, Massachusetts; Cincinnati, Ohio; Los Angeles, California; Marin County, California; Montgomery County, Maryland. We seal them the same way. We have not written pages for them, and we will say what we hold for one of them in an email rather than guess on a page.
• Marin County is not in any file you buy. We collect it, we count it on this page and we credit it here, and it stays out of every file we sell. Marin publishes its permits under a licence that lets anyone we hand a copy to pass that copy on, and we are not selling that right. If Marin is what you came for, say so before you pay: today we cannot sell you those rows.
• No property owner is named on any of these pages. They name the permit, the address and, where the city gives one, the contractor.
• 2 of the 6 cities give no contractor name. Chicago and San Francisco publish a house number and a street and no builder, so those pages can tell you where the job is and not who is on it.
• Entered our copy is not issued today. Every city page prints both numbers: how many of the week's arrivals carry an issue date inside the window and how many were issued before it.
• The street address and the contractor are today's values. They come from the live table the collector keeps, not from the dated copy, so a correction the city made after the seal is what you read.
• This is what each city published, not what each city did. A permit a city never put on its public file is not here, and we cannot tell you how many of those there are.
• Twelve places is not the country. If the metro you sell into is not on this list, we do not hold it, and we will say so in the reply rather than start collecting it and bill you for the wait.

More from this feed

• Up one level: Metro issued-permit changesThe whole feed, its price, and how the file arrives.