Building Permits Issued by City, Last 30 Days

Permits issued in the 30 days ending August 21, 2026, the newest issue date in the data. Each city carries its own "data through" date, because the cities publish on their own schedules and a city that stopped publishing is not a city that stopped building.

Across every city we collect, 7,616 permits were issued in that window with a combined declared value of $1.02B. 3 cities are more than two days behind the newest issue date in the set: Los Angeles (through 2026-08-15, 6 days back), Scottsdale (through 2026-08-14, 7 days back), Cambridge (through 2026-08-14, 7 days back). Their windows therefore end earlier than everyone else's, which lowers their counts on its own.

How to read the value column

"Declared value" is the construction cost the applicant wrote on the permit. It is not a sale price, not an appraisal, and not what the work ends up costing. Cities differ in what they require applicants to declare, so the column compares a city with itself over time far better than it compares two cities with each other.

The bracket after each figure is how many of that city's permits carried a value at all. Where none did, the cell says "not published" instead of a zero — Austin publishes permits without one. A total built from a partial column is smaller than the city's real construction spend, and the bracket is how you can see by how much.

A permit count is a count of paperwork, not of buildings. One project can pull a structural permit, an electrical permit, and a plumbing permit; a small city with a strict split will look busier than a large one that issues a single combined permit.

What a busy ZIP means

The busiest ZIP column is the single postal code with the most permits in the window. It is where the paperwork was filed, which usually but not always means where the work is. Some cities file against a mailing address for a portfolio owner, which piles unrelated jobs into one ZIP.

Where a city publishes no postal code at all, the column says so rather than guessing one from the street address.

Where these numbers come from

Each city publishes its own permit records through an open data portal. The clock reads those portals daily, stores one row per permit with a hash of the record, and never edits a stored row. The window above is recomputed from those rows on every rebuild.

• Source: the open permit record published by each city or county named above.

• Window: 30 days ending 2026-08-21, measured on the permit's own issue date.

• Freshness on this page is the newest issue date in the stored permits. It is not the ingest job's finish time — the job can finish cleanly against a portal that has published nothing new for a week.

This page is rewritten from the source clock and keeps the same url every time. Data through 2026-08-21. Row hash b8ad24e4f386812696898fbcbbf90553d57a022b59ed11d22e573420179df8c2. Machine-readable copies: CSV · JSON.

Something here look wrong? Reply to any page on this site with the row and the date and we will recheck it against the seal.