$30.9M in Alteration & Repair Permits: Los Angeles — June 2026

Los Angeles logged $30.9M of permitted alteration and repair work in the May 11 – June 9, 2026 reporting window — 2,486 permits, more filings than any other residential category in the city. This report examines that slice: what an Alteration & Repair permit actually covers in Los Angeles, what the filings were worth on paper, and how the category fits the city's broader residential mix. Every figure is computed from sealed daily permit snapshots, and this edition is cross-sectional: one window, no trend claims.

Scope: residential building permits (single-family and small multi-family); commercial and sub-trade permits are excluded at ingest. This is not a count of all construction permits issued in each city.

What Counts as an Alteration & Repair Permit in Los Angeles

The Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety classifies this work at intake under the source label "Bldg-Alter/Repair / 1 or 2 Family Dwelling." In plain terms, it is the permit for changing or fixing an existing one- or two-family home without adding new floor area. Kitchen and bathroom remodels, interior reconfigurations, structural repairs, window and door replacements that alter openings, foundation work, and fire or water damage repair all typically run through this permit type.

What it is not: additions that expand the footprint, brand-new dwellings, demolitions, pools, and standalone site structures each carry their own classification, and stand-alone trade work — a water heater swap, a panel upgrade — is generally filed under separate electrical, plumbing, or mechanical permits that sit outside this report's residential building scope entirely.

Who pulls these permits matters for reading the data. Alteration and repair filings come from a wide base: general contractors running whole-home remodels, specialty remodelers handling kitchens and baths, and homeowners filing as owner-builders for smaller scopes. Simple jobs can often clear an express or over-the-counter style review, while larger structural alterations go through plan check. That breadth is exactly why this category posts high counts and modest typical values.

Key Findings

• Los Angeles recorded 2,486 Alteration & Repair permits in 30 days, according to US Tech Automations' sealed permit snapshots.

• Reported Alteration & Repair valuation totaled $30.9M for the window, per the Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety via data.lacity.org (Socrata).

• The median Alteration & Repair filing is valued at $5,000, according to the sealed snapshot data.

• Alteration & Repair supplies 2,486 of the city's 4,042 residential permits, according to the same sealed snapshots.

• By dollars, New Construction leads with $111.7M; Alteration & Repair reports $30.9M, per the sealed category aggregates.

Alteration & Repair Permits in Los Angeles, May 11 – June 9, 2026

The headline figures for the category slice are copied directly from the sealed snapshot aggregates. Valuations are applicant-declared at filing, not independent appraisals.

The shape of this slice is the story. A $5,000 median means the typical alteration or repair filing is a small, single-scope job — a repair after damage, a modest interior change, one room rather than a whole house. The $30.9M total is therefore built from volume: thousands of small filings rather than a handful of large ones.

The median Alteration & Repair permit in Los Angeles is valued at $5,000; the category's 2,486 filings total $30.9M in reported work.

That $5,000 category median sits below the metro-wide $7,000 median across all residential permits. Metro-wide, the middle half of the valuation distribution runs from $2,500 at the low end to $35,000 at the high end — and the heavy weight of alteration and repair filings is a big part of why the low end of that range sits where it does. A market this weighted toward small permitted jobs is a market where many different firms, not a few large ones, are doing the work.

For contractors, that distribution reads as accessible, fast-turning demand: jobs that open and close quickly, spread across the city, with low barriers for smaller crews. For suppliers, it implies steady repeat purchasing of finish materials and repair-grade stock rather than lumpy framing-package orders.

How Alteration & Repair Fits the Los Angeles Mix

Alteration & Repair is the most-filed category in Los Angeles, but the mix table shows it is not where the biggest dollars sit. The table below covers the city's tracked residential categories alongside the metro headline row; the full Los Angeles report covers the metro-level picture in depth.

Alteration & Repair accounts for 2,486 of Los Angeles' 4,042 residential permits, yet its $30.9M in reported valuation trails New Construction's $111.7M and Addition's $47.6M.

The inversion between counts and dollars is the defining feature of this mix. Permit volume concentrates in small remodel and repair work, while reported value concentrates in the far less numerous new builds and additions. Each category below carries a different kind of signal, so they are worth reading one at a time.

Addition — 422 permits, $47.6M

Addition permits cover projects that expand a home's footprint or add floor area: a new bedroom wing, a second story, an expanded kitchen, an attached accessory space. At a $67,064 median, these are substantial undertakings — typically architect- or designer-involved, plan-checked, and months long. For trades, an addition behaves like a miniature new build: foundation, framing, roofing, and full finish work on one address. The category's $47.6M total from just 422 filings shows how much value each one carries relative to a repair job.

New Construction — 359 permits, $111.7M

New Construction covers ground-up one- and two-family dwellings, and it is where the dollars concentrate: $111.7M in reported valuation — the largest category total in the city — from 359 permits at a $180,000 median. These projects move through full plan review and a long inspection sequence, and they concentrate spending with fewer, larger builders. A supplier or lender reading this window sees a clear structure: the new-build segment is small in count but carries the deepest per-project value in the residential market.

Grading — 292 permits, $0.1M

Grading permits govern earthwork on residential lots — cuts, fills, and drainage changes — and in hillside Los Angeles they are a fact of life for many projects. The numbers look odd at first glance: 292 permits totaling just $0.1M, with a $75 median. The explanation is that grading valuations describe the earthwork scope itself, often a nominal figure attached to a larger project. Grading filings are best read as a leading marker of site preparation rather than as a spending category in their own right.

Swimming Pool & Spa — 241 permits, $25,000 median

Pool and spa construction gets its own classification, and its profile is distinctive: 241 permits totaling $6.5M, with a $25,000 median that is far more uniform than the remodel categories. Pools are discretionary, contractor-built projects with relatively standardized pricing, which is exactly what the tight clustering around the median suggests. For pool builders, equipment suppliers, and the trades that follow pools — electrical, plumbing, decking — this is one of the cleanest single-trade demand signals in the dataset.

Demolition — 106 permits, $0.7M

Demolition permits cover tearing down existing dwellings or major structures, and at 106 filings with a $5,000 median they are a small but meaningful slice. Demolition is rarely an end in itself: a demo filing on a residential lot frequently precedes a new-build application on the same parcel. Read alongside the 359 New Construction permits, the demolition count sketches the redevelopment pipeline — lots being cleared for what comes next.

Non-Building New Work — 106 permits, $3.4M

The "Nonbldg-New / 1 or 2 Family Dwelling" label covers new structures that are not the dwelling itself — retaining walls, fences over standard height, and similar site structures on residential lots. With 106 permits, $3.4M in reported valuation, and a $10,000 median, this category tracks investment in the lot rather than the house. In a hillside-heavy city, retaining-wall work in particular often travels together with grading filings on the same projects.

Other metros in this edition slice the same kind of work differently. San Francisco routes much of its remodel volume through an over-the-counter review path — covered in our San Francisco OTC alterations report — while Chicago files it under a renovation and alteration classification, covered in the Chicago renovation and alteration report.

The category labels differ, but the underlying pattern of high-count, modest-median remodel work appears across jurisdictions, including in Austin's renovation and remodel filings.

Methodology

Source: Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety via data.lacity.org (Socrata). All figures are computed directly from US Tech Automations' sealed daily permit snapshots; nothing is estimated, modeled, or extrapolated.

This page is a category-level cut of the same sealed snapshots behind the metro report: every Alteration & Repair figure here is a slice of the Los Angeles records for the May 11 – June 9, 2026 window, filtered on the source category label with no recoding. Category labels are reproduced verbatim from the source feed.

Coverage matters when reading totals. In Los Angeles, 3,779 of 4,042 permits carry a reported valuation — 93.5% — and across the full edition, 6,171 of 7,334 permits do, for 84% coverage. Valuation totals summarize only filings that declare a dollar amount, so they should be read as floors. Los Angeles ranks #1 among the 8 metros for both permit count and total reported valuation.

How the numbers are produced:

1. Collect. Pull each jurisdiction's public permit feed daily — for Los Angeles, the Department of Building and Safety dataset published on data.lacity.org.

2. Normalize. Map each city's fields onto a common schema and apply the residential scope filter at ingest, before any aggregation happens.

3. Seal daily. Hash each day's snapshot and store it append-only, so any figure in this report can be re-derived from the exact records behind it.

4. Aggregate. Filter the sealed Los Angeles records to the Alteration & Repair source label and summarize over the May 11 – June 9, 2026 window, with no estimation, interpolation, or backfill.

The same sealing discipline applies to our forward-looking work: the permit prediction ledger seals predictions before outcomes are observable, so they can be scored honestly later.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: How many Alteration & Repair permits did Los Angeles issue in this window?
A: 2,486 permits in the May 11 – June 9, 2026 reporting window, according to sealed daily snapshots of the Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety feed on data.lacity.org (Socrata). That makes it the most-filed residential category in the city for the window.

Q: What does an Alteration & Repair permit cover in Los Angeles?
A: Work that changes or repairs an existing one- or two-family dwelling without adding floor area — remodels, structural repairs, altered openings, foundation work, damage repair. Additions, new dwellings, demolitions, pools, and standalone trade permits are classified separately. The source label is "Bldg-Alter/Repair / 1 or 2 Family Dwelling."

Q: Why is the median Alteration & Repair valuation only $5,000?
A: Because the typical filing is a small, single-scope job. The category median is $5,000, below the metro-wide $7,000 median; across all Los Angeles residential permits, the middle half of declared valuations runs from $2,500 to $35,000. Volume, not project size, is what drives the category's $30.9M total.

Q: Is Alteration & Repair the biggest residential category in Los Angeles?
A: By count, yes — 2,486 of the city's 4,042 residential permits. By dollars, no: its $30.9M in reported valuation trails New Construction at $111.7M and Addition at $47.6M. The category leads on volume while the larger project types lead on value.

Q: Does this report count every construction permit in Los Angeles?
A: No. It covers residential building permits (single-family and small multi-family); commercial and sub-trade permits are excluded at ingest. It is a category-level slice of that residential scope, not a count of all construction permits issued in the city.

Put Permit Data to Work

Alteration and repair filings are the most actionable slice of the Los Angeles feed precisely because they are small and fast. A remodel permitted this week is a job site within weeks — which makes the daily feed a live map of where remodel money is moving, block by block. Contractors use it to qualify neighborhoods before spending on marketing; suppliers use the category mix to time inventory toward finish materials rather than framing packages; lenders and agents read remodel density as a signal of owner investment ahead of listings.

The catch is cadence. Most firms encounter permit data in quarterly summaries, long after the work is bid. In a category where the typical job is a $5,000 filing that opens and closes quickly, the value is in seeing filings the week they post.

US Tech Automations turns these signals into automated workflows: monitoring new filings as they appear, routing leads that match a trade or territory, and drafting outreach grounded in the underlying record rather than generic templates. The live data behind this report is available at permits.ustechautomations.com, and if you want permit signals wired into your own pipeline, contact us.

Source: US Tech Automations Research — computed from sealed daily permit snapshots, May 11 – June 9, 2026.