$75 Median: Los Angeles Grading Permits — June 2026

Grading is the quiet trade that runs ahead of every hillside build in Los Angeles, and the permit file proves it. Across the May 11 – June 9, 2026 window, the city's residential record carried 292 grading permits — a busy category by count, yet one where the typical job is logged at a declared value of just $75. That tension between volume and valuation is the whole story of this page.

Hold those two figures next to each other before any table appears: 292 permits, and a median of $75. A category can be one of the most-pulled in town and still show almost no declared dollar value, and grading is the textbook case of why. Read this report as one category-level slice of the same sealed Los Angeles snapshot that produces our citywide figures.

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. Every number below is drawn from sealed daily snapshots — nothing here is estimated.

What a Grading Permit Actually Authorizes

A grading permit is the city's written authorization to move, cut, or fill earth on a residential lot before — or instead of — building anything on top of it. In the source data this category arrives under the raw label Grading / 1 or 2 Family Dwelling, which we present in plain English simply as Grading.

In Los Angeles, where so much of the housing stock clings to slopes and canyons, this permit is doing real engineering work even when the paperwork looks trivial. It covers cutting a building pad into a hillside, benching a slope for stability, importing or exporting soil, recompacting a failed fill, and shaping drainage so a lot sheds water away from foundations. Much of it is geotechnical and civil work governed by soils reports, not framing.

That is why grading so often shows up as a precursor permit. A homeowner planning a new house on a vacant hillside parcel grades the pad first; a crew stabilizing a slipped slope after winter rains grades before they pour. The dirt moves before the structure does, which is exactly why this category leads on intent and lags on declared building value.

A grading permit authorizes earthwork — cutting, filling, and shaping a residential lot — and in Los Angeles it routinely precedes the actual construction.

Who pulls it matters too. Grading permits are typically filed by licensed grading or general-engineering contractors, sometimes by a civil engineer of record on the owner's behalf. These are not casual DIY filings. The low declared dollar figure on the permit reflects how the work is reported to the building department, not the cost of mobilizing equipment and crews to a steep site.

Key Findings

• Los Angeles recorded 292 grading permits during the 30-day window, according to the Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety via data.lacity.org (Socrata).

• The typical grading permit was logged at a declared value of $75, per our sealed permit snapshots.

• Total declared valuation for the grading category came to $0.1M, the lowest dollar figure of any major residential category we track in the city.

• By count, grading outranks Swimming Pool & Spa, which posted 241 permits, according to our sealed snapshots.

• Citywide, Los Angeles logged 4,042 residential permits worth $201.2M and ranks #1 on both volume and valuation among the eight metros in this edition.

That median of $75 is the single most revealing number on this page. When the typical job is declared at the price of a permit-counter receipt rather than a construction estimate, you are looking at a category where the building department captures the activity but not the spend — the dollars live in the earthwork contract, the soils engineering, and the equipment, none of which the residential building-valuation field is built to record.

Grading Permits in Los Angeles, May 11 – June 9, 2026

The table below isolates the grading slice from the same sealed snapshot that produces our citywide numbers. We publish count, total, and median together on purpose: read across the row and the $75 median stops looking like an error and starts looking like a signal.

A total of $0.1M spread across 292 permits, with a median of $75, is not a sign of cheap work — it is a sign that the work's real cost is recorded somewhere other than the building-valuation field. Compare that $75 grading median to the $7,000 citywide median across all residential categories and the gap is enormous, which is precisely the read this page exists to deliver.

Grading posted 292 permits against just $0.1M in declared valuation — high activity, near-invisible declared dollars.

For the full citywide distribution behind that $7,000 figure, see our Los Angeles building permit report. It places grading inside the metro's complete permit mix and explains how the city's valuation field behaves across every category.

How Grading Compares Across the Los Angeles Mix

Grading only means something next to the categories it runs alongside. The table below places it against the city's other leading residential permit types in the same window, then against the citywide headline row. The shape of this table is the argument: notice how count and declared dollars diverge from line to line.

Read down the valuation column and grading is the outlier. New Construction carries a $180,000 median and $111.7M in total declared value off just 359 permits — fewer than grading — because each new home is a large, fully-priced building project. Grading, with nearly as many permits, contributes $0.1M. The category is busy in the permit stream and nearly silent in the dollar stream, and that contrast is the most useful thing the mix tells you.

Grading Versus the Big-Ticket Categories

New Construction and Addition are where the declared money concentrates. A new home declares its full structure value; an addition declares the cost of the new square footage. Grading declares almost nothing because the building-valuation field is not designed to hold an earthwork or soils contract. So a hillside parcel can generate a $75 grading permit this month and a six-figure New Construction permit later — two records, two very different declared values, one project.

Grading Versus the Other Site-Work Categories

The closer cousins are Demolition and Non-Building New Work, each at 106 permits. Demolition (median $5,000) clears a structure; Non-Building New Work (median $10,000) covers retaining walls, decks, and other site features that are not the dwelling itself. Grading sits earlier in that same site-preparation sequence — shaping the ground before walls go up or after a slope fails — which is why its declared value runs even lower than those neighbors.

What the Concentration Implies

Across the wider city the spread is wide. The table below lays out the citywide valuation distribution so the $75 grading median has something to sit against — read it as the backdrop the grading category drops far beneath.

Declared valuations run from $2,500 at the lower quartile to $35,000 at the upper quartile, with the $7,000 citywide median between them and a single permit reaching as high as $4,000,000. Grading's $75 median lands far below even that lower quartile. For anyone reading the market, that places grading firmly in the signal column rather than the revenue column — it tells you where ground is being moved, not how much is being spent.

How We Built These Numbers

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.

The category-level view is a straightforward cut of the same sealed records behind the citywide report. We do not keep a separate grading dataset — we filter the Los Angeles metro snapshot down to the Grading / 1 or 2 Family Dwelling label and aggregate over the window. The scope rules and honesty constraints that govern the citywide report apply identically here. Where a permit lacks a declared valuation, it still counts toward the permit total but adds nothing to the valuation total; across the metro, coverage runs at 93.5%, with 3,779 records carrying a valuation figure.

This edition is cross-sectional. It describes one 30-day window and makes no claim about trends, growth, or change over time, because comparable historical windows do not yet exist in this series. When you read "292 grading permits," read it as a count for this window only.

Here is how a figure on this page comes to exist:

1. Collect. We pull the day's residential permit records from the Socrata endpoint at data.lacity.org, capturing the raw fields exactly as the city published them.

2. Normalize. We map each record's source label to a consistent category — here, Grading — without discarding or inventing anything.

3. Seal. Each daily snapshot is content-hashed and stored append-only, so the underlying records cannot be quietly edited after the fact.

4. Aggregate. At report time we filter the sealed snapshots to the grading category and sum across the May 11 – June 9, 2026 window to produce the counts and valuations above.

That sealing step is what separates this from a one-off database query. The 292 you see here is reproducible from a fixed, hashed record set, not a number that shifts the next time the source updates. Our prediction ledger explains how we hold ourselves to the same standard when we score forward-looking claims against public outcomes.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Why is the median grading permit only $75?
A: Because the residential building-valuation field is built to record structure cost, not earthwork. A grading permit authorizes moving and shaping dirt, and the real spend lives in the grading contract, the soils engineering, and the equipment — none of which that field captures. The $75 median reflects how the work is reported, not what it costs.

Q: Is 292 the total number of grading jobs in Los Angeles?
A: It is the count of residential grading permits — single-family and small multi-family — for the May 11 – June 9, 2026 window. Commercial and sub-trade permits are excluded at ingest, so this is not every grading permit the city issued.

Q: Who pulls a grading permit?
A: Usually a licensed grading or general-engineering contractor, sometimes a civil engineer filing on the owner's behalf. On a hillside lot the grading crew often arrives before the homebuilder, which is why this category reads as an early signal of construction intent.

Q: How does grading compare to the rest of the Los Angeles permit mix?
A: By count it is busy — 292 permits, ahead of Swimming Pool & Spa at 241. By declared value it is the quietest major category, at $0.1M total. Citywide, Los Angeles logged 4,042 residential permits worth $201.2M and ranks #1 among the eight metros we track.

Q: Can I trust that the 292 figure will not change later?
A: Each daily snapshot is hashed and stored append-only, so the grading count is computed from a fixed record set. That is the point of sealing — the number is reproducible rather than a moving target.

Put Permit Data to Work

A grading permit is one of the earliest public signals a residential project gives off, and that makes it valuable out of all proportion to its $75 median. Each of these 292 records marks a lot where ground is being moved — and on a hillside, that often means a new home is coming. A grading contractor can use the file to qualify which neighborhoods are turning dirt; a soils or retaining-wall supplier can time inventory to the site-work the mix implies; an agent can read clusters of grading as a pre-listing tempo worth watching.

For the trade reading these signals, the swimming-pool record offers a useful contrast: see our Los Angeles swimming pool and spa permits report for a category where declared value tracks the work much more closely, and our northeast Los Angeles ZIP report for how the same data reads at neighborhood scale.

This is where automation earns its place. We build agentic workflows that monitor sealed permit feeds, route each new grading record to the right person, and draft the first outreach — so an early-stage signal like a $75 grading permit does not get ignored just because its declared value is small. The same sealed snapshots behind this report power those workflows, and you can browse the underlying permit data at permits.ustechautomations.com.

If you work the Los Angeles site-work trades and want permit signals turned into a working pipeline rather than a spreadsheet, our real estate AI agents are built for exactly that handoff — from raw record to qualified, routed lead.

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