$50,000 Median: Seattle Addition & Alteration Permits

Addition & Alteration is Seattle's single most-filed residential permit category — 193 permits in the June 13 – July 11, 2026 window, ahead of every other category tracked in the city. Yet the typical project behind that volume is valued at just $50,000, a fraction of what the city's New Building category posts at $357,398. This report is a category-level slice of the same sealed Seattle snapshot behind our metro report: what an Addition & Alteration permit covers, what the 193 filings were worth, and how the category fits the city's broader residential mix.

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.

Seattle logged 193 Addition & Alteration permits worth $19.1M in the window.

What Is an Addition & Alteration Permit, Exactly

Seattle's own source label for this category is "Building / Addition/Alteration." In plain terms, it covers work that changes, restores, or expands an existing house without necessarily being a ground-up rebuild: room additions, interior remodels, structural repairs, foundation work, and similar scopes. General contractors running whole-home remodels, specialty remodelers handling kitchens and baths, and homeowners filing as owner-builders for smaller scopes all pull this same permit type.

What it is not: brand-new dwellings run through Seattle's "Building / New" category instead, and teardown work is filed separately as "Demolition / Demolition." That breadth — everything from a small repair to a large addition, filed by everyone from a homeowner to a licensed general contractor — is exactly why this category posts the city's highest permit count alongside one of its more modest typical valuations. It is also the same category leading ZIP-level reports like 98125 and 98133.

The permit itself typically covers plan review and inspection for the specific scope described on the application — a kitchen remodel permit does not authorize a later room addition, and a foundation repair permit does not cover a separate deck build. That scope-by-scope filing pattern is part of why the category racks up such a high count: many households and buildings generate more than one Addition & Alteration filing over time as different projects move through at different points.

The Numbers at a Glance

• Per the sealed permit snapshot data, Seattle recorded 193 Addition & Alteration permits in 30 days.

• Per the Seattle Department of Construction and Inspections via data.seattle.gov (Socrata), Addition & Alteration valuation totaled $19.1M for the window.

• According to the same sealed snapshot data, the median Addition & Alteration permit is valued at $50,000.

• Per the sealed category aggregates, Addition & Alteration supplies 193 of the city's 311 residential permits.

• According to the sealed snapshot, New Building carries a $357,398 median, well above Addition & Alteration's $50,000.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: How many Addition & Alteration permits did Seattle issue in this window?
A: Per the sealed permit snapshot data, 193 permits in the June 13 – July 11, 2026 window — the most of any residential category tracked in the city, out of 311 total residential permits.

Q: Why is the median Addition & Alteration permit only $50,000 when the category leads the city in volume?
A: Per the sealed data, the category's 193 permits total $19.1M, and its $50,000 median sits below Seattle's $100,000 citywide median and well below New Building's $357,398 median. High count and high typical value are two separate things, and this category leads on the first, not the second.

Q: What kind of work actually requires an Addition & Alteration permit in Seattle?
A: Work that changes or expands an existing dwelling without a full rebuild — additions, interior remodels, structural repairs, and foundation work. New dwellings and demolitions are classified separately under "Building / New" and "Demolition / Demolition."

Q: Is Addition & Alteration Seattle's biggest category by both count and dollars?
A: By count, yes — 193 of the city's 311 residential permits. By dollars, no: its $19.1M in reported valuation trails New Building's $30.0M from just 78 permits. The category leads on volume while New Building leads on total value.

Q: Who typically files these permits?
A: A wide base — general contractors running larger remodels, specialty remodeling firms, and homeowners filing as owner-builders for smaller jobs. That range of filers is part of why the category posts high counts at modest typical values, and it is also why no single trade dominates the leads generated by this category.

Q: How is a sealed snapshot different from querying the city's live permit system directly?
A: A live query can change every time the source system updates, silently rewriting last week's figures. Under this sealed-snapshot methodology, each day's data is hashed and stored before analysis, so every number in this report stays fixed to what the June 13 – July 11, 2026 window contained on the day it was sealed.

Q: Does Addition & Alteration's $19.1M total include every dollar of remodel work permitted in Seattle?
A: Not quite. Citywide, 309 of Seattle's 311 permits carry a reported valuation, a 99.4% coverage rate, so a small share of permits in any category — including this one — may be missing a dollar figure. The $19.1M total should be read as a floor rather than an exact accounting of every reported project.

Addition & Alteration Permits in Seattle, June 13 – July 11, 2026

The shape of this slice is the story. A $50,000 median means the typical Addition & Alteration filing is a modest, single-scope project rather than a major undertaking. Citywide, the middle half of all residential permits falls between $24,475 and $328,802 — and this category's median sits in the lower half of that range, closer to the floor than the ceiling.

Addition & Alteration's $50,000 median sits below Seattle's $100,000 citywide median.

For contractors, that distribution reads as accessible, fast-turning demand — jobs that open and close quickly, spread across the city, with room for smaller crews as well as larger firms. For suppliers, it implies steady repeat purchasing of finish and repair-grade materials rather than large single-project orders.

Where Addition & Alteration Sits in Seattle's Permit Mix

Addition & Alteration accounts for 193 of Seattle's 311 residential permits, yet its $19.1M in reported valuation trails New Building's $30.0M from just 78 permits.

The inversion between counts and dollars is the defining feature of this mix. A third category, "Demolition / Demolition," recorded 18 permits in the window — the smallest of Seattle's three leading categories, and one this slice does not carry valuation figures for. Permit volume in Seattle concentrates in remodel and repair work, while reported value concentrates in the far less numerous new-build category — a pattern our New Building report covers from the other side.

Other metros in this edition slice similar remodel-heavy work under different labels. Los Angeles files comparable work as Alteration & Repair, covered in our Los Angeles Alteration & Repair report, while San Francisco routes much of it through an over-the-counter review path in our San Francisco OTC Alterations report. The category names differ, but the pattern of high-count, modest-median remodel work recurs across jurisdictions.

What the Coverage Rate Means for These Totals

Every total on this page is a floor, not a ceiling. Citywide, 309 of Seattle's 311 permits carry a reported valuation, a 99.4% coverage rate — high, but not complete. A small number of permits in any category may lack a reported dollar figure at all, so Addition & Alteration's own $19.1M total does not include whatever value those missing figures might represent.

Even against a citywide high of $2,000,000 for a single reported permit, Addition & Alteration's own $50,000 median confirms this category's typical project is modest, not exceptional.

That gap between one $2,000,000 filing and a $50,000 typical project illustrates why this report leads with the median rather than the total. A handful of large permits in any category can inflate a total without changing what a typical project actually costs, and Addition & Alteration's own figures show both sides of that split clearly.

Methodology

Source: Seattle Department of Construction and Inspections via data.seattle.gov (Socrata). All figures are computed directly from US Tech Automations' sealed daily permit snapshots; nothing is estimated, modeled, or extrapolated.

Every Addition & Alteration figure here is a category-level slice of the same sealed snapshots behind the Seattle building permit report — filtered from the city's June 13 – July 11, 2026 records on the source category label, not re-collected or recoded. Citywide, 309 of 311 permits carry a reported valuation, a 99.4% coverage rate, so valuation totals should be read as floors. Seattle ranks #6 among this edition's 8 metros by permit count and #4 by total reported valuation.

Across the full edition, 6,456 permits were logged across all 8 metros, worth $747.7M, at 84% valuation coverage over the June 13 – July 12, 2026 window.

How the numbers are produced:

1. Collect each jurisdiction's public permit feed daily — for Seattle, the Department of Construction and Inspections dataset on data.seattle.gov.

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

3. Seal each day's snapshot by hashing and storing it append-only, so any figure here can be re-derived from the exact records behind it — the same discipline behind our permit prediction ledger.

4. Aggregate the sealed Seattle records filtered to the Addition & Alteration source label over the June 13 – July 11, 2026 window, with no estimation or backfill.

Put Permit Data to Work

Addition & Alteration filings are the most actionable slice of the Seattle feed precisely because they are numerous and fast-moving. 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. Contractors use it to qualify neighborhoods before spending on marketing; suppliers use the category mix to time inventory toward finish materials; lenders and agents read remodel density as a signal of owner investment ahead of a listing.

At 193 permits in a single window, this category alone generates more raw filings than most other categories tracked across the entire edition. That volume is exactly why manual review does not scale here: a team scanning the feed by hand can realistically follow a handful of filings closely, while an automated watch can flag every one against a defined territory or trade the moment it posts.

New Building's $357,398 median dwarfs Addition & Alteration's $50,000 figure.

The catch is cadence: most firms encounter permit data in stale quarterly summaries, long after the work is bid. US Tech Automations turns this signal 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. The live data behind this report is available at permits.ustechautomations.com, and if you want permit signals wired into your own pipeline, see how agentic workflows can route them automatically.

Source: US Tech Automations Research — computed from sealed daily permit snapshots, June 13 – July 11, 2026.