$104M in 30 Days: Seattle Building Permit Report — June 2026

This report covers residential building permit activity in Seattle, Washington for the May 11 – June 9, 2026 reporting window — a 30-day cross-section of what the city actually permitted. Scope matters here: 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 figure below is computed from sealed daily snapshots — data captured, hashed, and locked each day before any analysis happens — not from live queries that can shift under your feet.

Key Findings

• 438 residential building permits sealed for Seattle in the window, according to US Tech Automations' sealed permit snapshots.

• $103,523,384 in total declared valuation across the reporting window, per Seattle Department of Construction and Inspections data via data.seattle.gov (Socrata).

• $121,908 median declared valuation per permit, per the same sealed Socrata snapshots.

• 433 of 438 permits carry a declared valuation — 98.9% coverage, per Seattle Department of Construction and Inspections via data.seattle.gov (Socrata).

• Building / Addition/Alteration leads all categories at 261 permits, per the sealed snapshot record for the window.

Seattle Permit Activity, May 11 – June 9, 2026

The headline numbers describe a residential permitting market with serious money behind it. Seattle's declared valuations are unusually complete for a public permit feed, which makes the dollar figures in this section more trustworthy than they would be in a city where most permits omit a value.

Seattle permitted $103,523,384 in declared residential construction value across 438 permits between May 11 – June 9, 2026 — a median of $121,908 per permit.

The median deserves attention. A typical Seattle residential permit in this window carries a six-figure declared value, which points to substantial renovation and construction work rather than a market dominated by small repair permits. The largest single permit in the window declares $3,000,000 — a meaningful project by any residential standard, yet not so far above the median that it distorts the picture on its own.

Coverage is the quiet strength of this dataset. With 433 of the 438 permits carrying a declared valuation — 98.9% coverage — the total of $103,523,384 reflects nearly the whole permitted pipeline rather than a thin, self-selected slice. When you see a coverage figure that high, the totals and the median are describing the same market, not two different samples.

For contractors and suppliers, the practical read is simple: the permitted residential work flowing through Seattle in this window is concentrated in higher-value projects, and the public record is complete enough to act on. For lenders and analysts, the same completeness means the valuation figures can anchor underwriting conversations without heavy caveats about missing data.

Top Permit Categories

Category mix tells you what kind of work the market is actually doing. In Seattle's case, the answer is clear: this is a remodel-and-expand market first, a ground-up construction market second.

Building / Addition/Alteration dominates the window at 261 permits. That pattern is consistent with a mature, expensive housing stock where owners expand and upgrade existing homes rather than relocate — exactly the kind of demand that keeps remodelers, architects, and specialty trades busy.

Building / New comes in at 115 permits, showing that ground-up residential construction remains a real share of the pipeline even in a city with limited buildable land. Roof permits, at 27, round out the top categories — a reminder that even in a high-value market, routine envelope work still moves through the same permitting system.

For anyone selling into the trades, the category split is a targeting map. A supplier of windows, framing, or finish materials should weight outreach toward the addition/alteration pipeline; a foundation or sitework contractor will find proportionally more opportunity in the Building / New segment.

How Seattle Compares Across 8 Metros

This edition tracks 8 metros over the same May 11 – June 9, 2026 window: 7,334 residential permits and $688,331,017 ($688.3M) in declared valuation in total. Holding the window constant across jurisdictions is what makes the comparison meaningful — every row below describes the same 30 days.

Los Angeles dominates raw volume at 4,042 permits and $201.2M in total valuation, but its $7,000 median tells a different story — an enormous pipeline of small permits. San Francisco is the only metro in the edition with 100% valuation coverage, at 952 permits and $68.9M declared.

Seattle's profile is distinctive in this company. Its $121,908 median sits far above Chicago's $35,500, even though Chicago posts more permits at 566 and a larger total at $117.1M. Meanwhile New York records the highest median in the table at $204,720 on 430 permits — almost the same permit count as Seattle's 438 — but with the weakest coverage in the edition at 77.9%.

Austin reports 704 permits but no valuation data in this edition, so its dollar columns are marked with em dashes rather than misleading zeros. At the other end of the size spectrum, Scottsdale is the smallest market by count at 79 permits yet carries the table's highest median at $474,131 — a luxury-skewed pipeline. Cincinnati sits between them: 123 permits, $9.8M in total valuation, a $20,000 median, and solid 95.9% coverage.

Across all 8 metros, the edition seals 7,334 residential permits and $688,331,017 in declared valuation — with 6,171 permits, or 84%, carrying a declared value.

The takeaway for Seattle specifically: it pairs a high median with near-complete coverage, a combination no other metro in the edition matches. Where Scottsdale's median is higher but its market tiny, and New York's median is higher but its coverage thin, Seattle offers both scale and data quality — a permitted pipeline you can both size and trust.

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.

The pipeline behind these numbers works as follows:

1. Collect. A scheduled job pulls new residential permit records for Seattle each day from the Seattle Department of Construction and Inspections feed on data.seattle.gov (Socrata).

2. Normalize. Records are mapped to a common schema — permit category, declared valuation, issue date — and filtered to the residential scope stated in the introduction; commercial and sub-trade permits are excluded at ingest.

3. Seal daily. Each day's snapshot is hashed and sealed into an append-only, content-addressed store. Once sealed, a day's data cannot be quietly revised, which is the property that makes later claims auditable.

4. Aggregate. Headline figures — counts, totals, medians, coverage — are computed across the sealed snapshots that fall inside the May 11 – June 9, 2026 reporting window.

This edition is deliberately cross-sectional. It makes no month-over-month or year-over-year claims because a comparable sealed history does not yet exist; publishing trend lines before the underlying sealed record is deep enough would be exactly the kind of soft fabrication this methodology exists to prevent. The same sealing discipline underpins our permit prediction ledger, where predictions are sealed before outcomes are known and scored publicly afterward.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: How many residential building permits did Seattle issue in this reporting window?
A: 438 residential building permits were sealed for Seattle in the May 11 – June 9, 2026 window, based on daily snapshots of Seattle Department of Construction and Inspections data published via data.seattle.gov (Socrata). The count covers single-family and small multi-family permits only.

Q: What was the total declared valuation of Seattle's permits?
A: $103,523,384 — $103.5M in compact terms — in declared residential construction value across the window. That total is built from the 433 permits (of 438) that carried a declared valuation, a coverage rate of 98.9%.

Q: What is the typical value of a Seattle residential permit?
A: The median declared valuation is $121,908, and the largest single permit in the window declares $3,000,000. A six-figure median indicates the window is weighted toward substantial renovation and construction projects rather than minor repair permits.

Q: Which permit categories lead in Seattle?
A: Building / Addition/Alteration leads with 261 permits, followed by Building / New at 115 and Roof at 27. The mix points to a remodel-heavy market where upgrading existing housing stock outpaces ground-up construction.

Q: Does this report cover all construction permits in Seattle?
A: No. The scope is 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, so citywide construction activity is broader than these figures.

Q: Why are the snapshots "sealed," and why does that matter?
A: Sealing means each day's data is hashed and stored in an append-only record before analysis. Numbers published from sealed snapshots can be audited against the original capture, and they cannot be quietly revised after the fact — which is what separates verifiable reporting from retroactively tidy storytelling.

Put Permit Data to Work

Permit data is most valuable to the people who act on it within days, not quarters. Contractors use it to see where work is being approved and which categories are moving. Building-material suppliers use it to time outreach to projects that just cleared a permitting milestone. Agencies and lenders use it to ground market sizing and underwriting in the public record rather than in survey estimates.

US Tech Automations turns these permit signals into automated workflows: monitoring jurisdictions daily as new permits land, routing relevant records to the right owner inside your team, and drafting first-pass outreach that references the actual permit rather than a generic pitch. The sealed-snapshot foundation means every automated touch traces back to a verifiable public record. You can explore the underlying data at permits.ustechautomations.com.

If your business sells into residential construction in Seattle — or in any of the metros in this edition — the gap between a permit being issued and your first contact is where deals are won. Talk to us about building a permit-data workflow for your team.

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