PermitMint Housing & Renovation Data Center
Original analysis of 5,944,592 U.S. building permits across 1,536 cities, free for journalists, researchers, and home-improvement professionals to use with attribution.
Last updated:
What's here: Permit Fees by U.S. City · Project Mix by U.S. City · Permit Approval Timelines by U.S. City
Data confidence note: not all U.S. jurisdictions publish machine-readable permit history, so coverage is denser in mid-size and large cities than in small towns. Permit-type categories are normalized across sources where possible, but each city's original classification is preserved in the downloads. Refresh frequency varies by source portal — details and known limitations in the methodology section below.
Cite this data
Attribution is free and appreciated. Copy the format you need:
PermitMint. (2026). PermitMint housing & renovation data center. Retrieved April 19, 2026, from https://permitmint.com/data/
Source: PermitMint analysis of 5,944,592 U.S. building permits across 1,536 cities, last updated April 19, 2026.
Source: <a href="https://permitmint.com/data/">PermitMint</a>
Featured findings
Quick-reference stats from the current dataset. Each links to the underlying data.
The average permit fee varies 14.9x across the cities in our dataset: Norfolk averages $164, while Raleigh averages $2,440.
Across cities with ≥100 permit records and a reported fee. Outliers above $100K excluded.
From the permit-fees-by-city CSV. View on page →
Electrical permits are the single most-filed category across the cities in our dataset, accounting for 10.9% of all permits in the top 15 categories.
Based on 5,944,592 permit records across cities with normalized category data. Categories reflect each city's original classification.
From the project-mix-by-city CSV. View on page →
PermitMint tracks 5,944,592 real U.S. permit records across over 1.8M unique addresses in 1,536 jurisdictions.
Sourced from official municipal open-data feeds. Refreshes hourly.
From the project-mix-by-city CSV. View on page →
Datasets
Three downloadable datasets, no signup. All released under CC-BY 4.0, free to use including commercially, attribution required. Raw permit records are not published, only aggregates (averages, counts, percentages), to protect address-level privacy.
Permit Fees by U.S. City
For journalists & researchersAverage project cost and average permit fee for each covered U.S. city, calculated from all permits with a declared value. Extreme outliers (cost > $10M or fee > $100K) excluded.
Project Mix by U.S. City
For journalists & researchersThe most-filed permit categories — deck/fence/roof/electrical/plumbing etc. — ranked by volume across the full dataset and broken out per city. Shows what homeowners actually permit vs. what industry reports assume they permit.
Permit Approval Timelines by U.S. City
For journalists & researchersAverage number of days between permit filing and issuance per U.S. city, for jurisdictions where both dates are recorded. Pairs with the fees dataset for "which city is fastest AND cheapest" comparisons.
Methodology
Data sources
Two layers, combined on the site:
- Permit rules — hand-researched from each jurisdiction’s published municipal code, fee schedule, and building-department website. Every rule row cites a primary source URL. Where a jurisdiction publishes no live guidance, we mark data confidence as low and fall back to the state-adopted IRC (International Residential Code) baseline with applicable local amendments.
- Permit history — raw permit records crawled hourly from official municipal open-data APIs (Socrata, ArcGIS, CKAN, CARTO). Each record carries its source dataset and original record ID so results are reproducible from the origin feed.
Coverage
Rules data covers 1,536 U.S. jurisdictions across all 50 states plus DC. Permit-history data covers 49 cities with published open-data feeds; the remainder have hand-researched rules only because their permit activity isn’t machine-readable. Permit-history date range is 2021-01-01 to present for most cities; a handful have deeper archives extending back to the 1980s or 1990s where the source feed allows.
Refresh cadence
Rules are re-verified city-by-city on a rolling cycle (last-verified date shown on every permit page). Permit history updates hourly via one city per cron tick — full rotation through the covered cities completes roughly every 2 days. The three analytics caches powering this page (fees, project mix, contractors) rebuild daily between 5–7am UTC; a manual refresh also runs whenever material new data lands.
Known limitations
- Small jurisdictions — towns under roughly 5,000 population — often don’t publish digital permit records, so our history dataset over-represents mid-size and large cities. Rules data has no such bias.
- A handful of city feeds (Dallas, San Diego County, Gainesville, Providence, Framingham) have gone stale because the source portal stopped updating. We leave the historical data in place and flag the staleness rather than drop those cities.
- Some cities record dates in a non-
issued_datecolumn (New York City, Virginia Beach). Their record counts are accurate; their “latest date” signal is not. Being corrected. - Project-cost averages exclude outliers above $10M and fees above $100K to avoid commercial mega-projects skewing the homeowner-oriented view. Raw unfiltered totals are available on request.
Validation
Every rule carries a data_confidence flag (high / medium / low) and a cited source URL. Spot-checks against published fee schedules and direct building-department calls are logged. Permit-history rows retain their original source_record_id, so any row can be traced back to the origin feed for independent verification.
Versioning
This data center launched 2026-04-18. The current dataset totals are printed on every dataset card and refreshed on each page load. A formal changelog will land alongside Phase 2 CSV exports.
Press inquiries
Email: press@permitmint.com
We respond to press inquiries within 24 hours on weekdays.
Topics we can speak to
- Homeowner due diligence on unpermitted work (resale risk, insurance implications)
- Permit cost and timeline trends across U.S. cities
- Insurance implications of unpermitted renovations
- EV charger, generator, and pool permitting requirements
- Municipal permitting modernization and open-data availability
- Fee variance between neighboring jurisdictions and why it exists
Founder bio
PermitMint is built by Joey, a Fortune 500 security leader who applied forensic methodology to a domain that hadn’t had it: residential building permits. The site sources every rule from its originating code or fee schedule, cites the source on every page, and verifies jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction on a rolling cadence. Background: LinkedIn.
Coverage scope
Recent reports
Data-backed deep dives sourced from the same dataset powering this page.
Permit Approval Times by U.S. City
Wait times range from 10 days in Gainesville to 315 days in Miami across 23 U.S. cities.
Average Permit Costs by City (2026)
Side-by-side permit fee and project-cost averages across 30+ major U.S. cities.
Most Common Renovations by City
What homeowners in Chicago, LA, SF, Seattle, Austin, and Denver actually build, per official permit records.
What Homeowners Actually Pay for Permits
Real filed permit fees versus the numbers in every permit blog post, across 6 cities.
Pool Permit Cost by State
Swimming-pool permitting costs state-by-state, with seasonal relevance for spring and summer.
Do You Need a Permit for an EV Charger?
NEC 2023 transfer-switch rules, fee variance, and where DIY charger installs get flagged most often.
Home Generator Permits: What You Need to Know
Why standby generators almost always require both electrical and gas permits, and how to sequence them.
For developers & researchers
PermitMint maintains structured permit rules and a growing permit-history archive. We’re open to research and journalist API access requests on a case-by-case basis. No public API is published yet; email us with your use case and scope and we’ll route accordingly.
Cite this data
Same citation block as above, for readers who’ve scrolled to the end. Jump to top →