Building permit data APIs compared

At a glance

Prices and limits as each provider published them on November 8, 2026; they change, so check the linked page before you decide.

City open-data portals

Most large US cities publish issued permits on an open-data portal, usually Socrata (Tyler Data & Insights), ArcGIS or CKAN, with a public API and no login. It is the original source, it is free, and it is usually updated daily. Socrata's documentation says requests without an application token "come from a shared pool via IP address" and may be throttled, while a free token lets the portal throttle by application instead, with a higher limit (Socrata: Application Tokens).

The cost is your time: every city names its columns differently, stores dates and valuations differently, and some publish no valuation or contractor at all. Two cities are easy; twenty is a maintenance job.

Shovels

Shovels sells national permit data with AI-classified permit types, contractor profiles, properties, zoning decisions and resident records, through a web app, a REST API, a CLI and a Google Sheets add-on. Its pricing page lists a Free plan (500 credits a month, 1 year of record history, 1 seat), Basic at $599 a month (25,000 credits, full history), Pro at $999 a month (50,000 credits, up to 2 seats) and custom Enterprise plans; "1 credit = 1 record" (shovels.ai/pricing).

ATTOM

ATTOM's building permit page says it holds "over 300 million building permits from over 2,000 building departments nationwide", updated monthly, with permit type classification, status, job cost, description and contractor information; pricing is by quote (ATTOM: Nationwide Building Permit Data). Its Property Data API pricing page lists Basic Property plans starting at $500 a month and notes that endpoint availability varies by licence (ATTOM: Property Data API pricing).

Our Actor: Building Permits Scraper

Building Permits Scraper reads 120 official open-data datasets (61 original US cities, counties and states, 14 trade-permit datasets, 27 more US entries and 18 Canadian ones) and returns one schema: permit number, type, status, dates, valuation, site address, and contractor name, licence and phone where the city publishes them. Monitor mode returns only permits not seen on earlier runs. On November 8, 2026 the Store API listed $0.002 per permit, $0.002 per jurisdiction queried and $0.002 per results page. A sister Actor, Accela Citizen Access & EnerGov Permit Scraper, covers 31 cities and counties on those portals. See this week's sample on New building permits by city this week.

Limits: only jurisdictions that publish open data are covered, history goes back as far as each portal keeps, and it does not classify permits beyond the city's own type and subtype.

Where the alternatives are better

• National coverage and history: Shovels and ATTOM cover thousands of building departments, including ones with no open-data portal. Our Actor covers only the 120 datasets it lists.
• Permit classification: Shovels classifies permits with AI and ATTOM lists permit type classifiers; our Actor keeps each city's own type and subtype, which you filter by keyword.
• One city, no vendor: the city's own API is free and is the source of record.
• Our Actor fits when you want the newest permits from many of the covered cities in one schema, on a daily schedule, and pay only for what a run returns.

Other building permit Actors on Apify Store

From the Apify Store API (GET https://api.apify.com/v2/store?search=building%20permits) on November 8, 2026, the most-used results. Store pages show current figures; most Actors also charge a small per-run start fee.

Sources

All checked on November 8, 2026 unless noted.

• Socrata developer docs: Application Tokens
• Shovels: Pricing
• ATTOM: Nationwide Building Permit Data
• ATTOM: Property Data API pricing
• Building Permits Scraper on Apify Store
• Apify Store API: search "building permits"