Every building permit the city issues is public record. This page summarises the last twelve months of them — what’s being built, where, what it costs, and how much of it names a contractor. Free to read, no account.
Rolling 12 months · permits valued $10,000 and up
The gap between “permits issued” and “jobs you can chase” is the single most misunderstood thing about permit data.
Seattle issues roughly 5,611 permits a year over $10,000. But most of them list only an address and a scope of work. The city records a contractor of record on a minority of them — about 9%, or 497 permits over the last twelve months.
That distinction matters. A permit with no company attached tells you a job exists somewhere; it doesn’t tell you who to call. Only the contractor-named ones are genuinely actionable, which works out to roughly 40 a month across the whole city, every trade and project size combined.
Anyone selling you “thousands of Seattle construction leads” is counting the other kind.
By project class, last 12 months. Single-family work leads on count; multifamily leads on dollars.
| Type | Permits | Value |
|---|---|---|
| Building | 5,063 | $2.6B |
| Roof | 429 | $36.7M |
| Demolition | 412 | $4.7B |
| Grading | 19 | $141M |
Demolition value is inflated by a handful of very large redevelopment sites, where the whole project value is declared on the demolition permit.
Each of these has its own page: browse all 25 Seattle neighborhoods →
Top Seattle ZIP codes by permit count, last 12 months.
| ZIP | Area | Permits |
|---|---|---|
| 98115 | Ravenna, Bryant, Wedgwood | 477 |
| 98103 | Fremont, Wallingford, Greenwood | 459 |
| 98117 | Ballard, Loyal Heights | 363 |
| 98125 | Northgate, Lake City | 308 |
| 98118 | Columbia City, Seward Park | 301 |
| 98105 | University District, Laurelhurst | 294 |
The most recent permits over $25,000 that carry a company on the record. This is the shape of a usable lead: a job, a cost, an address, and someone to call.
Loading the latest filings…
This page is the free summary. PermitChampion is the daily version: every contractor-named Seattle permit, filtered to your trades and your budget range, with the company’s phone number, the person to ask for, and their licence status attached — in your inbox by 7am and saved to your account.
See PermitChampion →All of this is public. If you only need to check one address, you don’t need us at all — here’s where to go.
The Seattle Services Portal (run by SDCI) lets you search by address, permit number or parcel number, and shows inspection history and attached documents.
Shaping Seattle plots permit activity geographically — useful when you want to see everything happening on a block rather than one property.
The city publishes every permit since 1990 on the Seattle Open Data Portal. It’s free, it has an API, and the numbers on this page come from it.
What you don’t get from any of those: a phone number for the contractor, their licence standing, or a filter that only shows you your trade at your project size. That’s the part we built.
Yes. Address, scope of work, declared project cost, issue date, and the contractor of record when the city has one on file are all public. That’s why this page can exist.
Roughly 5,600 valued at $10,000 or more, worth about $7.2 billion in declared project value. Just under 500 a month, with a noticeable dip each November and a spring peak around March.
Sometimes the owner pulls the permit and hires the contractor afterwards. Sometimes the contractor is added to the record days or weeks after issuance. And on plenty of jobs the city simply never records one. It’s about 9% at the moment of issue.
For calling, largely yes — you have an address and nothing else. It’s a signal that work is coming, which is why we track those separately and flag the day a contractor name gets attached.
The City of Seattle’s published building permit dataset, refreshed daily. No scraping, nothing private. Contractor licence details come from the Washington State Department of Labor & Industries contractor registry.
No — Seattle only. Other jurisdictions either don’t publish an open permit API or publish records without a contractor field, which would mean listing jobs we can’t attach a name to. We’d rather cover one city properly.