Answers · Chicago building permits
Is Chicago building permit data public and free?
Yes. The City of Chicago publishes every building permit it issues as an open dataset, ydr8-5enu, on its data portal. No account, no fee, no API key. You can download the whole file or query it over HTTP, and the records go back to 2006.
Access is free; the work is not the access. What a subscription buys is the daily reading, the filtering and the join work — never the data, which anyone can pull from the same URL printed below.
Kova Signals is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or acting on behalf of the City of Chicago.
How this is measured
- Dataset
- ydr8-5enu
- Publisher
- City of Chicago
- Filter
- The dataset is read anonymously, with no token, by the code that renders this site's weekly permit pages. The earliest records it accepts are from 2006.
- Measured
- No count on this page — it describes the file and the query, and carries no figure to date.
Permit Signal
Permit Signal sells the daily reading of this file, not access to it. The first delivery is three real records, free, with the government source link on every row.