Contact
PermitNotebook is written and edited by Mario Bailey. Messages come to him directly, not to a support queue, and he answers them. The fastest way to reach us about anything on the site is the correction form, because it captures the page you are looking at along with your message.
If you found something wrong
This is the message we most want. We publish 1,418 rules across 137 jurisdictions and rules change, so some of them are wrong at any given moment. Tell us which page, what is wrong, and, if you have it, the official page that says otherwise. We check it against the source, fix it, and update the date the page says it was last checked. You do not need to leave an email address, though we will write back if you do.
If you work for a permit office
You are the most authoritative correspondent we have, and we treat it that way. If we have misread your ordinance, quoted a superseded fee schedule, pointed readers at a portal you have retired, or listed a phone number that no longer reaches your office, send it and we will change it. We will cite your official page rather than paraphrase you.
We also welcome a note when something is about to change. If your jurisdiction adopts a new code edition or a new fee schedule on a known date, we would rather publish the change on the day it takes effect than discover it three months later. Changes like that are logged publicly in our rule tracker.
If you want to use our data
Journalists, researchers and anyone else are welcome to use our three research datasets. They are published as downloadable CSVs under a CC BY 4.0 licence, with the official source and verification date on every row: permit fees, turnaround times, and first-time inspection pass rates. Credit PermitNotebook and link back and you need no further permission.
Write to us if you need a cut we do not publish, want to check a figure before you print it, or want to know how a number was computed. We would rather answer that question than have a figure of ours quoted wrongly, and we will tell you plainly where our data is thin.
If you need help with your own permit
We cannot pull a permit for you, review your drawings, or tell you what an inspector will decide. What we can do is show you what your jurisdiction publishes and point you at the office that has the authority. Start with Check your project, which assembles the answer for your locality and project from our verified data.
If you would rather have a professional handle it, ask us for help with a permit and the form passes your details to a local permit professional, and only with the consent you give on the form. That is a paid service provided by someone else, not by us. Our privacy policy covers what is shared and our disclaimer covers how we are paid.
What we do not do
We do not accept guest posts, paid links, sponsored articles, or link exchanges, and we do not publish content written by anyone with an interest in the outcome. Every rule on this site is read off a government source by us and carries a quotation from it. Pitches of that kind are the one category of message we will not reply to.