Building permits in Chicago, Illinois

What needs a permit, and what doesn’t

The Department of Buildings’ Permits page says a permit is required “before beginning most construction, demolition, and repair work,” but the city’s Guide to Building Permits carves out named exceptions for both a deck and a roof. For a deck, painting or power washing needs no permit at any building, and if you have not received a building violation, replacing a nonstructural element such as a deck board, stair tread, or railing picket in-kind needs none either. A wider exemption applies only to a residential building up to 4 stories above grade or its accessory building: repairing or replacing an entire exterior porch, deck, or stair system in-kind needs no permit there if it is no more than 6 feet above the ground and its landing area is 50 square feet or less. Roof repair such as patching, limited to 25% of a roof surface and not involving cutting away or removing part of an exterior wall or roof, needs no permit on any building; separately, a residential building up to 4 stories above grade may repair, recover, or replace a roof with a pitch of at least 2:12 without one, though a permit is required for any structural repair and any work on a low-slope roof. None of these exceptions may apply to a Chicago Landmark property or district.

How the city’s portal works, and who may skip a licensed contractor

Chicago’s Express Permit Program applications, covering “most types of building repairs and administrative changes to issued permits,” run through the Inspection, Permitting & Licensing Portal at ipi.cityofchicago.org; the Permits page instead calls the Standard Plan Review Permit Program “the main permitting process for building permit applications which require architectural plans.” Guided worktypes include “Porch, Deck, Balcony, or Fire Escape Repair” and “Reroofing,” whose own instructions require the roofing contractor to hold a valid Illinois roofing contractor license. Chicago’s Porch and Deck Safety page lets an owner act as their own general contractor only if the building is their primary residence, is no more than three stories tall, and contains no more than six dwelling units, and otherwise requires a Chicago-licensed general contractor; the same page always requires a permit to repair or replace a porch’s structural elements, such as columns, beams, foundations, stringers, or floor joists, with plans from an Illinois-licensed architect or structural engineer.

The fee, worked for a deck and for a roof replacement

The city’s Building Permit Fee Tables, effective January 6, 2026, price installation or alteration of a porch, balcony, or deck at a $250-per-unit-served minimum, and roof work with structural repair at a $900 minimum; the same table’s own footnote separately sets a $602 minimum for permits under it. A reroof without structural work, an Express-eligible worktype, is instead priced under Chicago Construction Codes Administrative Provisions Section 14A-12-1204.2 (Stand-alone permit fees), which the 2026 tables do not reprint and which prices it at $450. Under the exemptions above, a typical pitched reroof on a residential building up to 4 stories above grade needs no permit at all, and so no fee, unless it involves structural repair or a pitch under 2:12.

Booking inspections and what Chicago’s own permit data shows

Chicago’s Permit-Related Building Inspections page requires online-only, first-come-first-served requests, not by phone; a specific date needs a minimum of 4 business days of notice, and the department will attempt to honor it if an inspector is available. Chicago’s own building-permit records show 5,329 renovation and alteration permits issued in Chicago between 2025-07-12 and 2026-07-12, a median of 57 days from when the city began reviewing an application to issue; Express Permit Program permits, the route for deck repair and reroofing, are not in that sample.

What Chicago does not publish

None of these pages publish a day-count target for plan review or permit issuance for a deck or a roof permit, and our Deck and Roof Replacement rows leave the processing-time field blank. The Porch and Deck Safety page does not define structural repair on a roof. If Chicago publishes either figure elsewhere, it was not in the documents this section draws from.