Terms of Use

PermitNotebook is an independent reference. We read what city, county and state governments publish about residential building permits and record it with the source and the date we read it. We are not a government agency, we are not affiliated with any permit office, and we cannot issue, expedite, or influence a permit.

Nothing here is legal advice, code interpretation, engineering advice, or a substitute for the permit office with jurisdiction over your property. Permit rules are local, they change, and the answer for your specific project can depend on facts no website knows: your zoning district, your lot, your flood or wind zone, your homeowners association, and what a plans examiner concludes when they read your drawings. Confirm requirements with the official office before you spend money or start work.

We publish 1,418 rules across 137 jurisdictions and we state the date each was last checked. A dated page is not a guarantee that the rule has not changed since. Where a jurisdiction publishes no answer we say so rather than supply one, and you should treat those gaps as real gaps rather than as permission.

The three research datasets are open. Our permit rule data, permit turnaround times, and inspection pass rates are published as downloadable CSVs under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. You may copy, republish, analyse and build on them, including commercially, as long as you credit PermitNotebook and link back. Each row carries the official source it came from, so you can and should check it.

Everything else is ours. The written guides, the research pages, the page designs, the threshold diagrams and the site name are protected by copyright and are not covered by that licence. Quoting a passage with attribution is fine. Republishing pages wholesale, or scraping the site to reconstitute the dataset in order to avoid the attribution requirement, is not.

The underlying law is not ours at all. Statutes, ordinances, adopted codes and fee schedules are public records belonging to the governments that publish them. We claim no rights over them, and we link to the original in every case so you can read it yourself.

Automated access is welcome within reason. Please do not crawl at a rate that degrades the site for other readers.

If you submit a correction, we may use it to update the site, and we may quote the official source you point us to. We will not publish your name or contact details in doing so. If you submit the permit help form, we share the details you entered with a local permit professional, and only with the consent you give on that form. Our privacy policy sets out exactly what we collect and what happens to it.

Please do not send confidential information through these forms, and do not send anything you do not have the right to share.

We link to government websites and other third party sites. We do not control them and are not responsible for their content, availability, or privacy practices.

Some pages carry advertising, and some carry sponsored links that are labelled where they appear and that may earn us a fee. Neither ever changes a verdict, a threshold or a fee on this site, and the official government office is named on every page as the free path. The disclaimer explains this in full.

The site is provided as is. We work hard to be accurate and we correct errors quickly when they are reported, but we do not warrant that every figure is current or complete, and we are not liable for losses arising from decisions made in reliance on it. That includes permit fees, fines, stop work orders, delays and rework. The office with jurisdiction is the authority, not this website.

If you find something wrong, tell us. We especially want to hear from permit office staff. Send the official link through the correction form and we will match it and re-date the page.

We update this page when the way the site works changes, and we date it at the top so you can see when that last happened. Continuing to use the site after a change means you accept the updated terms. Questions about any of this can go to our contact page.