Glossary

Building permit glossary

The terms you’ll see on building permit records and on our city pages, in plain English.

Building permit: Written permission from a city or county to build, alter, repair or demolish a structure. The permit record names the address, the scope of work, usually the declared value and the contractor, and it moves through statuses from application to issue to final inspection.
Commercial permit: A permit for work on a non-residential property: offices, retail, restaurants, warehouses, industrial buildings, hotels, schools, hospitals and similar. On US Permit Search, “commercial and multifamily” permits are the ones a commercial contractor can bid on. How we classify permits →
Multifamily: Residential buildings with five or more units (apartments, condominiums). Most building codes treat them like commercial buildings, and they are permitted and built by commercial contractors.
Trade permit: A permit for one trade's work (electrical, plumbing, mechanical/HVAC, fire protection, roofing), usually pulled by the licensed subcontractor doing it. A large job has a building permit plus many trade permits. Permits by trade →
MEP: Mechanical, electrical and plumbing: the building systems trades, often permitted and bid together on commercial jobs.
Permit type: The city's category for a permit (for example Building, Electrical, Mechanical, Demolition or Sign). Names differ city to city; we map each into one list of trades.
Work class: The kind of work within a permit type: new construction, addition, alteration or remodel, repair, change of use, demolition. Many cities publish it; it is the quickest way to tell new buildings from renovations.
Declared valuation: The construction cost the applicant states on the permit application, used by many cities to calculate fees. It is an estimate, not a contract amount or market value, and some cities don't collect it for trade permits.
Application date: The day the permit application was filed. The time from application to issue is the review time, which our permit guides report as a median for each city.
Issued date: The day the city issued the permit and work could legally start. Our pages count permits and projects by issue date.
Finaled: A permit whose work passed final inspection and was closed out by the city. Statuses such as “Final”, “Completed” or “Signed-off” mean the same thing.
Plan review: The city's check of construction drawings against building, fire and zoning codes before a permit is issued. Commercial projects nearly always need it; it accounts for most of the time between application and issue.
Express (over-the-counter) permit: A permit issued the same day or within days, without full plan review, for simple, well-defined work such as equipment change-outs, minor repairs or signs.
Certificate of occupancy: The document a city issues when a new building, or one whose use changed, is safe to occupy. It comes after the building permit's work is finaled.
General contractor: The company responsible for the whole construction job, usually the one named on the building permit. It hires the subcontractors who pull the trade permits.
Tenant improvement (TI): Interior work to fit out commercial space for a tenant: walls, ceilings, lighting, HVAC, finishes. TI permits are one of the most common commercial permit types in large cities.
BBL and PIN: Parcel identifiers: New York City's Borough-Block-Lot number and Cook County's Property Index Number. We use them to look up a building's land-use class when a permit doesn't say whether the property is commercial.
Project (on US Permit Search): All the permits for one construction job, grouped by the city's project or job number, or by building address where the city has none. How we group permits →