How to Look Up Building Permits for a Chicago Address

Running a Chicago building permit search

A Chicago building permit search tells you what work the city authorized at an address and when. It is free, it is public, and it takes a couple of minutes once you know which of the city's two front doors to use. It is also incomplete in specific ways that matter, and the second half of this article is about those.

This article is part of our guide to Chicago building code violations. Here we are only looking up records. What the city does about work that was never permitted is a separate subject.

The two places to look

The Department of Buildings record search. The department's own search of building department records by address returns what the department holds for an address, permits included. This is the front door most owners should use, because it puts permits next to the other records for the same property.

The Building Permits dataset on the data portal. The city publishes every issued permit as a dataset on the Chicago Data Portal, updated regularly and searchable and filterable in the browser. Use this when you want to sort, export, or look at a run of addresses rather than one.

For questions about what a permit requires in the first place, the Department of Buildings keeps a permits page describing the permit types and how one is applied for.

The fields, and what each one is telling you

• Permit number and permit type. The type is the most informative field on the record. A new construction permit, an electrical permit, a renovation and alteration permit and an easy permit process record are very different animals, and the type tells you the scale of what was authorized.
• Issue date. When the city authorized the work. Not when the work happened, and not when it finished.
• Work description. Free text written by the applicant. Its usefulness varies from a full scope of work to three words. Read it, and do not rely on it.
• Reported cost. The applicant's stated value of the work. It is an input to the fee, not an appraisal, and it is routinely understated or rounded.
• Contractor and applicant. Who pulled it. A permit pulled by the owner rather than a licensed contractor is worth noticing on structural, electrical or plumbing work.
• Status. Whether the permit was issued, and what happened to it since.
• Inspections tied to it. Some permits carry required inspections. Whether those were passed is the part that tells you if the work was signed off.

The four things the permit history does not tell you

This is the section to read twice, because a permit search is usually run to answer a question it cannot answer.

1. It does not tell you the work was done. A permit is authorization. Plenty of permits are issued for work that was never started or was abandoned part way.

2. It does not tell you the work was done properly. For that you want the inspection results attached to the permit, and for some permit types there are none.

3. It does not tell you what was done without one. This is the big one. The absence of a permit for a finished basement does not mean the basement was permitted; it means nobody asked. An empty permit history on an obviously renovated building is a finding, not a clean bill of health.

4. It does not cover addresses outside the city. Chicago's records stop at the city limits. A suburban property's permits are held by that municipality, one village at a time, and there is no county-wide search. Our page on selling a house in Cook County covers where those local records sit.

A fifth, quieter one: the address itself. Buildings get renumbered, corner properties carry two addresses, and a permit filed under the other one will not appear in your search. If a building looks suspiciously permit-free, try the alternates.

How to use it well

1. Search the address, then sort by date. You are reading a story, and the order matters.
2. Compare the record against the building. Stand in it, or look at photographs. A record that does not explain what you can see is the point of interest.
3. Look for open permits. A permit that was issued and never closed out is a live item that can surface at a sale.
4. Look at what is cited, not only at what was permitted. Our guide on how to check a Chicago property for building code violations covers the violation side, and what happens after a violation is cited covers where those go.
5. Ask the department when the record is ambiguous. A phone call to the Department of Buildings resolves in a minute what an hour of clicking will not.

Frequently asked questions

Is a Chicago permit search free?

Yes. Both the Department of Buildings record search and the Building Permits dataset on the city's data portal are free and open to anybody, with no account required. Nobody needs to pay a service to look up a permit.

How far back do the online permit records go?

The published dataset covers a long run of years and the department's own search covers what the department holds, but neither is a complete history of every building in the city. Older work, and work done before records were digitized, may not appear at all. For an old building, absence of a record proves very little.

An open permit is showing on a house I want to sell. Does that matter?

It can, because an open permit is an unfinished item on the property's record and a buyer's attorney or title company may raise it. It is usually resolvable, and it is much better resolved before a contract than during one. Ask the Department of Buildings what closing it requires.

If selling is one of the options you are weighing

Selling a house as it stands to a private buyer is one option among several. Closing out the permits and listing it, or repairing and keeping it, are both still real choices, and which fits depends on what the records show and on numbers only you have.

Fair Value Investments is a private buyer. We buy houses in Chicago as-is, including ones with open permits or unpermitted work, for our own account. If you want to see what that looks like as a figure, our page on selling a house with code violations explains how we look at a property in this condition. Take whatever number you get to an agent or an attorney and compare it.

About this article: it is general information written by a home buyer, not by a lawyer or a housing counselor. Fair Value Investments (a d/b/a of Probate Professionals of America, LLC) is a private real-estate investor and home buyer purchasing property for our own account. We are not a licensed real estate broker, not a law firm, not a lender, and not a government agency, and nothing here is legal, tax, or financial advice. Any offer is made at our discretion after we evaluate the property; a cash offer, if made, may be below market value. You are free to consult your own attorney, tax advisor, or a licensed real-estate professional before deciding. There is no fee to receive an offer and no obligation to accept.