About PermitBase

Why this exists

Every city and county runs its building department a little differently — different fees, documents, review timelines, and local amendments. The information exists, but it's scattered across 552+ municipal websites, buried PDFs, and fee schedules that change without notice. PermitBase pulls it into one place so homeowners, contractors, and architects can see exactly what a jurisdiction expects before they submit.

How we research and verify

We don't guess and we don't scrape blindly. For each of the 552 jurisdictions we cover, we work from primary sources:

• Official fee schedules — pulled from each city or county's published fee documents, not estimates.
• Adopted codes — cross-checked against each state's construction-code framework: a statewide code where one exists (Utah's Title 15A, Idaho's Building Code Act) or the locally adopted editions in home-rule states like Arizona and Nevada, plus the specific editions each jurisdiction enforces.
• Review timelines — we publish a jurisdiction's stated service level when one exists, and clearly label everything else as an estimate to confirm with the department.
• Submittal requirements — based on each jurisdiction's current online permitting portal and document checklists.

Each jurisdiction page links to the official source we used and shows a last verified date. Where our confidence is partial, we say so rather than presenting an estimate as fact. You can audit the whole dataset’s verification status on our coverage & freshness page.

Keeping it current

Building codes and fee schedules change. A clear example: effective July 1, 2026, Utah adopts the 2024 editions of several model codes, and our jurisdiction pages reflect that transition. When we learn a requirement has changed — a new code edition or an updated fee schedule — we re-verify against the official source and update the affected pages.