Building permits are public record, and nearly every city and county lets you search them by address for free through its permit portal. The record shows every permit ever applied for at the address, what it was for, whether it was issued, which inspections passed, and whether it was finaled, expired, or cancelled. The search takes a few minutes. Reading the result correctly is the part this post is about.
I read permit histories for a living, in a sense: we pull Seattle's full permit dataset every night to find the expired ones, because a permit that lapsed without a final inspection is a project that stalled. This is the lookup half of that, inside the public records guide for real estate. The signal half is in expired building permits as a distress signal.
Where permits live
Permits are issued by whichever government has building authority over the address, which is the city inside city limits and the county outside them. The portal is almost always on the building, planning, or "development services" department's site, under "permit search," "check status," or "research a property."
| Authority | Portal | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| Seattle | Seattle Services Portal, run by SDCI; the same data ships as an open dataset | Construction, demolition, mechanical, and land use permits by address or record number |
| Fourteen King County cities plus unincorporated King County | MyBuildingPermit, a shared portal for Bellevue, Kirkland, Bothell, Burien, Kenmore, Sammamish, Issaquah, Auburn, Federal Way, and others | One search across every member jurisdiction |
| Pierce County (unincorporated) | PALS Online | Permits and land use cases by address or parcel |
| Snohomish County (unincorporated) | County permit search | Permits by address, parcel, or permit number |
| Smaller cities | A vendor portal: Accela, eTRAKiT (Shoreline's is at permits.shorelinewa.gov), EnerGov, CityView | Permits and often code cases in the same search |
The vendor systems matter because they look alike from city to city. Once you have used one eTRAKiT portal you have used all of them, and the four families above cover most of the country. If a city's site has no search at all, the permit records still exist and a public records request gets them.
The seven-step lookup
- Identify the authority. An address with a Bellevue mailing city can sit in unincorporated King County, and the county issued its permits. The assessor's parcel record names the jurisdiction; when in doubt, search both.
- Search the address exactly. Use the assessor's version of the address: house number, street name, street type. Seattle's portal searches back to 2005-era records; older ones are in the archive below.
- Retry in a fixed order. No result does not mean no permits. Drop the unit number, drop the directional, then search by parcel number, which never gets retyped. Address matching is where most lookups fail.
- Open every record. The result list shows counts and titles. The permit detail page shows the chain: applied, reviewed, issued, inspections with dates and results, final. A house with four permits might have four finished projects or one finished project and three abandoned ones.
- Read the status, not the title. The next section covers what each one means.
- Pull the documents. Plans, inspection reports, and correspondence attach to the record on most portals. Seattle keeps older plans and permit files in its document archive, which is where a 1960s addition lives.
- Cross-check code enforcement. Search the same address in the code violation record. An expired permit beside an open case is a stalled project the city is already pushing on.
Reading the status
| Status | What it means | What it tells you |
|---|---|---|
| Applied / In review | Permit requested, not yet granted | An owner with a plan and no approval yet |
| Issued | Work may proceed | A project underway, or about to be |
| Inspections passed (partial) | Some stages approved, work continuing | Progress; check the date of the last inspection |
| Finaled / Closed / Completed | Final inspection passed | The work is legal and done |
| Expired | The permit lapsed before a final inspection | A project that stopped |
| Cancelled / Withdrawn / Void | Never started, or pulled back | Plans changed; usually no work occurred |
The two statuses that mislead are Issued and Expired. Issued does not mean the work passed: it means the city approved the plan. A permit issued five years ago with no inspection since is a stalled project wearing an active status. Expired is the honest version of the same thing, and the timing rule matters. In Seattle, construction, demolition, mechanical, and grading permits expire 18 months after issue; an owner can renew in the last 30 days, and can reestablish a permit that has been expired less than a year. Past a year, it is a new application. Many other jurisdictions run the model code's 180-day rule instead, so read your city's expiration policy before calling a permit dead.
What the permit history tells you
This is the part the portal will not say out loud, so here are the numbers from Seattle, where we hold every expired building permit the city has published.
12,814 expired permits on 10,267 Seattle properties, as of August 2026. Sixty-eight percent (8,715) are additions and alterations, the classic remodel that ran out of runway. Another 1,725 were new construction, 699 were demolitions, and 547 were tenant improvements. The oldest lapsed in 2006. The median expired permit lapsed about five and a half years ago, and the city has minted between 1,100 and 1,400 new expirations every year since 2018.
Then the cross-check. Of those 10,267 properties, 1,320 (12.9%) also carry a code violation, against a citywide rate of 7.2% (13,134 of 182,108 Seattle properties have any violation on record). A property with an expired permit is about 1.8 times as likely to have a code case as a Seattle property picked at random. That is co-occurrence, not a prediction, and it is measured across all history rather than a window. But it is why a permit lookup belongs in the same pass as a violation lookup: the two records describe the same stalled project from two departments, and stacking them is what separates a house that is being fixed from one that has been abandoned mid-fix. The broader overlap numbers are in distress signal statistics.
For an investor, the read is simple. An expired addition permit on an owner-occupied house is a family that started a project and stopped, and the reasons people stop (money, a death, a divorce, a move) are the reasons people sell. A finaled permit history is the opposite signal: an owner who finishes things.
If you are the seller
The permit history is going to come up, because Washington's seller disclosure statement asks about it directly. RCW 64.06.020 puts three questions on the form: whether all building permits were obtained for structural work, whether all final inspections were obtained, and whether permits were obtained for any alterations. Answer them from the portal, not from memory. An expired permit you forgot about is discoverable by every buyer's agent in the same five minutes it took you, and it is the kind of thing that turns a listing into an as-is sale. Unpermitted work can often be legalized through a retroactive permit, and a permit that expired less than a year ago can usually be reestablished; both are cheaper before listing than as a buyer's credit after.
When the portal is not enough
Three gaps. Records older than the portal live in an archive, on microfilm, or in a document management system like Seattle's, and some cities charge a research fee to pull them. Cities with no online search at all still hold the records, and a records request with the address and a date range gets them, usually free. And a permit record tells you what the city approved, not what got built; the code enforcement record tells you what the city found.
Frequently asked questions
Are building permits public record?
Yes. Permits are issued and kept by a government agency, so they are public records in every state. Most cities and counties publish them on a searchable portal; the rest release them on request.
Can I find building permits with only a street address?
Usually. Every permit portal searches by address, and the record attaches to the parcel rather than the owner, so you need no name. Where the address search fails, the parcel number from the assessor's site is the more reliable key.
Why does a permit search by address show no results?
Four common reasons: the address is written differently than the portal expects (unit numbers and directionals are the usual culprits), the property is outside that jurisdiction and the county or a neighboring city issued the permits, the work predates the portal's online records, or no permit was ever pulled. Retry with a shorter address, then the parcel number, then the other jurisdiction, before concluding the last one.
Does an issued permit mean the work passed inspection?
No. Issued means the city approved the plan and work may begin. Passing is recorded inspection by inspection, and the permit is finaled when the last one passes. A permit that was issued and then expired never got there.
How do I find out if work was done without a permit?
Compare the house to the record. Square footage on the assessor's card that exceeds the permitted footprint, a finished basement or added bathroom with no matching permit, or a converted garage with no change-of-use record are the usual tells. A code case for unpermitted work will show up in the code enforcement search, if the city has found it.
The permit record shows the projects that stopped. Our free map shows the properties where a stopped project met an open code case, across seven Puget Sound markets, with no account needed.