Garage, shed and shade structure permits in suburban Cook County, IL

How these numbers are made

Source: Cook County Assessor's Office, Assessor - Permits (Cook County Open Data, dataset 6yjf-dfxs), read 20 Oct 2026. We count permits issued January 2024 through December 2025; denied and withdrawn permits are left out. The file carries no usable permit status, so it can't say which permits were finished, so no finished share is shown.

Building permits from the suburbs of Cook County (Evanston, Schaumburg, Berwyn, Cicero, Oak Park, Des Plaines, Orland Park, Skokie and about 115 other cities, villages and towns, plus unincorporated areas), as the suburbs report them to the Cook County Assessor. Chicago is not counted here: it has its own pages on this site. Each suburb issues its own permits; this file is the Assessor's copy, so it holds only the permits a suburb sent in.

• The file names no contractor (the applicant is usually the homeowner), so there are no contractor lists, rankings or firm pages here.
• Suburbs send their permits to the Assessor weeks to months after issue, and by October 2026 about a tenth of them had not yet sent 2026 permits, so the window ends in December 2025, the last month with near-complete reporting.
• The file's status is the Assessor's own review of each permit for property tax, not a final inspection, and the file has no final dates, so we show no finished share and no time to final; every permit is listed as open.
• The kind of work comes from each suburb's short work description, which the Assessor calls more reliable than its own codes. Driveways, patios, decks, signs and fire alarm work fall under Other.
• The value is the job value the suburb recorded on the permit.
• The file has no ZIP code we can publish, so there are no ZIP code pages.
• A permit that covers several parcels (a condo building, say) is counted once.

Counts are permits, not jobs: one job can need several permits. Nobody paid to be on this page and nobody can. Sources and definitions →