Garage, shed and shade structure permits in Durham, NC

How these numbers are made

Source: City and County of Durham GIS, All Building Permits (PublicServices/Inspections MapServer layer 12; Durham Open Data), read 19 Oct 2026. We count permits issued October 2024 through September 2026; denied and withdrawn permits are left out.

Residential building permits from Durham City-County Inspections, the joint office that issues permits for the City of Durham and for unincorporated Durham County: new houses, townhouses and duplexes, additions, alterations, repairs, decks, roofs, accessory buildings and demolitions. Commercial permits and buildings of five or more units in the same file are not counted. Electrical, plumbing and mechanical permits are not in this file. Chapel Hill, Raleigh and the other Triangle towns run their own permit offices and are not in this file.

• The file names no contractor, so there are no contractor lists, rankings or firm pages for Durham.
• This is the building permit file only. Electrical, plumbing and mechanical permits are published only as a list of permits still open, so they are not counted.
• The file covers the City of Durham and unincorporated Durham County together and does not say which a permit is in.
• A permit counts as finished once the office issues its certificate of occupancy or completion; the final date is that sign-off date. The file has no expired status.
• Solar, roofing, pools, fences and additions are sorted out of the broad alteration and repair permits by their work description. Decks count under Other.
• The value is the building cost declared on the permit. The file has no ZIP code we can publish, so there are no ZIP code pages.
• Each new townhouse unit gets its own permit, so new homes count units, not buildings. Townhouses are about half of the new homes.

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