King County building permit search: the Permitting Portal, the Records Center and the monthly reports

Which office permits your address

King County Permitting covers unincorporated land only. Seattle, Bellevue, Redmond, Kent, Renton and the county's other cities issue their own permits; the county's permit records page says records for those properties usually mean contacting the city. Electrical permits in unincorporated areas come from Washington Labor & Industries and plumbing permits from Public Health.

How to look up the permits on a King County address

1. Open the Permitting Portal and type the address, parcel number or permit number into the search bar at top right.
2. For more control, choose Building, Search Permits and Applications and pick the search type: address, licensed professional, record information or contact. Tick Search All Records to include engineering, fire and planning records.
3. Note the portal's warning: the Start and End Date fields are "the date range for when a Record was created and not the status date (i.e., Permit Issuance)".
4. Open each record and read its status and inspection results. A new home can carry a building permit plus a separate residential mechanical permit.
5. For electrical work, look the address up with Washington Labor & Industries, not the county.

What the statuses mean

These are the statuses in the county's Issued Permits Reports for permits issued 2024 to 2026:

Each report shows a permit's status only as of the month it was issued, and never updates it, so almost every permit in it reads Permit Issued. Our pages therefore show no finished share and no time to final; the current status is in the portal.

When the permit you want is not online

The county's permit records research page says "The Permitting Records Center can access residential building permits back to approximately 1970", with some residential plans back to 1987. To request a file, create an account and submit the request online, which the county calls "the fastest way to get available records", or email the Research Request Form to Permitrecords@kingcounty.gov. "Customers can review any file free of charge"; copies are charged at the standard county rate. For records before the 1970s the page points to the Washington State Archives (read 24 October 2026).

What our King County pages add

Our King County page counts the permits the county issued for unincorporated land, October 2024 to September 2026:

89% of the permits were for homes. New-home permits fell from 232 (October 2024 to September 2025) to 148 (October 2025 to September 2026). ZIP 98053 had the most permits, 1,095 (15%); see King County permits by ZIP code. The permit statistics page has year and month counts, and browse permits lists the rows. To check a contractor's registration, see how to check a contractor's license in Washington.

What this does not tell you

The county's reports name the applicant, often the homeowner, not the contractor, so we do not list or rank King County firms. Residential mechanical permits carry no job value, and fire, grading and right-of-way permits are not counted.