Owner-builder vs hiring a contractor: what the permit says about you

Owner-builder or contractor: what changes on paper

The exemption, state by state

From the statute (or, for Tennessee, a city form quoting it), read 20 October 2026.

Not verified on the day, so left out: Texas (no state general contractor license; the question is your city's permit rule), Colorado, Hawaii, Massachusetts, New York, Illinois, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Missouri, Iowa, Virginia, Vermont, New Mexico and North Dakota. North Dakota's chapter 43-07 refers to a person working on their own property being exempt, but does not define the scope. Ask your building department for its owner-builder form.

What you sign, and what it makes you

• California (San Francisco DBI's owner-builder acknowledgment, quoting B&P 7044): you are the responsible party of record on the permit; if you engage anyone other than licensed contractors on work worth $500 or more, labour and materials, you may be their employer, and then "I must register with the state and federal government, withhold payroll taxes, provide workers' compensation" for anyone you hire who is not a licensed contractor. The workers' comp declaration warns that "failure to secure workers' compensation coverage is unlawful, and shall subject an employer to criminal penalties". Item 8 adds that if you sell, you "may be held liable for any financial or personal injuries sustained by any subsequent owner(s)" from latent defects. CSLB separately says that if an uninsured worker is injured on your property, you could be liable for the costs.
• Florida (the disclosure statement written into F.S. 489.103(7)): "I must provide direct, onsite supervision of the construction"; "I may not hire an unlicensed person to act as my contractor"; and for anyone you employ, you "must provide workers' compensation for the employee".

So the choice is whether you will be the employer, the scheduler and the person the inspector calls.

How owner-pulled permits look in the file

The cities below record an owner-builder permit with a placeholder where the contractor's name would be: OWNER, HOMEOWNER, OWNER BUILDER, NONE, or a blank. Our pipelines drop those permits from the firm rankings, because there is no firm to rank. Our build notes record how many we dropped:

In Honolulu the owner-builder permits were mostly additions (1,258), remodels (875) and fences (481); our build note puts it at about half of additions, remodels, fences and walls naming no contractor. Compare that with the 979 addition and 1,048 remodel permits that did carry a firm. In Scottsdale, where owner-builders are 14–18% of remodel and addition permits, 807 addition permits carried a firm, with a usual filed value of $81,012.

Arlington's owner-pulled permits are mostly trade permits: 443 electrical and 355 plumbing were pulled with no contractor named. Check what your own city allows an owner to do in those trades before you plan on it.

How to tell which kind of permit is on a house

1. Search the address on your city's permit portal; Did my contractor pull a permit? has the link for 46 cities.
2. Open the permit and look at the contractor field. OWNER, HOMEOWNER, OWNER BUILDER, NONE or blank means the owner held it.
3. Look for the final inspection. An owner-builder permit that never reached a final is the one a buyer's inspector will ask about.
4. If you are hiring, open the firm list for your city (for example Honolulu firms or Anaheim firms) and check the contractor has permits in their own name for this kind of work.

Money, time and the loan: what the statutes leave out

The pages that weigh owner-building against a contractor all put numbers on it, and none sources them. Projul, which sells software to contractors, puts a general contractor's markup at 15–25% of project cost and says owner-builder budgets often come in 15–25% too low (Projul, March 2026). A family blog that weighed it for its own house wrote that self-contracting "can save you 15% on construction costs if all goes well" and takes "25-40 hours a week", and quoted Building Advisor: "Most exaggerate the savings and minimize the time commitment required" (Northern Nester, 2019). Read together, the markup you save is about the size of the overrun those pages say owner-builders risk.

Three things to settle before you sign the owner-builder form, because the statutes above do not:

What this does not tell you

We do not compare how often owner-builder permits finish against contractor permits, because we drop owner permits before the finish calculation. The shares above are from our build notes, not the live pages, and they depend on how each city records the applicant; a city that writes the owner's name in the contractor field can hide owner-builders among small firms (St. Louis keeps person-name contractors who are not the listed owner, so some handymen and some owners look alike).

See every Honolulu addition builder by their permit record →

See every Anaheim remodeler by their permit record →

See every Scottsdale addition builder →