Building permits by ZIP code in Howard County

How these numbers are made

Source: Howard County Open Data, Building, Electrical, Fire, Grading, Mechanical, Plumbing & Sign Permits (Socrata dataset kvz2-j5cj), read 19 Oct 2026. We count permits issued December 2023 through November 2025; denied and withdrawn permits are left out. The county's file has no permit status or final inspection date, so it can't say which permits were finished, so no finished share is shown.

Residential permits Howard County's Department of Inspections, Licenses and Permits issues countywide: new houses and townhouses, alterations, additions, decks and porches, solar, pools, demolition, and electrical, plumbing, HVAC and fire-sprinkler permits for homes. Howard County has no incorporated towns, so Columbia, Ellicott City, Elkridge, Clarksville, the Howard County parts of Laurel and Mount Airy and the rest of the county are all in this file. Commercial and sign permits in the same file are not counted, and grading permits are left out.

• The county's file names no contractor, so there are no contractor lists, rankings or firm pages for Howard County.
• The file has no declared job value, no status and no final inspection date, so we show no costs, no finished share and no time to finish.
• The county updates the file once a year, in December; the copy on file runs through November 2025, so the counts stop there.
• The file holds no permits issued between December 2022 and November 2023, so the window starts in December 2023, the first month after the gap.
• Only the residential permits are counted; a permit that was issued twice under one number is counted once, at its first issue date.

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