Building permits by ZIP code in Philadelphia

How these numbers are made

Source: City of Philadelphia, Licenses and Inspections Building and Zoning Permits, 2007 to present (OpenDataPhilly; Carto table permits), read 19 Oct 2026. We count permits issued October 2024 through September 2026; denied and withdrawn permits are left out.

Residential permits the City of Philadelphia Department of Licenses and Inspections (L&I) issues inside the city, which is also Philadelphia County: building, plumbing, electrical, mechanical, EZ minor-work, demolition and solar permits for homes. Commercial permits, zoning and use permits, excavation and site permits, certificates of occupancy and event permits in the same file are not counted. Suburbs in Bucks, Montgomery and Delaware counties run their own permit offices and are not in this file.

• The city's file lists a contractor on most permits, but these pages show permit counts only: there are no contractor lists, rankings or firm pages for Philadelphia.
• We count residential permits only, as the city's file marks them; a home job filed as a commercial permit is not counted.
• The city's open permit file has no declared job value, so we show no costs.
• A new house gets separate building, plumbing, electrical and mechanical permits, so one project can count several times, once under each kind of work.
• A final date is the day the city marked the permit completed. Permits that expired or were cancelled carry no final date even where the file shows one, because that date is when they lapsed.

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