Chicago building permits, read every day.
6,358 permits filed in the last 90 days, about 70.6 a day. Every one is scored for which trade it feeds and how likely it is to become a job.
Which of these are your leads.
Each figure is a counted query against Chicago’s own permit descriptions over the last 90 days. It is the pool a trade could draw from, before scoring drops the filings that are not worth a call.
Solar installers
Homes about to electrify, panels, storage, service capacity, EV.
Roofing contractors
Envelope work already budgeted, and the jobs that force it.
HVAC & electrification
Heat pumps, replacements, and the panel capacity that unlocks them.
Real estate
Owners investing before a listing, and land moving toward development.
Most common permit types.
These are Chicago Department of Buildings’s own labels, grouped by the city rather than by us. They are useful for reading the shape of the market and useless for finding a lead: a re-roof and a ground-up build can share one label, which is why the trade counts above read the free-text description instead.
Where every number here comes from.
The source
Chicago Department of Buildings, dataset ydr8-5enu on data.cityofchicago.org. An official Socrata API, queried directly. Counts on this page are aggregate queries, so reading it never pulls a permit row.
The window
The last 90 days by filing date. Ninety days is long enough to be stable against a slow week and short enough that the number still describes the market you are selling into now.
Freshness
Newest record 2026-09-08, 1 days old at the last check. A feed with nothing newer than 21 days is treated as abandoned and pulled from the product rather than quietly served.
What is not here
Owner names and phone numbers. Those are not in the permit record; they are resolved per property on demand inside the product and screened against do-not-call lists before anyone sees them.
How many building permits are filed in Chicago each day?
About 70.6 a day, 6,358 over the last 90 days, measured from Chicago Department of Buildings's own open-data feed.
Where does Chicago permit data come from?
Directly from the city's Socrata open-data portal at data.cityofchicago.org, dataset ydr8-5enu. It is an official government API, not a scraped page, and it is read once a day.
Can I get Chicago permits as sales leads?
Yes. EarlyIntent scores every permit for buying intent by trade, solar, roofing, HVAC and real estate, and delivers a ranked feed carrying the reason each one scored and the next step to take. A territory is one trade in one geography, and on Pro and above it is exclusive to you.
How fresh is the Chicago feed?
The newest record in Chicago Department of Buildings's dataset is dated 2026-09-08, 1 days old at the last check. Anything with nothing newer than 21 days is treated as abandoned and pulled from the product, because two of the seven city datasets originally evaluated had silently stopped updating years earlier while still serving hundreds of thousands of rows.
Which trade gets the most from Chicago?
Solar installers on current volume: 1,177 of the last 90 days of filings mention that work. That is the pool before scoring, not the size of a feed.
Is this scraped?
No. Chicago Department of Buildings publishes this dataset through a Socrata open-data API, and EarlyIntent queries it the way any member of the public can. Nothing is scraped from a web page, nothing is bought from a broker, and no permit record here is anything other than public record.