How long is a Massachusetts building permit good for?

Under 780 CMR 105.5 of the Massachusetts State Building Code, a permit becomes invalid unless the work authorized on the site commences within 180 days of issuance. It also becomes invalid if the work is suspended or abandoned for 180 days after it has commenced. The building official can grant one or more written extensions of up to 180 days each, but the extension has to be requested in writing before the expiration date, with justifiable cause demonstrated.

Why would an old permit be a better lead than a fresh one?

Because the competition is gone and the deadline is real. Every lead list in the state sorts newest-first, so a permit issued five months ago has already been called by whoever was going to call it, and those calls failed or the job would be done. The homeowner still has an approved scope, a paid fee, and now a date on which all of it becomes worthless. That is a motivated buyer with no one else in the room.

How do I know a permit stalled instead of just finishing quietly?

Use the inspection trail. Massachusetts requires inspections at defined milestones under 780 CMR 110.3, including footing and foundation, framing before insulation, energy-efficiency checks, and a final inspection before occupancy. A permit with no inspection recorded four or five months after issuance almost certainly never broke ground. A permit with a foundation inspection and nothing for months after it stalled mid-project.

Do electrical permits expire on the same 180-day clock?

No, and the difference matters. Building permits run on the 180-day clock in 780 CMR 105.5. Electrical permits fall under 527 CMR 12.00, the Massachusetts Electrical Code, where the Inspector of Wires may deem a permit abandoned and invalid if the work has not commenced or progressed during the preceding 12-month period. An extension is available on written application for reasonable cause. Confirm the plumbing and gas clock with your local inspector, since that one is not uniform across departments.

Is it appropriate to contact a homeowner about a permit that is about to lapse?

Yes, if you keep it factual and useful. Permit records are public, the expiration rule is published in the state building code, and you are telling a homeowner something they usually do not know. Reference the record plainly, state the date, and offer to do the work or to help request the extension. Do not imply you represent the building department, and follow the same consent and suppression rules you apply to any other outreach list.

Expiring Permit Leads: Massachusetts's 180-Day Rule

By the permits.llc team · Last reviewed August 4, 2026 · Optimal window: Days 120-170 after issuance

TL;DR

A Massachusetts building permit goes invalid if work never starts within 180 days (780 CMR 105.5).
Permits issued in February and March 2026 are hitting that deadline right now.
These homeowners are approved, already paid, and nobody in your county is calling them.
Filter for permits aged 120 to 170 days with no inspection recorded, then lead with the date.

Every permit lead list in Massachusetts sorts the same way: newest first. Fresh permits are the whole product. The result is that a permit is treated as most valuable on the day it is issued and worthless a few months later, and by month five it has fallen off the bottom of everyone's list at the same time.

Here is the direct answer that changes the math. Under 780 CMR 105.5 of the Massachusetts State Building Code, a building permit becomes invalid unless the work authorized on the site commences within 180 days of issuance. That means an unworked permit is not decaying toward zero. It is counting down toward a hard date, and the homeowner sitting on it becomes more motivated as that date gets closer, not less. A permit issued on February 5, 2026 reaches day 180 today, August 4.

So the least-worked cohort in the entire dataset is also the one with a deadline attached. Nobody is calling these people. That is the opportunity.

What the 180-day rule actually says

The Massachusetts State Building Code sets two separate 180-day clocks on every building permit, and most homeowners know about neither.

The first is the commencement clock. A permit becomes invalid unless the work authorized on the site commences within 180 days after its issuance. The homeowner who pulled a permit in February, got busy, and never broke ground is out of time in August.

The second is the abandonment clock. A permit also becomes invalid if the work is suspended or abandoned for a period of 180 days after the work has commenced. This one catches the half-finished jobs: the foundation that got poured in March and then sat, the framing that went up before the contractor stopped returning calls.

There is a way out, and it is the reason a phone call here is genuinely useful rather than just opportunistic. The building official is authorized to grant, in writing, one or more extensions of time, for periods of not more than 180 days each. The catch is in the fine print: the extension has to be requested in writing before the expiration date, with justifiable cause demonstrated. A homeowner who lets the date pass without asking has lost the easy path. Municipalities differ on what happens next, and some will want a fresh application rather than a reinstatement.

Most homeowners have no idea any of this exists. They paid a fee, got a piece of paper, and assumed it was good until they used it.

Why a five-month-old permit can outperform a five-day-old one

A fresh permit is a race. A stale permit is an empty room.

Think about what happened to a permit issued in February. It hit every alert feed in the state within days. Whoever was going to call, called. If any of that had worked, the job would be under way and the inspection trail would show it. The record still sitting there with nothing after the issue date means every one of those attempts failed, and every one of those competitors moved on to March's permits, then April's, then July's.

Now consider the homeowner at month five. Approved scope sitting with the building department. Fee paid. The decision to do the project already made, which is the hardest part of any sale to manufacture. Something got in the way: a contractor ghosted them, a bid came back high, a quote for one piece never arrived. And now a date on which the whole approval evaporates.

A permit is a signal about the homeowner, not the contractor who filed it. That framing does more work here than anywhere else, because on a stalled permit there often is no contractor left. There is just a homeowner with a plan, a sunk cost, and a clock.

That is the opposite of a cold lead. It is a warm lead that everyone abandoned because their software told them it was old.

How to read a permit by its age

Age alone is not the filter. Age combined with the inspection trail is. Massachusetts requires inspections at defined milestones under 780 CMR 110.3, including footing and foundation, framing before any insulation or finish goes in, energy-efficiency checks, and a final inspection before occupancy. That trail is how you tell a finished job from a dead one without leaving your desk.

Permit age	Inspection trail	What it means	What to do
0-14 days	None yet	Normal. Everyone is calling.	Compete on speed or skip
15-90 days	None yet	Scheduling lag or an early stall. Too soon to tell.	Watch; do not spend outreach here
90-120 days	None	The job is not happening on its own.	Add to the watch list, calculate the expiration date
120-170 days	None	Prime. Approved, paid, unworked, and inside the extension window.	Call. Lead with the date
120-170 days	Foundation or rough only, then silence	Mid-project stall. The abandonment clock is running.	Call. Highest-value records in the cohort
Past 180 days	None	Permit is likely invalid. Harder, not impossible.	Low-priority follow-up; expect a re-application conversation
Any age	Final recorded	Finished.	Drop, or work as a follow-on trade

Two notes on using this table.

Measure from the issued date, not the application date. The 180-day clock in 780 CMR 105.5 starts at issuance, and the application-date record usually reaches you first, so a feed keyed to the wrong field will run every countdown early. Store the calculated expiration date as its own field.

Weight the homeowner-as-applicant records to the top. When a homeowner is the applicant of record rather than a licensed contractor, the odds of a stall go up sharply, because there is no professional managing the schedule. The homeowner-applicant permit is already a strong signal on its own. At day 140 with no inspection, it is the single best record in the file.

Building, electrical, and plumbing permits expire on different clocks

This is where operators get the timing wrong, because they assume one rule covers everything. It does not.

Building permits run on the 180-day clock described above, under 780 CMR 105.5.

Electrical permits run on a much longer leash. Under 527 CMR 12.00, the Massachusetts Electrical Code, a permit may be deemed abandoned and invalid by the Inspector of Wires if the authorized work has not commenced or has not progressed during the preceding 12-month period. An extension of time is permitted on written application for reasonable cause. A twelve-month clock is a different lead calendar entirely, and it means an electrical permit at day 150 is not urgent the way a building permit at day 150 is.

Plumbing and gas permits are the ones to confirm locally rather than assume. Practice varies between departments, so ask the inspector in the towns you work rather than applying the building-permit number and getting it wrong in front of a homeowner.

The practical upshot: run separate age filters per permit class. A single "permits older than 120 days" filter across your whole feed will flag electrical records that have another seven months of life and miss nothing useful, while burying the building permits that actually expire next week.

What to say when a permit is about to lapse

The pitch writes itself, because you are delivering information the homeowner does not have. Keep it factual and lead with the date.

Here is a working script for a permit issued February 20, 2026 on a basement finish in Framingham, with no inspection recorded, calling in the first week of August.

"Hi, this is Dan Moretti at Moretti Building. I pull the public building permit records for Middlesex County, and I noticed the basement permit on your property was issued back on February 20 and there's no inspection on it yet. I'm not with the town, but the state building code puts a 180-day limit on starting the work, and for that permit the date is August 19. Two ways to handle it. You can write to the building department before the 19th and ask for an extension, which they can grant for up to another 180 days. Or if the holdup was that the contractor fell through, that's the part I can actually help with, and I could come look at it this week. Either way I wanted you to know about the date, because most people never get told."

Four things are doing the work there. The specific date, which turns a vague warning into a fact the homeowner can verify. The disclaimer that you are not the town, which keeps the call honest. The extension option offered first, which makes it a service call rather than a pitch. And the reason it stalled named out loud, because on most of these records it really was a contractor who disappeared.

Do not send this one by mail. The whole value is the deadline, and a postcard arriving after the expiration date is worse than no contact. And do not guess at the date. If you are off by two weeks, the homeowner calls the building department, gets corrected, and you have burned the one thing that made the call credible.

Mistakes that waste the expiring-permit cohort

The failure modes here are specific, and each one is easy to fix once named.

Sorting the file by recency and never scrolling. This is the default in every CRM and it is why the cohort exists at all. Build a saved view that sorts by days-to-expiration ascending, so the records closest to their deadline surface first regardless of when they were issued.

Calling at day 179. The extension has to be requested in writing before the expiration date, and a building department is not obligated to turn one around in an afternoon. Day 120 to 170 is the working window. After that you are handing the homeowner a problem instead of a solution.

Assuming a big project stalled for a small reason. On a gut renovation permit or a large addition, a five-month stall usually means financing moved or the general contractor walked. Bring a realistic restart plan, not a price.

Treating the mid-project stalls as the same lead as the never-started ones. A permit with a foundation inspection and four months of silence is a different sale, because somebody already has money in the ground. The homeowner is often dealing with a dispute, an unpaid deposit, or unfinished work they are afraid to touch. These are the highest-value records in the cohort and the ones that need the most careful first call. They are also why real estate investors watch this cohort, since a stalled permit is frequently the first public sign of a distressed project.

Ignoring the trades under the main permit. A stalled basement finish is not just a general contracting lead. It is an electrician lead, an HVAC lead, and a flooring lead, because the reason it stalled is often that a single sub never showed. If you are one of those trades, you are not restarting the project, you are unblocking it, and that is a much easier call to make.

How permits.llc fits in

permits.llc indexes 167,000+ Massachusetts permit records across 92 cities and 11 counties, refreshed daily from official municipal portals, and every record carries the permit type, issue date, and property address. That is everything the 180-day filter needs. Take the issue date, add 180 days, and you have a deadline field your competitors are not storing. Sort ascending on it and you have a call list nobody else in your county is working.

The cheapest way to test this is on data you already have. Download the free 2026 dataset of every 2025 Massachusetts permit at the free MA permit download, filter your county to building permits, and count how many show no inspection activity at all. That count is the size of the cohort you have been throwing away. When you want the current year's records arriving in time to catch the window, set up daily alerts for your trade and county and add the expiration date to every record as it lands.