NYC Contractor Lists: Why Borough Is the Wrong Filter

Segment a New York City contractor list by borough and you will build five overlapping copies of largely the same list. Across 387,409 permits filed since January 2021 by 12,242 named contractors, the 849 firms that work all five boroughs file 39.4% of everything, while firms that stay inside a single borough account for 9.7%.

The boundary that actually divides New York City contractors is trade. Not geography.

TL;DR

• 849 firms work all five boroughs and file 39.4% of every New York City permit.
• Only 9.7% of permits come from firms that stay inside one borough.
• But 56.3% of contractors file just one permit type. Trade is the real boundary.
• Segment a New York City account list by trade and filing volume, never by borough.

Why does borough segmentation fail here?

Because New York City contractors do not respect borough lines, and the bigger the firm the less it respects them.

Group every named filer in the New York City Department of Buildings record by how many boroughs it appears in, and the pattern is steep and consistent.

Boroughs worked	Firms	Permits	Share of all permits	Average filings per firm
1	5,241	37,601	9.7%	7.2
2	2,816	41,122	10.6%	14.6
3	1,819	52,760	13.6%	29.0
4	1,517	103,432	26.7%	68.2
5	849	152,494	39.4%	179.6

Read the first column against the last. The 5,241 single-borough firms are the largest group by headcount, 42.8% of every contractor in the file, and they file an average of 7.2 permits across five and a half years. That is roughly one job a year. Meanwhile 849 firms, under 7% of the universe, file 179.6 each.

Firms working four or five boroughs are 19.3% of the contractor pool and file 66.1% of all permits.

So a Brooklyn list and a Queens list, built independently, will return substantially the same names. You will pay twice to acquire them and once more to deduplicate them. This is the inversion that makes New York City different from every other market we index, and the five-borough map sets out why the concentration exists in the first place.

Where do contractors actually specialise?

In trade, and sharply.

Run the same grouping on permit type instead of borough and the shape reverses. Of 12,242 named contractors, 6,897 file exactly one permit type. That is 56.3% of the city's filers. Another 3,898 file two. Only 251 firms file four types, and just seven firms in the whole of New York City file five or more.

Firms working one or two permit types make up 88.2% of the contractor universe and 66.5% of all filings.

That is the mirror image of the borough result, and it is the practical finding. A firm that files electrical permits in Manhattan almost certainly also files them in Brooklyn and Queens. That same firm almost certainly does not file plumbing permits anywhere.

New York City contractors are geographically unbounded and trade-bounded. Territory thinking, which works in most of the markets we cover, actively misleads here.

How small is each trade universe?

Small enough to name, in most cases. Here is the full permit mix with the number of distinct firms behind each type.

Permit type	Permits	Share	Named firms
Building	199,113	51.4%	9,763
Electrical	93,649	24.2%	1,628
Plumbing	37,514	9.7%	1,148
Mechanical	32,951	8.5%	4,691
Fire alarm	14,534	3.8%	705
Sign	4,483	1.2%	98
Trench	2,759	0.7%	842
Demolition	2,406	0.6%	424

Electrical is the standout. It is a quarter of all New York City permit volume and it comes from 1,628 firms. Plumbing is a tenth of the file from 1,148. Both figures track the city's licensed master electrician and master plumber requirements, which cap who may file at all and keep those universes stable year to year. Something similar drives the electrical permit as a trailing signal on work that is already funded.

Sign work is the extreme case: 98 firms. That is a list you could read in an afternoon.

Building permits are where the noise lives. Half the file, 9,763 firms, and no licensing bottleneck narrowing it. If you are selling to general contractors, expect to do more qualification work than a trade seller does.

What does an account list actually look like?

Pick the trade, pull every named filer citywide, sort by filing count, and stop reading somewhere in the low hundreds.

For a supplier selling into fire alarm work, that is 705 firms, and the ones filing at any real frequency will be a fraction of them. For electrical, 1,628 firms, of which the citywide operators averaging 179.6 filings are the accounts worth a named owner and a quarterly touch. The rest belong in a nurture sequence, not a call rota.

Volume ranking matters more than it does elsewhere because the distribution is so skewed. A firm averaging 7.2 filings over five and a half years is not a lapsed account. It is a firm whose entire business is one or two jobs a year, and it will never be a large customer no matter how well you sell.

This is the distinction that separates a permit-derived account list from a bought contact file, which we cover in more depth in permit data versus lead lists. One is sorted by observed behaviour. The other is sorted by whoever happened to be in the database.

What is the owner field telling you, and what is it not?

It records the party that commissioned the work. It is not a title search.

In New York City the commissioning party is often an LLC, a managing agent, or a co-op or condo board rather than a person who holds the deed. A permit is a signal about the property owner, not about the contractor, and in this market that owner is frequently an entity rather than a household.

That is precisely why an account strategy built on the contractor field works better here than an owner-outreach strategy. The contractor name is the dependable identity in the New York City file, and it repeats, which is what makes accounts possible at all.

Where owner-side work does pay off is compliance-driven repair, because there the entity has a deadline it did not choose. The sidewalk shed permit trail is the clearest example of that pattern.

Where does borough data still earn its place?

In coverage and logistics, and in one genuine exception.

The borough split tells you where volume sits: Manhattan 136,883 permits, Brooklyn 102,646, Queens 81,983, the Bronx 40,460, Staten Island 25,437. That governs how you staff a territory, where a warehouse or a service radius makes sense, and which borough a delivery promise can survive. It is real operational information.

The exception is Staten Island. It carries 6.6% of citywide filings from 2,076 named firms, the smallest contractor pool of the five boroughs. It is the one place where a locally built list is short enough to be worth assembling on its own terms, and also the one place a citywide pull is most likely to come back thin. Check it separately rather than assuming your five-borough list covers it.

Everywhere else, borough is a reporting dimension. Not a targeting one. Browse New York permit types to see the trade cut applied directly, and the home security and alarm playbook for how the fire alarm cohort behaves once a compliance job is filed.

How permits.llc fits in

We hold 390,587 New York City permit records from the Department of Buildings, covering Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and Staten Island, current to within a couple of days. The contractor name is populated on effectively all of them, which is the highest identity coverage of any state file we carry.

That completeness is what makes this analysis possible. You cannot see that 849 firms do 39.4% of the work by looking at one borough, or one month, or one trade. It only appears when you take the whole city at once, which is the one view a per-job lead feed will never give you.

Pull the records from the New York permit download, or start with our borough-level coverage to see the volume split before you decide where a territory boundary belongs.