How many fire alarm permits are filed in New York City each year?

4,810 in the twelve months to 2026-08-31, filed by 479 distinct firms. That is 2.9% of the city's permit volume in our five-borough file, which makes fire alarm one of the smallest trades by count. It is also the most valuable by median: $50,000 per filing, above mechanical at $48,000, building at $40,000 and plumbing at $34,000.

Who can file a fire alarm permit in New York City?

A very short list, which is why only 479 firms appear in a year. Fire alarm plans require a New York City Licensed Master Electrician together with an S-97 Certificate of Fitness holder, and the installing company must hold an FDNY Fire Alarm Company Certificate with at least one principal carrying the S-97. A registered design professional, meaning a professional engineer or registered architect, has to approve the plans. FDNY Project Authorization is then required before work starts and before an inspection can be scheduled.

Which borough files the most fire alarm work?

Manhattan, at 3,138 of the 4,810 filings, or 65.2%. Brooklyn follows at 839, Queens at 438, the Bronx at 275 and Staten Island at 120. Manhattan also carries 83 of the 118 filings at or above a million dollars. The Bronx runs the highest median at $63,300 on only 92 active firms, which is the thinnest competitive bench of any borough with real volume.

Is New York City fire alarm work an account list or a lead list?

An account list. 479 firms filed 4,810 permits, the top ten filed 1,265 of them and the top twenty-five filed 2,016, which is 41.9% of the trade. 135 firms filed exactly one permit all year. A market where twenty-five names carry two fifths of the volume is worked by naming those firms and building relationships, not by scraping a fresh list each week.

Does fire alarm demand follow the construction cycle in New York City?

It tracks it closely rather than moving independently. Fire alarm filings held between 5.9% and 7.9% of building filings in every complete month of the last year. The interesting part is the January to March window, where the share rose to 7.7%, 7.7% and 7.9% while building filings sat at their seasonal low. Fire alarm work holds up through the winter trough better than the general market does.

NYC Fire Alarm Permits: 479 Firms, $50,000 Median

By the permits.llc team · Last reviewed September 8, 2026 · Optimal window: Weeks 1–6

Fire alarm is the highest-value permit type in New York City. Across the 4,810 filings in the twelve months to 2026-08-31, the median declared cost is $50,000, ahead of mechanical at $48,000, building at $40,000 and plumbing at $34,000. It is also the trade with the smallest bench: 479 firms filed all of it, and twenty-five of them filed 41.9%.

TL;DR

4,810 New York City fire alarm permits in twelve months, from 479 firms.
$50,000 median declared cost, the highest of any permit type in the file.
Top 25 firms file 2,016 permits, 41.9% of the trade. An account list.
Manhattan is 65.2% of volume. The Bronx has the highest median at $63,300.

Why is fire alarm the most valuable permit type in New York City?

Because the filing threshold is high and the work behind it is systemic rather than cosmetic.

Nobody pulls a fire alarm permit to swap a smoke detector. The filings that reach the record are system installations, replacements and major modifications, and in a city of multifamily towers and commercial floorplates that means a building-wide job. The median declared cost of $50,000 and the 75th percentile of $125,045 describe that shape. 118 filings in the year cleared a million dollars.

Set against the other trades in our five-borough file, the ranking is not close:

Permit type	12-month filings	Firms	Per firm	Median declared cost
Fire alarm	4,810	479	10.0	$50,000
Mechanical	12,606	2,875	4.4	$48,000
Building	72,759	7,250	10.0	$40,000
Plumbing	13,238	907	14.6	$34,000
Demolition	994	244	4.1	$30,000
Sign	2,464	73	33.8	$2,500
Electrical	56,129	1,533	36.6	$53

The electrical figure is not a job value. As covered in why New York City electrical permits trail the job, the cost field on an electrical filing records a fee rather than a contract, which is exactly the kind of field-level trap that makes a naive value sort useless here.

Who is allowed to file this work?

A short list, and the length of that list is the whole story.

Fire alarm plans in New York City require a Licensed Master Electrician working with an S-97 Certificate of Fitness holder. The installing company needs an FDNY Fire Alarm Company Certificate, and at least one of its principals has to carry the S-97 for installation, inspection, testing and service. A registered design professional, a professional engineer or registered architect, must approve the plans. Then FDNY Project Authorization has to be in hand before work starts and before any inspection can be scheduled.

Four separate credentials, held by different parties, before a single device goes on a wall.

That stack is why 479 firms file the whole trade. It is the same mechanism that keeps the plumbing bench small, described in who can pull a plumbing permit in New York City, and it produces the same result: a market defined by licensing rather than by demand.

How concentrated is the fire alarm market?

Enough that a list-buying motion is the wrong motion.

The top ten firms filed 1,265 of the 4,810 permits, 26.3% of the trade. The top twenty-five filed 2,016, or 41.9%. At the other end, 135 firms filed exactly one permit in the entire year, which is 28.2% of the firms carrying 2.8% of the volume.

That is a head-and-tail market with almost nothing in between, and the two halves buy differently. The head is a couple of dozen dedicated fire alarm houses running a book of building owners and managing agents. The tail is electrical contractors who took one fire alarm job because a client asked, and who will not take another this year.

Selling into the head is account management. Selling into the tail is a volume motion. Treating the 479 names as one addressable list means running the wrong play on both. That distinction is the core of account-based prospecting on New York City permit data.

Where does the work actually sit?

Manhattan, by a wide margin, but not at the highest ticket.

Borough	Filings	Firms	Median declared cost	At or above $1M
Manhattan	3,138	331	$48,618	83
Brooklyn	839	222	$55,920	13
Queens	438	174	$53,000	12
Bronx	275	92	$63,300	10
Staten Island	120	43	$32,500	0

Manhattan holds 65.2% of the citywide cohort and 83 of the 118 million-dollar filings. Its median, though, is the second lowest in the table, because the borough carries a long tail of small commercial modifications alongside the tower work.

The Bronx is the interesting cell. 275 filings, the highest median in the city at $63,300, and only 92 firms active. Ten of those filings cleared a million. Per active firm that is the densest large-job market in the five boroughs, and it is the one a Manhattan-first territory plan misses entirely.

Staten Island files 120 fire alarm permits a year across 43 firms and none of them reached a million dollars. It is a real market and a small one, and it should be sized as such rather than pitched as a fifth of the city.

Does fire alarm follow the construction cycle?

It tracks it, at a remarkably steady ratio, with one seasonal wrinkle worth knowing.

Fire alarm filings held between 5.9% and 7.9% of building filings in every complete month of the last year. The monthly counts ran 483 in September, 495 in October, 416 in November, 432 in December, 412 in January, 403 in February, 552 in March, 403 in April, 350 in May, 379 in June and 323 in July.

March was the peak at 552. January through March also produced the highest ratios of the year, 7.7%, 7.7% and 7.9%, at exactly the point where general building filings hit their seasonal floor. Fire alarm work does not stop for winter the way exterior trades do, and the compliance side of the trade explains why. Fire alarm systems in commercial occupancies must be inspected and tested at least annually under the New York City Fire Code and NFPA 72, and a failed test in February produces a permit in March regardless of the weather.

For anyone planning capacity or a campaign calendar, that is a genuinely useful asymmetry. The quiet quarter for the general market is not the quiet quarter here.

What does this data not tell you?

The limits matter as much as the numbers, and they are specific.

Our New York file carries no square footage, no year built, no stories and no tax block or lot. A fire alarm permit tells you the address, the borough, the date, the declared cost and the firm. It does not tell you the size of the building, which means you cannot filter this cohort to buildings over a given floor area, a constraint that also shapes what permit data can and cannot do for Local Law 97 retrofit targeting.

The owner field is populated on all 4,810 records, but a permit is a signal about the property owner, not the contractor, and in New York that owner of record is the party that commissioned the work. Often it is an LLC, a managing agent or a co-op board rather than a person, and it is not a deed search.

Declared cost is what was stated on the application. Use it to rank filings against each other, not to quote against.

One more caution on recency. August 2026 shows 162 fire alarm filings against July's 323, which is the shape of a reporting lag rather than a market that halved. Every monthly figure above excludes it. Our New York file otherwise runs current to within a few days, which is unusual and which the borough coverage pages report per borough.

How permits.llc fits in

New York City fire alarm is 4,810 filings a year, 479 firms, a $50,000 median and a top twenty-five that carry 41.9% of it. That is a small enough universe to know by name and a valuable enough one to be worth knowing.

Start with the New York City fire alarm permit records to see the current filings, then take the New York permit download and rank the firms yourself before you decide whether this is an account list or a lead list for your business. Borough-level volume and coverage sit on the New York borough coverage pages, and dated filing alerts are set up through permit alerts.