Does your New York data cover the whole state?

No. Our New York coverage is New York City only, all five boroughs, sourced from the New York City Department of Buildings. There is no upstate, Long Island or Westchester data in the file and we are not going to imply otherwise. That boundary matters for more than coverage. New York City administers its own Construction Codes through the DOB, so a rule that governs a project in Albany or Buffalo does not govern one in Queens. If you sell outside the five boroughs, this is not yet your dataset.

Why do borough names and county names differ in NYC permit data?

Because the underlying record stores counties while everyone in the industry speaks in boroughs. Three of the five have different names in each system: New York County is Manhattan, Kings County is Brooklyn, and Richmond County is Staten Island. Queens and the Bronx match. We store the county name because that is what the source publishes, and we write the borough name because that is what a contractor actually searches. If you are querying raw DOB data yourself, that mismatch is the single most common reason a borough filter silently returns nothing.

How concentrated is the NYC contractor market?

Far more than most markets. Across the 380,279 permits filed since January 2021, only 12,177 distinct contractors appear. Of those, 778 filed 100 or more times and account for 54.8% of every permit in the file. Contractors filing ten or more times account for 93.8%. Only 1,748 filed exactly once in five and a half years. That concentration is the central strategic fact about selling into New York City: the buyer universe is finite and nameable, so an account list beats a lead list.

How current is the NYC permit data?

Current to within a day or two. Our most recent New York City record as of publication is dated August 16, 2026. That makes it the freshest state file we hold, and it is a real difference from our other coverage. Depth varies by borough, though. Manhattan and Brooklyn records reach back to 2003, Bronx to 2007 and Queens to 2009, but Staten Island only starts in November 2017. Long-run trend analysis works in Manhattan and Brooklyn and does not work in Staten Island.

NYC Building Permit Leads: The Five-Borough Map

Q: Does the owner field give you the building's owner?

Not reliably, and this is worth knowing before you buy. The field is populated on 94.5% of records, but inspection shows it records the party that commissioned the work rather than the deed holder. One value in our file appears on Bronx electrical permits at 3780 Bronx Boulevard, 3115 Sedgwick Avenue, 1415 Ogden Avenue and dozens of other addresses, every one of them for sidewalk shed lighting. No single entity owns all of those buildings. It ordered the work. Treat the field as the commissioning party, which is genuinely useful, and not as a title search.

By the permits.llc team · Last reviewed August 25, 2026 · Optimal window: Weeks 1–6

TL;DR

Our New York coverage is New York City only: 383,420 DOB permits, five boroughs.
778 contractors file 54.8% of all NYC permits. The buyer universe is small and nameable.
Electrical permits nearly match building permits in every borough. Unusual, and useful.
The owner field names who commissioned the work, not who holds the deed.

New York City is the only market we index where chasing individual permits is the wrong strategy. Since January 2021 the entire city produced 380,279 permits filed by just 12,177 distinct contractors, and 778 of those contractors account for more than half the file. Build a list of the several hundred firms that file regularly in your borough and your trade, and you have covered most of the work that will happen there.

That is close to the opposite of how permit prospecting works everywhere else. In a suburban market a permit points at a household that will pull one permit this decade. In New York City it points at a party that will file again next month.

Two things to establish before anything else. Our New York coverage is the five boroughs, sourced from the New York City Department of Buildings, and nothing outside them. And New York City writes and administers its own Construction Codes through the DOB, so statewide New York rules are not the rules that govern a job in the Bronx.

The usual reframe still applies, with a local twist. A permit is a signal about the property owner, not the contractor. In the five boroughs that owner is rarely a homeowner. It is an LLC, a co-op or condo board, or a managing agent acting for one.

What does a New York City permit actually signal?

That a specific building is being worked on, by a party that almost certainly works on other buildings too.

This is the mental adjustment. The permit is still a commitment signal, and it still lands before most of the spending. But its value in New York City is less about the individual job and more about identifying an account. A managing agent filing electrical permits at four buildings this quarter will file at four more next quarter.

The record supports that use well. Contractor names are present on 383,414 of our 383,420 New York City records, which is 99.998%. That is effectively complete, and it is the best contractor coverage in anything we hold. You can see who is doing the work across the entire city, going back years.

The freshness is unusual too. Our most recent record is dated August 16, 2026, a day before this was written.

Why is New York City its own jurisdiction?

Because it is, legally, and getting this wrong is the fastest way to lose credibility with a New York contractor.

New York City administers its own Construction Codes through the Department of Buildings. The code that governs the rest of New York State does not govern the five boroughs. Facade requirements sit in the city's own rules at 1 RCNY 103-04, filings run through the DOB, and enforcement is a city function.

There is a naming trap layered on top of that. Permit records are stored by county, but the industry speaks in boroughs, and three of the five have different names in each system.

Borough	County in the record	Permits	Records from
Manhattan	New York	135,300	April 2003
Brooklyn	Kings	101,629	August 2003
Queens	Queens	80,991	July 2009
Bronx	Bronx	40,362	November 2007
Staten Island	Richmond	25,138	November 2017

Note the right-hand column, because it is the caveat people skip. Manhattan and Brooklyn go back more than two decades. Staten Island starts in late 2017. Long-run analysis works in two boroughs and does not work in the fifth, and we would rather flag that than let you find out after you have built a report on it.

Which permits does the DOB record show?

All eight types we track, in all five boroughs, which is not true anywhere else we cover. Here is the mix for the twelve months to August 2026.

Borough	Building	Electrical	Plumbing	Mechanical	Fire alarm
Manhattan	25,962	19,000	5,982	6,344	3,249
Brooklyn	19,889	15,709	3,389	2,852	848
Queens	16,542	13,461	2,503	2,318	441
Bronx	7,578	6,578	791	963	298
Staten Island	5,661	3,788	994	589	121

Look at the electrical column against the building column. Manhattan runs 0.73 electrical permits per building permit, Brooklyn 0.79, Queens 0.81, and the Bronx 0.87. Staten Island is lowest at 0.67, which fits its more single-family character.

Nothing else we index looks like this. Filtering a New York City file down to building permits, which is the instinct most people bring from other markets, throws away roughly two fifths of the record.

One correction to a claim this article originally made. Electrical filings are not an early signal in New York City. Measured at the address level they land a median of zero days from the building permit and a median of 16 days after the mechanical, plumbing or fire alarm filing. Their value is confirmation and the closed 1,529-firm filer list behind them, which the read on why electrical is a trailing signal works through in full.

Why does New York City prospecting invert?

Because the market is concentrated to a degree that changes the correct strategy. Here is the distribution of contractors by filing volume since January 2021.

Contractors filing	Firms	Share of all permits
100 or more times	778	54.8%
10 or more times	5,625	93.8%
Exactly once	1,748	under 1%

Six percent of the firms do more than half the work. Fewer than 2,000 firms filed a single permit in five and a half years, meaning almost nobody in this market is a one-off.

The practical consequence is that a New York City territory is a finite, knowable list. You can enumerate every general contractor filing regularly in Brooklyn. You cannot enumerate every homeowner in a suburban county, which is why permit alerts are the right tool there and an account list is the right tool here.

It changes the outreach too. A firm filing eighty permits a year is not going to respond to a message about one of them. It responds to a case for being on its subcontractor list. That is a longer sell with a much larger lifetime value, and it is worth measuring on a per-account basis rather than a per-lead one.

What is the owner field actually telling you?

Not what its name suggests, and this is the caveat we would most want you to read.

The owner field is populated on 362,168 records, or 94.5%. But it records the party that commissioned the work rather than the party on the deed. One value in our file appears on Bronx electrical permits at 3780 Bronx Boulevard, 3115 Sedgwick Avenue, 1415 Ogden Avenue, 348 Beekman Avenue and many more, every single one described as installation of lighting for a sidewalk shed. No entity owns all of those buildings. It ordered shed lighting at all of them.

Other high-volume values show the same shape: one name appearing on more than 3,000 permits spread across all five boroughs. That is not property ownership. It is a commissioning or filing role.

Read correctly, that is still valuable, arguably more valuable. Values appearing five or more times account for 72.6% of all permits since 2021. Those recurring names are the managing agents, facade operators and shed companies that generate work continuously. They are accounts.

Read incorrectly, as a title search, it will put you in front of the wrong party with the wrong pitch. This is the sort of field-level difference that separates a permit record from a purchased contact list: you can see exactly what the field contains and judge it, rather than trusting a label.

Where does the facade compliance clock create work?

In a predictable place, on a published schedule, which is rare and worth exploiting.

The Facade Inspection Safety Program requires owners of buildings taller than six stories to file periodic reports on the condition of their facades. Cycle 10 began on February 21, 2025 and its filing deadlines are staggered by the last digit of the building's block number.

Sub-cycle	Block numbers ending in	Filing window
A	4, 5, 6, 9	February 21, 2025 to February 21, 2027
B	0, 7, 8	February 21, 2026 to February 21, 2028
C	1, 2, 3	February 21, 2027 to February 21, 2029

Sub-cycle A closes in roughly six months. Sub-cycle B is open now.

One correction worth making plainly, because the table invites the wrong conclusion. Our permit records carry no tax block or lot column, so you cannot sort or filter a territory by block digit from this file. The sub-cycle calendar is real, and it tells you when compliance work peaks citywide, but it is a timing signal you apply to your own territory rather than a sort key our data supports. Where you want a deadline you can actually compute per property, use the shed permit date instead, as we set out in the Local Law 51 repair clock.

When an inspection finds an unsafe condition, the owner has to put up protective measures such as a sidewalk shed and start remediation. That sequence shows up plainly in the record: across the 162,518 described permits in the last twelve months, 15,554 mention a sidewalk shed, 8,360 mention scaffolding and 5,285 mention facades. Sprinkler work adds another 7,263.

Shed work is not the prize. It is the marker. A shed goes up because repair work is coming, and the repair is what you want to be early on.

How permits.llc fits in

We index 383,420 New York City permits across all five boroughs, current to within a day or two, with contractor names on 99.998% of records and full permit type coverage in every borough. Manhattan and Brooklyn reach back to 2003.

The concentration figures in this article are not something we built. They are what the DOB record shows once you group it by filer, and the reason nobody quotes them is that it takes the whole city at once to see the pattern. One borough looks like a normal market. Five boroughs and five years look like 778 firms doing half the work.

Start with the free New York City permit data download to check the field coverage yourself, including the owner-field caveat above, which we would rather you verify than take on trust. Then use permit coverage by borough to pick where to build the account list first, keeping the per-borough start dates in mind if history matters to your analysis.