Philadelphia EZ Permits: Five Days, and No Contractor Name

A Philadelphia EZ permit is a construction permit issued without plan review, and the Department of Licenses and Inspections quotes about five business days for it. That is the same turnaround L&I sells as accelerated review on a standard building permit application, where it costs $2,000 with $350 due at filing and no credit toward the final permit fee. If your scope fits an EZ Standard, you get the speed for nothing.

TL;DR

• EZ permits skip plan review entirely and clear in roughly five business days.
• Accelerated review buys the same five days on a building permit for $2,000.
• 5,772 General Permit Minor filings in Philadelphia name an owner and no contractor.
• That single family explains most of the city's 64.1% building-permit contractor gap.

Philadelphia contractors mostly know EZ permits exist. What almost nobody has looked at is what they leave behind in the city's own filing record, and the answer is stranger than it sounds. Two permits can both carry the letters EZ and produce opposite data.

What is a Philadelphia EZ permit?

It is a permit issued with no drawings submitted and no plan review performed. L&I publishes a set of EZ Standards, one per eligible work type, and the deal is simple: comply with the standard that covers your scope and you skip the review queue. Applications go through eCLIPSE online or in person at the Permit and License Center on John F. Kennedy Boulevard.

Who may file is broader than people assume. L&I states that any property owner or their authorized agent can apply, and that an authorized agent may be a design professional, an attorney, a contractor, or a licensed expediter. Hold onto that sentence. It turns out to explain most of what follows.

L&I also notes that certain permits may issue immediately when a licensed contractor with current credentials submits them. Same day, not five days.

Which work qualifies for the no-plans path?

L&I groups the standards into three buckets. Interior work covers non-structural alterations in single-family residences, limited commercial alterations, and demolition of interior walls that are not load bearing.

The exterior list is longer: residential decks up to 216 square feet, excluding roof decks; exterior window and door replacement with no change in size; masonry facade replacement, which does not apply to historic properties; above-ground and in-ground pools and spas; roof covering replacement; security gates and grilles; wall covering replacement; and retaining walls.

Then trade work, which has its own EZ paths for electrical, mechanical, plumbing and fire suppression.

The 216 square foot deck ceiling and the no-change-in-size condition on windows are where most borderline jobs fall out. A deck at 240 square feet is a plan-review job. A window opening widened by four inches is a plan-review job.

How much do five business days actually cost?

Here is the comparison that belongs on a Philadelphia estimator's wall.

Path	L&I review time	What it costs
Application without plans (EZ)	About 5 business days	Filing fee only
One or two family alteration, addition or new construction, with plans	15 business days	Filing fee only
All other building permit types, with plans	20 business days	Filing fee only
Accelerated review on a building permit application	5 business days	$2,000, with $350 at application, not credited

Filing fees are $25 for one and two family dwellings and $100 for any other occupancy, and unlike the accelerated fee they are applied toward the final permit cost. Surcharges add $7.50 per permit, $3 to the city and $4.50 to the state.

Check the accelerated price against your actual permit type before you quote it, because it is not one number. On an electrical permit L&I puts accelerated review at $1,050, and the electrical filing fee is a flat $100 at every occupancy rather than $25. The five-day promise is the same. What you pay to buy it is not.

So the EZ path and accelerated review land in the same place on the calendar and about $2,000 apart on the invoice. On a roof covering replacement or a window swap, that is not a rounding error. It is the margin.

What do EZ filings look like in Philadelphia's own data?

Our Philadelphia file holds 77,848 permits running from January 2025 to 25 August 2026, and 7,314 of them carry an EZ label in the permit type description. In the last twelve months alone, 4,136 of 46,221 Philadelphia filings took the no-plans route.

Broken out, the pattern is impossible to miss.

EZ standard	Filings	Names a contractor	Names an owner
General Permit Minor, EZ Roof Covering Replacement	3,348	0%	99.3%
Plumbing, EZ Bathroom & Kitchen Remodel	1,609	99.8%	99.9%
General Permit Minor, EZ Interior Non-Load-Bearing Wall Demo	1,258	0%	97.9%
General Permit Minor, EZ Wall Covering Replacement	580	0%	98.4%
General Permit Minor, EZ Exterior Window and Door Replacement	215	0%	99.5%
General Permit Minor, EZ Deck, existing one-family dwellings	152	0%	100%
General Permit Minor, EZ Masonry Facade Replacement	92	0%	100%
General Permit Minor, EZ Swimming Pool/Spa	47	0%	100%
General Permit Minor, EZ Chimney and Vent Extension	13	0%	100%

Eight of the nine standards name nobody. One names almost everybody. They are all EZ permits.

Why do EZ roof permits name an owner and no contractor?

Because the city issues them to the owner, and the licensing rule underneath is different in each case.

A Plumbing EZ Bathroom and Kitchen Remodel permit can only be pulled by a licensed plumber, so a firm is always attached: 88 distinct firms across those 1,609 filings. A General Permit Minor roof covering replacement has no equivalent city trade licence gating it, and L&I lets any owner or authorized agent apply. The agent may well be the roofer, but the permit is issued in the owner's name and that is the name the record keeps.

This is where a permit stops being a scorecard on the contractor and becomes a signal about the property owner, not the contractor.

It also settles a question our earlier look at which Philadelphia trades name a contractor raised but could not answer. Building permits in our file name a contractor on 64.1% of 29,058 records, well behind electrical at 99.9% and plumbing at 99.8%. Pull out the 5,772 General Permit Minor filings, which name a contractor on none of them, and the rest of the building permits name one on 80.0%. Nearly the whole gap is one permit family behaving exactly as designed.

Across all of Philadelphia, 10,171 permits name a property owner and no contractor. 5,648 of those are EZ filings. More than half the city's owner-only records come from one no-plans path.

How should you use EZ filings without fooling yourself?

Start with the wrong reading, because it is the tempting one. A roof permit with a blank contractor field does not mean the homeowner is shopping for a roofer. Most of those jobs were almost certainly filed by the roofer as the owner's authorized agent. Treating the blank as an open job is how a good list gets burned in a week.

The right reading is narrower and more durable. These are dated, addressed, owner-named records of specific work at specific properties, in the trades where owner identity is normally hardest to get. For a window company, 215 EZ window and door filings are 215 properties that just replaced windows to the same size. For a hauler, 1,258 interior demolition permits are 1,258 fit-outs that generated debris, which is the connection the dumpster and junk removal playbook is built around.

Roof covering is the volume play and it moves with the calendar. Monthly filings ran 292 in August 2025, fell to 63 in February 2026, and recovered to 191 by May. Geographically it concentrates: 19143 leads with 247 filings, then 19140 at 182, 19132 at 160, 19145 at 152 and 19119 at 142. That is a drive-time territory, not a citywide blast.

One more caution. Every Philadelphia record in our file carries the same value for application date and decision date, so the feed reports permits at the point they are issued. You cannot measure anyone's actual review turnaround from it, including your own, and the five-day figure above is L&I's published target rather than something our data confirms. Job value is not available either, since project cost is empty across the whole Philadelphia file.

How permits.llc fits in

We hold 77,848 Philadelphia permits, current to within about a day, with the permit type description intact so the EZ families can be separated from everything else. That separation is the part that matters here, and it is not something a generic export gives you.

If you want to work the owner-named side, pull the file and filter to General Permit Minor. You can download Pennsylvania permit records directly, or start from our Pennsylvania county coverage to see exactly what the file holds before you commit to it. Philadelphia is 99.4% of it, and we would rather you knew that first.

For work that needs the contractor's name instead of the owner's, the Philadelphia service upgrade filings sit on the other side of the licensing line and name a firm nearly every time. Different question, different file cut. If you would rather be told when new filings land than pull the file yourself, permit alerts run on a schedule you set.