Do Philadelphia permit records include the contractor's name?

It depends entirely on the permit type, and the spread is wider than most people expect. Across the last 12 months in our Philadelphia file, electrical, fire alarm and demolition permits name a contractor on 100% of records, plumbing on 99.9% and mechanical on 99.6%. Building permits name one on 65.7%. The reason is licensing. Philadelphia requires a city trade licence to pull a plumbing, electrical, fire protection or complete demolition permit, so a licensed firm is always attached to the filing. Building permits on one and two family dwellings can be pulled by a contractor registered under the state Home Improvement Consumer Protection Act, and the contractor field is not filled in as reliably.

Does Philadelphia permit data include the job value?

No. Project cost is empty on all 77,447 records in our Pennsylvania file, so there is no way to sort Philadelphia work by dollar size, filter for jobs over a threshold, or estimate a market's value from our data. This is the single biggest limitation of the Philadelphia file and it is worth knowing before you build a workflow around it. What you get instead is identity: a named contractor on most permits and a named property owner on 94.9%.

How much of your Pennsylvania data is Philadelphia?

99.4% of it. Of 77,447 Pennsylvania permits, 77,020 are Philadelphia. Reading in Berks County holds 292 and Allentown in Lehigh County holds 135, and the Allentown records stop in June 2026. Pennsylvania has 67 counties and we hold data in three, so treat this as a Philadelphia dataset that happens to sit under a Pennsylvania label. If your territory is Pittsburgh, Harrisburg or the Lehigh Valley at any scale, this file will not serve you yet.

Which Philadelphia trade has the most competition?

Building work, by a wide margin. 11,323 building permits named a contractor in the last 12 months and they were spread across 2,439 distinct firms, with the ten busiest holding only 8.6% between them. At the other end, 413 demolition permits came from 33 firms and the top ten held 86.2%. Fire alarm is nearly as tight, with 60 firms and a 74.0% top-ten share. Same city, same file, completely different market structures.

Is this application data or issued permit data?

Issued. Every Philadelphia record in our file carries the same value for application date and decision date, which tells you the feed reports permits at the point they are granted rather than tracking them through review. So you cannot measure review turnaround from this data, and you should not pitch anyone on doing so. What you can do is treat the date as a reliable issue date, which is what matters for timing outreach anyway.

Philadelphia Permit Data: Which Trades Name a Contractor

By the permits.llc team · Last reviewed August 19, 2026 · Optimal window: Weeks 1–4

TL;DR

Philadelphia electrical, fire alarm and demolition permits name a contractor 100% of the time.
Building permits name one on 65.7%, spread across 2,439 competing firms.
Ten firms hold 86.2% of demolition work and 74.0% of fire alarm work.
Project cost is empty on all 77,447 Pennsylvania records. Plan around it.

A Philadelphia electrical permit names the contractor who pulled it every single time. A Philadelphia building permit names one about two thirds of the time, 65.7% across the last 12 months. That difference is not a data quality accident, it is the Department of Licenses and Inspections licensing structure showing up in the public record, and it changes what the same file is good for depending on which trade you work in.

Most permit data articles treat a city as one market. Philadelphia is six, and they do not resemble each other. One of them has 2,439 firms competing for work. Another has 33.

What does a Philadelphia permit actually name?

Our Philadelphia file carries 77,020 permits, and the fields that are reliably filled in are the ones about people and places rather than money.

Owner name is present on 94.9% of Pennsylvania records. Contractor name on 86.0%. Address on 99.9%, postal code on 99.1%, latitude and longitude on 99.0%, and a written work description on 99.6%. Permit type is populated on every record and splits cleanly across seven categories.

Project cost is populated on 0.0%. Not partially, not unevenly. Empty.

That combination is unusual. A permit is a signal about the property owner, not the contractor, and in Philadelphia you get both parties named on the same record more often than anywhere else we cover. What you cannot get is what the job is worth.

Which Philadelphia trades name a contractor, and which do not?

Here is the last 12 months of Philadelphia permits, broken out by trade. Concentration figures are calculated across the permits that actually name a contractor.

Trade	Permits (12 mo)	Names a contractor	Distinct firms	Top 10 firms' share
Building	17,239	65.7%	2,439	8.6%
Plumbing	13,590	99.9%	384	29.8%
Electrical	8,272	100.0%	607	22.5%
Mechanical	4,864	99.6%	813	23.5%
Fire alarm	1,894	100.0%	60	74.0%
Demolition	413	100.0%	33	86.2%

Owner name holds up across all six: 97.8% on demolition, 96.6% on plumbing, 96.0% on electrical, 94.2% on building, 94.0% on mechanical and 87.6% on fire alarm.

Read the firm counts again. Philadelphia issued 42 times more building permits than demolition permits last year, and the building work was shared among 74 times as many companies.

Why do trade permits carry names when building permits do not?

Because Philadelphia licenses the trades directly and the state handles home improvement separately, and the two regimes do not overlap.

L&I requires a city trade licence to perform plumbing, electrical, fire protection or complete demolition work in Philadelphia. Plumbing work has to run through a licensed Master Plumber. Fire protection certifications have been filed through eCLIPSE since April 2023. Contractor licence applicants have to name the supervisors responsible for the work and show completion of an approved OSHA 30 course. A permit in those categories cannot exist without a licensed entity behind it, so the name is captured at filing.

Building permits on one and two family dwellings sit in different territory. Those jobs generally fall under the Home Improvement Consumer Protection Act, administered by the Pennsylvania Attorney General, which is a registration rather than a licence. HICPA carves out plumbers, electricians, fire suppression workers and complete demolition contractors, the exact four groups the city licenses separately. Philadelphia then layers its own Home Improvement Contractor requirement on top for residential work, so a contractor can satisfy one obligation while missing the other. The result in the data is a softer contractor field.

Both regimes sit under the Pennsylvania Uniform Construction Code at 34 Pa. Code, with Philadelphia administering its own construction and occupancy code through L&I on top of it.

How concentrated is each Philadelphia trade?

Concentrated enough that two of the six are not prospecting markets at all.

Sixty firms filed every fire alarm permit in Philadelphia last year, and ten of them took 74.0%. Thirty three firms filed all 413 demolition permits, with the top ten holding 86.2% and only 13 firms filing a single permit all year. Those are not lead lists. They are a complete census of who does that work in the city, which is a different and arguably more useful thing.

Plumbing sits in the middle: 384 firms, top ten at 29.8%, top 25 at 49.3%. Electrical runs 607 firms and 22.5%. Mechanical, 813 firms and 23.5%.

Building is the outlier in the other direction. 2,439 firms filed at least one building permit, 1,079 of them filed exactly one, and the ten busiest managed 8.6% between them. If you sell to residential general contractors in Philadelphia, your addressable market is genuinely large and genuinely fragmented, and no incumbent is anywhere close to owning it.

What can this data not tell you?

Four things, and it is cheaper to know them now.

There is no project cost, anywhere, on any Philadelphia record. Any workflow that scores jobs by size has to be built on permit type and work description instead.

The file reports issued permits, not applications in flight. Application date and decision date carry the same value on every Philadelphia record, so review turnaround is not measurable here and nobody should claim otherwise.

Coverage outside Philadelphia is thin to the point of being decorative. Reading holds 292 records and Allentown 135, and the Allentown data stops on 18 June 2026. Three of Pennsylvania's 67 counties are represented. Do not buy this expecting Pittsburgh.

Contractor licence numbers are not in the file either. You get the firm name, not its licence, so verification still means a lookup elsewhere.

How should you use this to pick a Philadelphia play?

Start from which side of the record you need, then pick the permit type that fills it.

If you sell to contractors, the trade permits are your file. Plumbing, electrical, mechanical, fire alarm and demolition name the firm on essentially every record, and the firm counts tell you immediately whether you are looking at a market to prospect (813 mechanical firms) or a market to study (33 demolition firms). Suppliers, insurers and software vendors targeting Philadelphia trades get a near complete picture from one export.

If you sell to property owners, building permits carry an owner name on 94.2% of records and cover the widest range of residential work. The 65.7% contractor coverage matters less, because the contractor is not who you are calling.

If you sell geographically, use the coordinates. 19146, 19104 and 19148 each cleared 1,900 permits over the last 12 months, and 19146 alone produced 863 building and 690 plumbing permits. Philadelphia's near total geocoding makes drive time territories practical in a way our thinner state files do not.

The trap to avoid is treating a concentrated trade as a growth list. Calling all 60 fire alarm firms takes an afternoon. Understanding which ten of them control three quarters of the work is worth considerably more than the call sheet.

How permits.llc fits in

We hold 77,447 Pennsylvania permits, 46,514 of them filed in the last 12 months, current to within about a day of Philadelphia's own feed. The Philadelphia records run from January 2025 forward, which is a shorter history than some of our states and a much better identity profile than most.

You can pull the raw file from the Pennsylvania permit download page and filter it by trade before you commit to an approach, or browse the Pennsylvania county coverage breakdown to see exactly how much sits outside Philadelphia before you assume statewide reach. If you want new filings pushed to you rather than exported in batches, permit alerts run across every state we cover.

Two pieces worth reading alongside this one: our comparison of permit data against purchased lead lists covers why a public filing behaves differently from a bought contact, and measuring return on permit leads is the method we would apply to a concentrated market like Philadelphia demolition. If you work a specific trade, the HVAC contractor playbook and the alarm and security playbook map the permit triggers for the two trades where Philadelphia's data is strongest.