Austin Has 5,023 Expired Permits and 27,278 Open Ones

An Austin permit expires 180 days after activation if the City has not performed an on-site inspection, pass or fail. In our Austin file, 5,023 permits carry the status Expired and another 27,278 are still Active, which together is 34.5% of the 93,554 Austin records we hold. Every one of them sits on a property whose current owner is responsible for resolving it, even if the permit was pulled by somebody who sold the house years ago.

The permit lead business sells new filings. Fresh permits, delivered daily, before the competition sees them. That is a real product and we sell it too. It is also the smaller half of what Austin publishes, because Austin publishes status, and status is where the unfinished work is.

TL;DR

• 5,023 Austin permits are Expired. 27,278 are Active. 60,398 have reached Final.
• The current owner is liable for expired permits, including ones a previous owner pulled.
• An unresolved permit can block the next permit on that property.
• 385 Austin addresses carry two or more expired permits. One carries 13.

What does an expired Austin permit actually mean?

It means the City stopped seeing progress. Austin expires a permit 180 days after activation if no on-site inspection has happened, and an inspection where the inspector finds work has continued pushes the date out another 180 days. Where the job's structure makes regular inspection intervals impossible, a #114 Continuance of Work Inspection keeps the permit Active.

Activation matters here and is easy to get wrong. The clock starts when the contractor links their Austin Build + Connect account and their contractor registration to the permit and pays the fees, at which point the status flips to Active. It does not start at application, and it does not start at issuance.

So Expired is not a verdict about the building. It is a statement that nobody from the City has been out to look at it in six months.

That distinction is the whole opportunity. Two very different situations produce the same word.

How many Austin permits are open or expired right now?

Austin's file runs on four trades, and they behave differently once you sort by status.

Trade	Final	Active	Expired	Active share
Building	11,943	9,082	1,341	40.2%
Electrical	19,422	6,692	1,206	24.2%
Plumbing	16,975	6,568	1,445	26.1%
Mechanical	12,058	4,936	1,031	27.2%

Building stands out. Four in ten Austin building permits are still Active, against roughly one in four across electrical, plumbing and mechanical. That fits the work: a trade permit covers a job measured in days, a building permit covers one measured in months, and the longer the job the longer the permit sits open.

Plumbing carries the most expired records at 1,445, which is not what you would guess from a trade that mostly does short jobs.

The expired file is also recent. 3,993 of the 5,023 expired permits, 79.5%, were applied for in 2025. Only 322 are from 2026, which makes sense, because a 2026 permit has not had time to go 180 days without an inspection yet. This year's expirations are still arriving.

At the other end, 722 permits with an application date before 2023 are still marked Active. A handful reach back much further, including a carport conversion applied for in February 1984 that is still open, and several 1990s records carrying inspection notes written in 2026. Somebody is going back and closing those out.

Why does an expired permit block the property's next job?

Because Austin says an expired permit may need to be resolved before a new permit is issued on that property. That single sentence is what turns a records problem into a sales pipeline.

Picture the sequence. A homeowner in Austin decides to redo a kitchen in 2027. Their contractor goes to file, and the property has a 2025 plumbing permit for a water heater that nobody ever got inspected. Before the kitchen job can start, the old permit has to be reactivated or otherwise cleared, and reactivation carries fees.

The owner did not create that problem. The City is explicit that the property owner is responsible for expired permits even when they did not own the property when the permit was issued, and Austin's homeowner guidance repeats it in plainer language: the owner is responsible for addressing all expired permits, including ones performed by previous owners. There is a form named the Acknowledgment of Expired Permits, which tells you how routine this is.

Reactivation is available to the property owner, the general contractor, or the trade contractor listed on the permit. In-person service exists for first-time reactivations, one project per day.

An extension is a different instrument. It has to be requested before the permit expires, and Austin allows it once per permit. After that, the only path is reactivation.

Which expired permits are real work and which are just missing inspections?

Read the description, and the answer usually falls out.

476 of the 5,023 expired Austin permits mention a water heater. 199 mention a changeout. Those are one-day and two-day jobs. A permit for a water heater replacement that sat 180 days without an inspection is overwhelmingly likely to be a heater that got installed and never inspected, not a heater sitting in a garage since last spring. The work is done. The record is not.

Now the other shape. 173 expired records mention new residential construction, 152 mention a remodel, 129 mention foundation work, 114 mention a pool and 95 mention an addition. Those are jobs measured in months, and a 180-day gap in inspections on one of them means it actually stopped.

The commercial difference is large. On the first group you are selling a close-out: get the inspection scheduled, get the permit finaled, clear the property. Small ticket, fast, and the customer often does not know they have a problem until they try to sell or pull another permit. On the second group you are selling a finish-out, which is a real project with a real budget and an owner who has already spent money and stalled.

The same status field produces both. No competitor list separates them, because no competitor list ships status at all.

How do you build a target list from permit status?

Start narrow. 5,023 records is a manageable number, and 4,447 distinct addresses is more manageable still.

The sharpest filter is stacking. 276 Austin addresses carry exactly two expired permits, 109 carry three or more, and one address carries 13. Multiple expired permits at one address usually means one project that stalled across every trade, which is a far stronger signal than a single stale record. Work that list first.

Age is the second filter, and it needs honesty attached. 15,303 Active Austin permits have an application date more than 180 days old, and 8,840 are more than a year old. Application age is not the same as the 180-day clock, which runs from activation. What an old Active record does tell you is that the job started at some point and has not reached Final, and that is enough to justify a call.

Identity is the third. 4,369 of the 5,023 expired records name the filing company and 4,266 carry a phone number for it, across 1,276 distinct firms. If you take over finish-out work, or subcontract to the firms that keep leaving jobs open, that is your contact list. The approach that works is not an accusation. It is an offer to close out work somebody else has clearly moved on from. Scoring permit leads applies here in an unusual way, because recency inverts: on this list, older is more qualified.

A permit is a signal about the property and its owner, not about the contractor who filed it. Nowhere is that clearer than an expired record, where the filer has often long since left and the obligation stayed behind with the building. For anybody buying and reselling houses, this is due diligence they are probably already paying somebody to do by hand, which is why the real estate investor playbook treats open permits as a pricing input rather than a curiosity.

What can this file not answer?

Several things, and it is worth being blunt about them.

There is no expiration date. The expiry_date field is populated on zero of our 93,554 Austin records. We can report the status Austin publishes and the application date, and we can compute age from that, but a per-permit countdown is not available from this data.

There is no owner. owner_full_name is empty across the entire Austin file, which is the single biggest constraint on Austin permit data and the reason our Austin coverage supports contractor outreach rather than homeowner outreach. The address is there on every record. The name behind it is not.

There is no way to prove abandonment. Expired means no inspection in 180 days. It does not mean the contractor walked, and publishing a leaderboard of firms with the most expired permits would be assigning blame the data cannot support. Some of those firms did the work and the homeowner never scheduled the final.

There is no job value. Declared project cost is populated on about 1% of Austin records, so size this opportunity by permit count and address count, never in dollars. And there is no license number, no bond and no insurance field, so vetting a firm you find here still runs through the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation for electrical and air conditioning work, and the Texas State Board of Plumbing Examiners for plumbing.

Our Austin data is the City of Austin, inside Travis County. It is not Houston, not Dallas, not San Antonio, and not unincorporated Travis County, which runs its own development permit process.

How permits.llc fits in

We hold 93,554 City of Austin permit records with status on every one, refreshed daily. The Austin permit download gives you the full file with status_raw intact, so the Expired and Active cuts described here are filters you run yourself rather than a product we gatekeep. If you would rather work by trade, Austin permit types splits the same file into building, electrical, plumbing and mechanical, and the mechanical file in particular is our best-identified Austin trade, which is why the Austin changeout market piece leans on it.

New filings still matter, and daily permit alerts exist for exactly that. Just do not assume the newest records are the only ones worth calling. In Austin, 32,301 permits are sitting unresolved, four in ten building permits have never reached Final, and the industry standard is to ship you none of them.

Download the Austin permit file and sort it by status before you sort it by date. Or start with Austin permits by county if you want the coverage picture first.