Every permit type in Seattle

4 kinds of permit appear on the 3,009 Seattle permits we hold, as of 2026-09-09. 3 of them have enough measurable permits to say how long the city takes. Open a type to see the permits themselves.

Permit type	Permits held	Share of what we hold	Typical	9 in 10 within	Measured
Building	2,535	84.2%	55 days	262 days	2,533
Roof	244	8.1%	too few measured to time
Demolition	217	7.2%	81 days	418 days	217
Grading	13	0.4%	97 days	311 days	13

“Permits held” counts what PermitWatch holds for Seattle — the most recently issued permits, not the city’s whole history — so it describes this corpus and not the city’s output. 1 type has fewer than eight permits carrying both an application and an issue date, so it is left untimed rather than given a median over a handful of permits.

What these names mean

Permit types are the city’s own classification, printed here exactly as Seattle publishes them — including its prefixes and its spelling. Two cities describing the same job will use different words for it, which is why this page is per city.

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Preview: 9,183 permits loaded from Chicago, Austin and Seattle. More cities are being added.