Through July 17, Chicago has issued 16,660 building permits in 2026, carrying $7.124 billion in reported construction cost. Somewhere in that stack is every restaurant buildout, office renovation, and ground-up development that will need vendors over the next year. The problem is that most of the 16,660 are noise — and the city's lookup tools won't tell you which is which.
This is a field guide to doing it yourself: where to look permits up, how to read a single permit row, and what each permit type actually signals if you sell to businesses.
Where to look
Chicago publishes every building permit on the city data portal (data.cityofchicago.org — search "Building Permits"). The dataset updates daily and goes back decades. You can filter by permit type, sort by issue date, and export to a spreadsheet. There's no account required.
Each row carries more than most people notice: the reported cost of the work, a free-text work description, the street address, and a contact list that usually includes the property owner, the applicant, and the general contractor. That contact list matters — for most B2B use cases, the contractor tells you the project is real, and the owner tells you who's paying for it.
The permit types, ranked by lead time
Seven permit types cover essentially all commercial activity. Ordered from earliest signal to latest:
- Wrecking/Demolition — 359 issued YTD. The earliest public signal that a site is changing hands or changing use. Nothing gets torn down without a plan for what replaces it. We looked at the demolition-to-opportunity pipeline in the demolition writeup.
- New Construction — 790 issued YTD, $2.825B reported cost, median 51 days in review. The longest-lead signal in the dataset. A ground-up commercial project generates vendor demand for a year or more after the permit. How to spot a tower eight months early.
- Renovation/Alteration — 2,902 issued YTD, $2.823B. The workhorse. This is the buildout signal: a tenant is preparing a space for occupancy. Note the reported cost — it carries nearly as many dollars as new construction on almost four times the permit count. Why renovation permits are the single best commercial buying signal.
- Elevator Equipment — 571 issued YTD, $358M. Underrated. An elevator upgrade means a building owner is investing in the property — often ahead of new tenants.
- Signs — 1,124 issued YTD. Late-stage. A sign permit means the tenant has a name on the way to the facade: opening is close and the brand budget is active.
- Express Permit Program — 10,644 issued YTD. Nearly two-thirds of all permits, median two days to issue. Minor repairs, small residential work. For B2B purposes, almost entirely noise — filter it out first and the dataset shrinks to something readable.
- Reinstate Revoked Permit — 270 issued YTD. A stalled project coming back to life. Worth a look if you sold into a project that went quiet.
Reading the review clock
The processing time is information too. A renovation permit spends a median of 58 days between application and issuance; new construction 51; signs 34. If you watch permit applications instead of waiting for issuances, that review window is extra runway you get for free — a month or two of knowing a project is coming before the permit is even granted.
Caveats
Reported cost is self-reported by the applicant and skews low. A permit is a property-level event, not a business-level one — plenty of renovation permits are apartment rehabs with no commercial tenant behind them, so read the work description before acting on a row. And connecting a permit to the licensed business that eventually opens at that address takes real matching work; the address formats on the two city datasets don't line up cleanly.
That last step — connecting the permit trail to the license trail — is the part we've built. BizPulse surfaces buildout signals on the profile of every licensed Chicago business, and the opening-soon view tracks addresses where permit activity points to a business that hasn't opened yet.
The permits are public. The signal is real. Most of your competitors are still waiting for the ribbon-cutting.