How to look up Boston building permits in 2026 (free + paid options)

Option 1: City of Boston Inspectional Services Department (ISD) — free, web portal

The official source. Boston ISD publishes a public permit-search portal that covers building, electrical, plumbing, mechanical, and short-form permits within the city limits.

What you can find:

• Permit number, type, status, issue date.
• Project address.
• Applicant name (often the contractor, sometimes the homeowner).
• Declared work description and declared cost.

What you can't:

• Filter across multiple municipalities (Boston ISD covers only the city of Boston — not Cambridge, Brookline, Somerville, Newton, Quincy, etc.).
• Pre-classify by trade. A "REROOF" permit, a "HVAC REPLACEMENT" permit, and a "PV SOLAR INSTALLATION" permit all sit in the same flat list.
• Resolve aliases. "John's Solar LLC" and "JS Solar Installers" are separate strings even when they're the same business.
• Get a daily push. You have to remember to log in and run the search.

Free is free. For a one-off lookup of a specific address, the ISD portal is the right answer.

Option 2: MassGIS — statewide, parcel-grade, free

MassGIS is the Commonwealth's geographic information clearinghouse. It exposes parcel data (lot lines, zoning, owner-of-record) for every Massachusetts municipality. It does not publish permit records directly, but it lets you cross-reference an address to its parcel, owner, and assessed value — which is useful context once you've found a permit.

Use case: you found a permit at 123 Beacon St. via Boston ISD; you want to know whether the property owner is an LLC, an individual, or a real-estate trust before you knock. MassGIS gives you that.

Option 3: The 38 individual municipal permit portals around Boston metro

Every city and town in Massachusetts maintains its own permit-records system. Some use the same vendor (Energov, Viewpoint, OpenGov, ProjectDox); most don't. As a result, if you cover "Boston metro," you are theoretically looking at:

• Boston ISD
• Cambridge ISD
• Brookline Building Department
• Somerville Inspectional Services
• Newton Inspectional Services
• Quincy Inspectional Services
• Medford, Malden, Everett, Revere, Chelsea, Watertown, Waltham, Belmont, Arlington, Lexington, Winchester, Woburn, Stoneham, Melrose, Saugus, Lynn, Salem, Peabody, Beverly, Marblehead, Swampscott, Nahant, Wakefield, Reading, North Reading, Wilmington, Burlington, Bedford, Concord, Lincoln, and the rest of the Route 128 belt.

Each has its own portal UI, its own field schema, its own login flow (some are public, some require account creation), and its own update cadence (some daily, some weekly, some monthly).

If you genuinely want full Boston-metro coverage by hand, plan on 4–6 hours per week of someone's time, every week, forever.

Option 4: A daily permit feed (PermitPulse and similar)

The tradeoff with the free options is obvious: they're free, but you pay in time and in completeness. Daily permit-intelligence feeds aggregate the per-municipality data into one place and add the layers the raw portals leave out:

• Trade classification. A "REROOF" permit and an "HVAC REPLACEMENT" permit are tagged before they hit your inbox, so a solar contractor isn't reading roofing filings and vice versa.
• Contractor entity resolution. "John's Solar LLC" and "JS Solar Installers" get merged into a single contractor-of-record so you can see who's actually winning work in your territory.
• Daily push, not pull. One email per weekday, scoped to your trade and your metros.
• CSV export. Pipe filtered permit events directly into your CRM or your prospecting list.

Which one should you use?

If you pull permits for a single address every once in a while: use Boston ISD's free portal.

If you need to know every weekday which solar / roofing / HVAC / electrical jobs got filed in your territory yesterday: a daily permit feed costs less than two hours of your time and gives you the trade classification + contractor resolution that free portals don't.

FAQs

Are Massachusetts building permits public records?

Yes. Massachusetts public-records law (M.G.L. c. 66, § 10) makes municipal permit filings public information. Each city or town is required to make them available, though the format and access mechanism varies.

How fresh is the Boston ISD permit data?

Boston ISD updates its public portal on a rolling basis as permits are issued. The lag from filing to portal visibility is typically same-day to next-business-day for most permit types.

Can I get Boston permit data by API?

The City of Boston publishes some permit datasets via Analyze Boston (data.boston.gov) as CSV downloads, but there is no fully real-time API at the city level. Real-time aggregated APIs are the niche that paid feeds (including PermitPulse) fill.

Do I need a license to look up permits?

No. Permit records are public. Licensing rules apply when you pull a permit (i.e., file as the contractor of record), not when you look one up.