Bellevue does not run its own permit lookup website. The city shares a portal called MyBuildingPermit with several other jurisdictions in the Puget Sound area, including Auburn, Bothell, Burien, Edmonds, Federal Way, Issaquah, Kenmore, Kirkland, Mercer Island, Sammamish, Snoqualmie, and King County. Every permit application in Bellevue goes through this shared system. The city says all permit applications must now be submitted online at MyBuildingPermit.com and that paper applications and plans are no longer accepted, so the portal is the only route for both filing a permit and checking on one.
What you need before you search
Before you search, decide what you already know about the project. MyBuildingPermit lets you search four different ways, and each one wants different information.
- A permit number, if you already have one from a notice, a posted sign, or a previous search
- A property address, if you know the site but not the permit number
- A project name or description, if you are looking for a specific development by name
- A contractor or applicant name, if you want to see everything one company has filed
A parcel number is not required to start a search. The portal finds the parcel once you search by address.
How to search
Go to mybuildingpermit.com and select "Check Status." This opens a separate search page at permitsearch.mybuildingpermit.com. That page asks you to pick a jurisdiction first. Jurisdiction is a required field, and you have to choose Bellevue from the dropdown before any search will run, because the same portal covers a number of cities and the results are filtered by jurisdiction.
Once Bellevue is selected, pick one of four search tabs.
- "Permit #" searches by permit number and accepts a partial match, so the full string is not required
- "Project Info" searches by project name or description, also a partial match
- "Location" searches by street name or parcel information
- "People" searches by contractor or applicant name
The search can be narrowed further by permit type, permit status, and date ranges for when the permit was applied for, issued, or finaled. The portal's status site guide documents an option to export results to a spreadsheet, which helps if you are tracking several properties at once.
What the statuses mean
A permit moves through a small number of stages inside the portal. Applied means the application has been submitted and is waiting on or currently under review. Issued means the city approved the permit and construction is authorized to begin. Finaled means every required inspection has passed and the city has closed the permit out. A permit can also sit in a withdrawn or expired state if it never made it through the process. Applied, issued, and finaled are also the three dates you can search by if you are trying to pull permits from a specific window of time.