Building permits in Seattle are public record. The place to look one up is the Seattle Services Portal at services.seattle.gov. The portal searches construction and land use permit records by address or by record number, and it needs no account or login. This guide walks through that search the way the city built it, including one required field that quietly hides older results. It then covers where permit history from before the portal lives, and how the same records look once BuildVue groups them into projects.
This is a guide to finding the records at one address in a single sitting. It also covers finding the record behind one permit number. Watching permit activity across the city month after month is a different job, and how to track building permits in Seattle covers that one. Seattle also works differently from its neighbors, so Bellevue, Tacoma and Everett each have their own walkthrough.
What to have ready before you search
Any one of these is enough to start a search.
- A record number, if you already have one from a posted notice or an earlier search. Most look like a run of seven digits followed by a letter code for the permit type, such as CN for construction or LU for land use. Applications still in intake often carry a temporary number instead. It starts with the year, in the form 26TMP followed by six digits.
- A street address, which the portal asks for in parts rather than as one line of text. Separate fields hold the house number range, the direction in front of the street name, the street name itself, the street type such as AVE or ST, and the direction after the name.
- A date range, which the portal treats as a required field and fills in for you.
That last one is the piece people miss. The date range is not a filter you add, and it is already on when the page loads.
How to run the search
Go to services.seattle.gov and open Permits for Trade, Construction and Land Use from the list of record types. The page that loads is called Find Trade, Construction and Land Use Permit Records. You do not need to sign in. The Login and Register links sit at the top of the page, but they matter only if you are applying for a permit or paying a fee.
The form is in two halves. Required Fields holds a Create Date From and a Create Date To. Optional Fields holds the record number, the record type, the record status and the address fields. Fill in whichever optional fields you have and leave the rest blank.
Before you press Search, look at the two dates. When we ran this search on August 9, 2026, the portal had prefilled the range as January 1, 2015 through that same day. Anything created before 2015 fell outside the window. Those records would not have come back no matter how well the address matched. If you are looking for a permit filed more than about ten years ago, widen the From date first.
A search with only a street name and a street type matches every property on that street. On a long street that means hundreds of records. The results counter stops giving an exact number once it passes 250 and shows 250 plus instead. Narrowing by house number range, by record type or by a tighter date window turns that into a readable list.
What the results tell you
Results come back as a table with a row for each record and these columns.
- Created Date, the day the record was opened
- Record Number, the identifier you can search by directly later
- Record Type, such as Construction Permit, Master Use Permit or Demolition Permit
- Status, the stage the record is on
- Address
- Description, the free text summary of the work
- Expiration Date, on the permit types that carry one
A Download Results link sits above the table. It helps when a search returns more rows than you want to read on screen.
Statuses are worth reading carefully. They describe where a record sits inside the city's process rather than what is happening on the ground. A permit can be issued months before anyone breaks ground, and a record can sit still while the applicant redraws something.
Reviews In Process means staff are working through the plans. Additional Info Requested means the city has asked the applicant for something and the clock is with them. Issued means the permit is approved and work is allowed to start. Completed means the record is closed out. A record can also be withdrawn or expired if it never went the whole way through.
Click any row to open the record itself. It repeats the header information and adds the location details, the fees, the inspections and any related records.