How to look up building permits by address in North Carolina

There is no single statewide building permit database in North Carolina. A permit lives with whichever government enforces the building code where the property sits: a county inspections department for unincorporated land and the towns that contract with the county, or a city's own inspections office. Finding a permit by address takes two steps: work out who issued it, then search that office's records. This guide covers both, lists how to search each of the 23 offices TarSignal reads, and explains how to tell whether work on a house was permitted.

Step 1: Work out which office issued it

The mailing address isn't a reliable guide. A home with a Raleigh or Charlotte mailing address can sit outside the city limits, and a town can hand its inspections to the county. Every county's GIS map (Wake County's is called iMaps) shows the jurisdiction for a parcel. Search the address there and note two things: whether it's inside a city's limits, and the parcel number, which some permit systems search by instead of the street address.

Mecklenburg County is the easy case: its Code Enforcement department issues building permits across the county, including inside Charlotte. Gaston County has issued construction permits in Gastonia since August 2022, and Cabarrus County's covers Concord and Kannapolis. In Wake County, by contrast, Raleigh, Cary, Apex and the other towns each run their own office alongside the county's.

Step 2: Search that office's records

Each office's search works differently. Some find permits by address; others by parcel number, permit number or a date range; a few show only 50 permits per search. The table lists how to search each of the 23 offices TarSignal reads, and how often their records name the contractor. Each office links to its own page on TarSignal, which has its portal, its busiest ZIP codes and what it has filed lately.

• Mecklenburg County and Charlotte: Code Enforcement (code.mecknc.gov, which MeckPermit.com now points to) keeps permits in Accela Citizen Access. A permit's page names the applicant and usually the licensed contractor.
• Wake County (unincorporated areas): the county's permit portal searches permits issued since July 1, 2018 without an account; older records are in a separate database.
• City of Raleigh: the Permit and Development Portal searches public records without registering. It runs the same software as Wake County's but is a separate system with its own login.
• Union County: the inspections portal searches by permit number, tax parcel number, subdivision and lot, contractor or date range, but not by street address, so look up the parcel number first.
• Johnston County: Building Inspections offers searches by address, type of work, township and date range, with the last six years of permits online.
• Cary and Morrisville also publish their permits as open data that downloads as a spreadsheet, and Greensboro publishes its permits on the City's open data portal: the easiest way to see everything filed on a street.

Step 3: Read what you find

A permit record usually shows the address and parcel, the type of permit (building, electrical, plumbing, mechanical), a description of the work, its declared value, the dates it was applied for and issued, its status and inspections, and, in most offices, the contractor. Where an office files trade work separately, one project can have four or five permits at the same address.

Status words vary by office, but they follow the same arc: applied or in review, then issued, then inspections, then final or complete. Mecklenburg writes Closed - Complete, Greensboro Final Inspection Made, Durham and Cabarrus CO Issued, Wake County and Raleigh Complete. Under state law (G.S. 160D-1111), a permit expires if work hasn't started within six months of being issued, or a shorter time set by local ordinance, and it expires at once if work stops for 12 months. An expired permit means no further work until a new one is issued. A finished building gets a certificate of compliance, more often called a certificate of occupancy, after its final inspection; our guide to certificates of occupancy covers how to check one.

How to check whether work on a house was permitted

• List the work you can see or were told about: an addition, a finished basement, a deck, a new HVAC system, a panel upgrade, a new roof.
• Look up every permit at the address, including trade permits filed separately (electrical, plumbing, mechanical).
• Check each one reached a final. An issued permit with no final is open, and it may have expired.
• Remember what doesn't need a permit: most repairs and replacements costing $40,000 or less on a house are exempt unless they touch structure, plumbing, electrical or HVAC equipment (G.S. 160D-1110), so a reroof or new windows often has no permit at all.
• If something that should have one doesn't, ask the seller, and ask the inspections office how it handles work done without a permit.

Old permits

Older permits can be harder to find. Several offices keep records from before their current software in a separate archive, or only on request from the inspections department, so a house built twenty years ago may need a phone call rather than a search.

Or search 23 offices at once

TarSignal's Permit Search reads the permit records of 23 North Carolina permit offices, from Charlotte and the Triangle to Wilmington and Asheville, most of them back to late 2023, and puts them in one search. Type an address, ZIP code or contractor and you get the permits filed there, whichever office issued them, with the contractor on each where the record names one. It's free to start. Contractors use the same records to find work: the trade guides show where each kind of permit is being filed and who's pulling them.

How the numbers were counted

Portals and how to search them were checked on each office's site in October 2026. The contractor share is the percentage of each office's permits filed in the 12 months to October 23, 2026 that name a contractor in TarSignal's records; offices marked none publish no contractor in the records TarSignal reads. Searches and their limits change; if a portal looks different, the office's own help page is the authority.