Terms of Use

What PermitAnswer is

PermitAnswer is an informational reference that extracts and summarizes permit requirements from publicly available city and state codes. It is designed to help homeowners and contractors understand the general rules before contacting their local building department.

Not legal advice

Nothing on this site constitutes legal advice, professional engineering advice, or a determination that any specific project does or does not require a permit. Permit requirements depend on your exact project scope, your lot conditions, local amendments not captured in our data, and the judgment of the building official.

Always confirm permit requirements directly with your local building department before starting work. Reliance on this site as a substitute for professional advice is at your own risk.

Accuracy and currency of data

Building codes are amended frequently. The data on each page reflects the source we read on the date shown. We make reasonable efforts to keep information current, but we cannot guarantee that a given rule has not changed since we last checked it. We display a confidence score to indicate the strength of the source evidence; pages with low confidence are labeled accordingly.

If you find an error, please report it so we can correct it.

No warranty

The site and its content are provided "as is" without warranty of any kind, express or implied, including warranties of accuracy, completeness, fitness for a particular purpose, or non-infringement. We do not warrant that the site will be uninterrupted or error-free.

Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law, PermitAnswer and its operators shall not be liable for any damages arising from your use of or reliance on information found on this site, including but not limited to permit fees, fines, stop-work orders, or costs of bringing unpermitted work into compliance.

Links to third-party sites

We link to city codes (Municode) and building department websites. We do not control those sites and are not responsible for their content, accuracy, or availability.

Use of content

The underlying permit data extracted from government codes is in the public domain. The presentation, prose summaries, confidence scores, and other original content on this site are our own. You may quote or link to pages with attribution; do not reproduce the site's content at scale without permission.

Changes to these terms

We may update these terms at any time. The "Last updated" date above indicates when the current version took effect. Continued use of the site after an update constitutes acceptance of the revised terms.

Contact

Questions about these terms: contact us.