Toronto permit data

Where to Get Building Permit Data in Canada

Published July 24, 2026

Where can you get building permit data in Canada?

Short answer: There is no single national database of individual building permits in Canada. Statistics Canada publishes monthly aggregate totals by region through its Building Permits Survey. The individual permit records live with each municipality, and the larger cities publish them through their own open data portals. For Toronto, PermitIndex indexes the City's open permit data into a searchable index refreshed daily.

Those are three different products, and picking the wrong one wastes an afternoon. The federal layer tells you how much construction a region approved in a month, but it cannot name a single address. The municipal layer holds the actual records, but scattered across dozens of portals with incompatible formats. The indexed layer, which is where PermitIndex sits for Toronto, turns one city's records into something you can query without writing code. This guide covers what each layer contains, where to download it, and which one fits which job.

What does Statistics Canada publish about building permits?

Statistics Canada runs the Building Permits Survey, a monthly survey of Canadian municipalities that reports the value of construction and the number of dwelling units authorized, broken down by type of structure and type of work. The current monthly table, published as Building permits, by type of structure and type of work, covers Canada, the provinces and territories, and census metropolitan areas, with seasonally adjusted series built for month-to-month comparison.

Its strengths are breadth and consistency. It is the only source that lets you compare permit activity across every region of the country on one methodology, and the series runs back years without format breaks.

Its limits matter just as much. The survey publishes aggregates only: no addresses, no individual permits, no project descriptions. Releases follow the reference month on a lag of several weeks, so it describes recent history rather than the current week. If your question is "what is being built at this address" or "which streets are busiest," StatCan cannot answer it at any price.

Which Canadian cities publish building permits as open data?

Most large Canadian cities now publish record-level permit data, and this is where real addresses appear. Toronto publishes its active building permits dataset through the City's open data portal, refreshed frequently, under the Open Government Licence. Vancouver publishes issued building permits going back to 2017 through its own portal, with API access. Calgary, Edmonton, and Ottawa each run separate portals carrying permit files in their own layouts, and the federal open government portal federates some of these catalogues into one search.

The catch is fragmentation. Every portal has its own schema, its own field names, its own refresh cadence, and its own definition of which permits appear at all. Some publish everything ever issued, others only what is currently open. There is no national standard, so any project spanning more than one city starts with a mapping exercise: which field is the address, which date means issued, and what quietly leaves the file over time. You get raw material, not a lookup tool.

What is in Toronto's active building permits dataset?

Toronto's open dataset is the one PermitIndex is built on, so it is worth describing precisely. Each record carries the property address, the permit type and current status, a short description of the work, the application and issue dates as the City recorded them, and an estimated construction value where the applicant disclosed one. Many permits disclose no value at all, which is why any dollar total from this data describes only the disclosing subset.

Three things are absent by design. Names are not reliably published, so the dataset supports territory analysis, never contact lists. Postal codes appear only as the first three characters, the forward sortation area, never a full code. And the dataset covers active permits: records leave it as projects close out, so older years look emptier than they actually were, and every count should be read as permits currently on record rather than a historical census. Our guide to whether building permits are public record in Ontario covers what that record does and does not tell you about a specific property.

How is PermitIndex different from downloading the raw file?

The raw file is authoritative but unfriendly: a large export you have to parse, geocode, and classify before it answers anything. PermitIndex does that work continuously. We ingest the City's dataset daily, derive a trade classification for every permit, geocode each record, and index the result by address, neighbourhood, and postal area, so you can search any Toronto address and read its permits in seconds.

The index currently holds 28,514 Toronto building permits issued in the trailing twelve months and still on record as of Aug 26, 2026. Of those, the 10,137 permits that disclosed a construction value together represent $14,673,846,387 in disclosed value; the rest disclose none, so the real total is higher. We also compute things the raw file does not contain at all, like the median lag from application to issuance on the Toronto permit wait times page.

One honest limit: PermitIndex covers Toronto only today. For any other city, go to that municipality's own portal.

StatCan, municipal open data, or PermitIndex: which one do you need?

Match the source to the question, not the other way around.

| Your question | Best source | |---|---| | How much construction is being approved nationally, provincially, or by metro area, month by month? | Statistics Canada, Building Permits Survey | | What are the individual permit records in one specific city, addresses included? | That city's open data portal | | What is permitted at a Toronto address, or in a Toronto neighbourhood, without parsing raw files? | PermitIndex |

Quotable: In Canada, aggregate permit statistics are federal and record-level permit data is municipal. No national body publishes individual building permits, so the closer your question gets to a specific address, the more local your data source has to be.

The two public layers also disagree on freshness in a way that surprises people: the federal survey publishes on a lag measured in weeks, while a city portal like Toronto's refreshes its record-level file far more often. If you want to see how the two layers compare on actual Toronto numbers, we ran that comparison in StatCan vs municipal building permit data, and the step-by-step Toronto lookup guide shows the record-level workflow end to end.

The limits worth knowing before you build on this data

Two caveats apply to nearly every Canadian permit source. First, published records describe paperwork, not construction quality: a permit tells you work was authorized, not that it was done well, and minor work legitimately proceeds with no permit at all. Second, datasets shed records on their own schedules. Toronto's active-permits file drops permits as projects close, so an address with an empty result means nothing is currently on record, not that nothing was ever permitted there.

Treat every source as a starting point with a documented bias, and read the publisher's own notes before quoting a number. The full description of what we ingest, how often, and under what licence is on our data sources page.