Legal and operations
Data sources and disclaimers
Last updated August 27, 2026
Where the data comes from
Official government sources only: documented public permit APIs, official ArcGIS Feature Services, public open-data datasets, and the permit portals cities and counties publish themselves. Records are never bought from a data broker, and never invented, estimated, or inferred. A source that would require defeating a CAPTCHA, circumventing a login, or evading a rate limit is not automated at all.
Automatic coverage
170 of the 539 California permitting authorities in the routing catalog are searched automatically, spanning 37 counties and 11 portal software families: Accela Citizen Access (59), Tyler EnerGov Self Service (50), eTRAKiT (35), Citizenserve (7), official ArcGIS Feature Services (7), SmartGov (7), and 5 more jurisdictions across 5 smaller portal families. A jurisdiction is counted here when its connector ships as live coverage or passes live acceptance testing against the official source; each coverage page states what that jurisdiction's tests covered, and most include a negative test in which an address with no permit records correctly came back empty. The ledger behind these markers records passing acceptance tests dated between Jul 23, 2026 and Sep 2, 2026. A stored result from an identical search in the last 30 days may be reused - 7 days for a no-record result, one day for an incomplete read - and any other search runs live against the official source. A search that could not finish, or whose address could not be confirmed to the jurisdiction confidently enough, is labeled incomplete alongside whatever it did read - never presented as a completed permit history, and never as "no permits found". Automated coverage is a statement about the connector, not a guarantee that a portal publishes every permit ever issued. Every jurisdiction count on this page is generated from the same routing catalog the coverage page lists, so the two cannot disagree.
Jurisdictions with no automated search
The remaining 369 are cataloged and routed. 3 of them run automation that has not passed live acceptance certification: those searches publish what they read, and a no-record result is reported as inconclusive, never as an authoritative "no permits found". For the other 366, no automated search runs, and PermitProof is an individual-account product with no staffed queue behind it, so the report explains the gap instead of promising to fill it. 261 of them carry a specific recorded barrier - a portal that requires an account and sign-in, a public portal that automated search has not worked against, a jurisdiction recorded as taking records requests rather than publishing a self-serve search, or a portal that is online but where no certifiable permit search could be established - and the report names which one applies. The rest say plainly that PermitProof has no automated search there yet. For 204 the catalog holds an official source that the report links so the address can be checked directly; for 165 it holds nothing to link, and the report says so rather than pointing at a link that is not there.
Coverage states
A jurisdiction is either searched automatically or it is not, and the report says which. A source that was unavailable, blocked, or unreadable is reported as exactly that, never as "no permits found", and an automated search that reached no publishable conclusion is never rounded up into one. A report states that no permits were located only for the 170 jurisdictions whose live negative test observed that exact portal returning a no-record result.
Demonstration mode
Mock records are always labeled: Demonstration data. Not retrieved from an official permit source. Mock records are never mixed with live records. The public sample report is built from that demonstration dataset, so there is no government record behind any row in it - which is why each of its source links opens this page instead of a permit portal.
Core report disclaimer
Permit records are based on available public sources as of the search date. The absence of an online permit does not establish that work was not completed. PermitProof does not verify construction quality, code compliance, insurability, underwriting eligibility, or coverage.
Interpretations
Interpreted descriptions are summaries for workflow convenience. The original government record controls.