Explore Calgary's building and development permits

Two datasets

Building permits track construction — what got built, its estimated cost, contractor and completion. Development permits are the planning approvals that usually come first: whether a proposed use is permitted or discretionary in its land-use district, and whether the city approved or refused it. Switch between them with the Building · Development toggle in the filter bar.

Live, not stored

Every chart is built on the spot by querying the City of Calgary's open-data API the moment you open this page. Nothing is cached or hand-entered — change a filter and the questions are re-run against the live dataset.

City view vs. detail view

With a broad filter (hundreds of thousands of permits) the tool shows city totals computed by the server. Narrow things down below ~30,000 permits — one community, or a single year city-wide — and it automatically switches to detail view: individual permits on the map, the records table, and median instead of average statistics.

What the numbers mean

• Estimated cost is the applicant's projected construction value — not final or assessed value. Some permits have no cost on file.
• Days to issue = issued date − applied date; days to decision (development) = decision date − applied date. Rare records whose dates run backwards are excluded.
• Completion rate = completed ÷ resolved permits (excludes ones still in review or on hold). Approval rate (development) = approvals ÷ decided applications (approvals + refusals, incl. deemed refusals).
• About 29% of development permits — nearly all filed before 2000 — have no category and appear as (uncategorized); the city flags its 1979–2000 development records as legacy data, so treat those early years as incomplete.
• Application → construction (development view, one community drilled) joins each released development permit to building-permit applications at the same parcel — unit-level addresses are matched at the parcel, and only applications filed since the building-permit records begin (1999) are scored. Same parcel and later in time doesn't guarantee the same project, so read it as a conversion tendency, not a per-permit link.
• Renovation lifecycle pairs a new build with the first later non-demolition permit at the same address.
• The map shades each community's area by your chosen metric in city view, and plots individual permit locations in detail view.

Source

City of Calgary Open Data — Building Permits (c2es-76ed) and Development Permits (6933-unw5). Independent project, not affiliated with The City of Calgary.