Builty Building Permit Dataset — Schema Update (March 2026)

Schema Change

Builty is excited to bring a schema update to their Building Permit dataset for February 2026. This update expands the number and types of projects captured, making the data easier to interpret and refining how permit data is organized and delivered. For your research, this means a single permit can contain multiple associated projects and work types. This dataset preserves a one-row-per-permit structure. To accommodate multiple values without breaking this structure, projects and work types are aggregated and newline-delimited (\n) within their respective fields. Additionally, permit contacts and attributes have been restructured from flat fields into nested columns. 

Workflow Impact

1. Filtering: If you are looking to filter based on project or work type downstream, utilize string pattern matching, given these fields are no longer atomic values.

2. Aggregations: Any grouping or counting logic based on project or work type should first split or parse these multi-value delimited strings before aggregating.

3. Contacts & Attributes: These fields are now nested columns and should be accessed via object/struct notation. Direct references to previously flat contact or attribute fields should be updated to use nested field parsing to access values within the new hierarchical structure.