Is a permit's declared value the same as the price of the job?

No. It is the figure the contractor reports to the building department so the permit fee can be calculated. It usually covers the contract value of the work without sales tax, and it does not cover overhead, profit on change orders, or anything the contractor is not permitting.

Why would a contractor understate it?

Permit fees are usually a function of declared value, so a lower figure means a cheaper permit. Most understatement is rounding rather than fraud, but it means the published figure should be read as the floor of a market, not its middle.

Can a declared value be higher than the price?

Occasionally. Some departments want the replacement value of the structure affected, and some contractors enter a round number well above the contract to avoid a re-submission.

Reading the data

Why the permit says $12,000 and the quote says $28,000

Every number on our cost pages comes from a figure the contractor typed into a permit application. It is real, it is public, and it is not the price of the job. Here is the gap, and how to read across it.

When a roofer pulls a permit, the application asks what the work is worth. The building department needs the figure because the permit fee is calculated from it — a few dollars per thousand, in most jurisdictions, sometimes on a sliding scale. The number goes in the public record, which is where we read it.

What the figure usually includes

The contract value of the permitted work: materials and labour for the thing described on the permit. On a re-roof that is the tear-off, the deck repair the contractor expects, underlayment, the shingles and the labour to lay them.

What it leaves out

Sales tax, in most states. On a $20,000 job in a 8% state that is $1,600 the homeowner pays and the permit never sees.
Anything discovered after the permit. Rotten decking, a second layer nobody knew about, a chimney that needs flashing. Change orders rarely trigger an amended valuation.
Work that is not being permitted. Gutters, soffit and fascia, skylights replaced like-for-like, interior repair after a leak.
Insurance supplements. On a hail claim the carrier’s final scope often lands well above the figure on the permit pulled weeks earlier.
Financing costs. A dealer fee on a 0%-for-18-months plan is part of what the homeowner pays and no part of the declared value.

And why some of it is just rounding

Fees scale with the number, so there is a quiet incentive to round down — and a practical one to round at all. Look at any city’s permit file and the values cluster hard on $10,000, $12,000, $15,000, $20,000. Those are not quotes. They are a busy office manager putting a plausible figure in a box. It is not usually fraud; it does mean a median built from thousands of them sits below the retail market rather than at it.

It can run the other way too. A few departments ask for the replacement value of the affected structure rather than the contract, and a few contractors deliberately overstate to avoid being sent back for an amendment. Those are the long right tail on our distribution charts.

How we handle it

Medians and quartiles, never averages — a few very large jobs would drag a mean out of reach.
Values under $500 and over $2,000,000 are dropped as placeholders rather than jobs.
Complete calendar months only, so a report published mid-month does not show demand collapsing.
Metros whose permits mostly carry no value at all get no figure. Minneapolis–St. Paul publishes none, so we publish none for it.
Duplicates and re-published rows are excluded before anything is counted.

See the numbers

Questions about the method, or a cut you need that we do not publish: support@permitdawn.com.