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Fort Worth building permits, and what they actually say

If you came here to pull or check a permit, you want the city, not us. Applications, fees, inspections and status all live in Fort Worth Development Services. We do not republish the fee schedule, because it changes and the only sites that carry it are aggregators copying each other.

What is on this page is the other half: the 36,548 residential permits the city has issued since 2024-01-02, matched by address to the Tarrant County appraisal roll, so every permit carries the house it was pulled on. Nobody else has put those two together, and it answers questions the permit portal cannot: what work actually gets done here, on what kind of house, and what owners declare it is worth.

Headline figures

Residential permits
36,548
2024-01-02 to 2026-08-19
Matched to a parcel record
72%
54% of those carry a build year
Kitchen permits: median year the house was built
1954
Median floor area 1,881 sq ft
Bathroom permits on already-improved houses
74%
Appraisal effective year later than build year

Every residential permit since 2024-01-02

One dot per permit, sized by the valuation the applicant declared. The filter changes which permits are shown rather than recoloring them, because four categories on screen at once cannot be told apart by a red-green colorblind reader, so the comparison lives in the tables below instead.

Dot size: declared value$10k$100k$500kClick any dot for the permit and its parcel record.

What gets permitted, and to what kind of house

Every remodeling category lands on houses built in the early fifties. New construction, at 44% of all residential permits, is a different city entirely, and a different map. The last column is the share pulled on a house the appraisal district had already recorded as substantially improved: an earlier remodel, visible in the tax roll rather than in any permit.

Fort Worth residential permits by scope of work, with the median characteristics of the houses they were pulled on
ScopePermitsMedian declaredHouse builtFloor areaAlready improved
New construction16,092$273,00020241,980 sq ft6%
Solar4,971$20,00019981,762 sq ft26%
Windows & doors3,263$9,49719851,873 sq ft34%
Garage, deck, fence2,854$6,50019861,956 sq ft39%
Foundation2,406$8,83719831,904 sq ft36%
Other2,071$20,00019741,827 sq ft47%
Pool1,185$65,00020103,000 sq ft28%
Addition1,073$45,00019531,940 sq ft74%
Roof974$15,00019731,760 sq ft43%
Whole home570$35,00019551,694 sq ft65%
Bathroom449$18,00019521,542 sq ft74%
Kitchen426$30,00019541,881 sq ft68%
No description214$330,00019731,513 sq ft42%

Same city, 8× the money

Kitchen, bathroom, addition and whole-home permits only, grouped by ZIP. The widest gap below is 76109 against 76105, at $75,000 against $10,000, on housing stock of almost exactly the same age, 1953 against 1948. The difference is floor area and what the neighborhood will carry, not the era of the house. It is also the reason a national cost calculator is useless here.

Remodeling permits by Fort Worth ZIP code
ZIPPermitsMedian declaredHouse builtFloor areaAlready improved
76109336$75,00019532,660 sq ft89%
76107260$50,00019452,082 sq ft83%
76110233$50,00019281,750 sq ft95%
76116205$52,54219572,257 sq ft89%
76104119$20,00019311,236 sq ft82%
76119115$14,50019531,124 sq ft74%
76105107$10,00019481,050 sq ft86%
7611191$25,00019471,309 sq ft93%
7613383$25,00019631,862 sq ft61%
7611274$28,00019571,480 sq ft68%
7610669$20,00019491,092 sq ft90%
7617969$40,00020152,392 sq ft5%

If you are planning the work rather than researching it

The numbers above are declared valuations, which is not what a job costs, and the note below says why. What they do tell you is that remodeling in Fort Worth is overwhelmingly a mid-century problem: houses from the early fifties, no remodeling category with a median floor area above 1,940 square feet, most of them already altered at least once. That is a specific kind of job, and it comes with a specific set of surprises.

Where this comes from, and what is wrong with it

Permits come from City of Fort Worth, CIVIC/Permits (mapit.fortworthtexas.gov), mirrored 2026-08-19 rather than queried live. Parcel attributes come from Tarrant Appraisal District, 2025 Residential Comp Attribute Data, a free annual download. Owner names appear in both and are discarded on the way in.

Declared valuation is not contract price. The permit fee is calculated from it, so it runs low, and 759 permits declare nothing at all. Treat the dollar columns as direction, never as a quote. Counts and house characteristics are the solid part.

Scope is assigned by keyword, not by reading. A permit describing new windows, siding, MEP brought to code, sheetrock, paint inside and out and refinished floors is filed under windows because that word appears first, when it is plainly a whole-house renovation. Roughly 6% resist classification altogether.

28% of permits match no parcel record, almost all of them new construction on houses that did not exist when the roll was certified. Among additions the match rate is 89%.

There is no contractor in this data. Fort Worth published contractor name, licence and phone until 2015 and does not now, so nothing here says who did the work.

More about remodeling in Fort Worth