Documentation

Method, sources, and what this does not cover

This site republishes City of Toronto open data. It is not the City, and it is not a legal record. If a decision depends on a permit, verify it with Toronto Building.

Where the numbers come from

File	City dataset	City refresh
permits-active.csv	building-permits-active-permits	2026-11-03 10:23
permits-cleared-2017on.csv	building-permits-cleared-permits	2026-11-03 11:20
permits-cleared-2000to2016.csv	building-permits-cleared-permits	2026-11-03 11:20
variances-active.csv	committee-of-adjustment-applications	2026-11-03 10:11
variances-closed-2017on.csv	committee-of-adjustment-applications	2026-11-03 10:11
variances-closed-2016.csv	committee-of-adjustment-applications	2026-11-03 10:11
address-points.csv	address-points-municipal-toronto-one-address-repository	2026-11-03 11:39
zoning.geojson	zoning-by-law	2026-02-20 21:29
neighbourhoods.geojson	neighbourhoods	2026-02-20 19:15
wards.geojson	city-wards	2026-02-20 19:02

The permit datasets are pulled straight from the City’s CKAN API every day, unmodified. The Committee of Adjustment files behind the variance figures come from the same API on the same schedule, and are placed on a street, ward and neighbourhood by the same address match the permits use. Coordinates and neighbourhood names come from the City’s Address Points and Neighbourhoods layers. Nothing here is hand-entered.

What the pipeline does

Permits are counted once. A permit that has been revised four times appears in the raw data as five rows; this site keeps only the highest revision, which is why the totals here (997,152 permits from 1,096,499 rows) are lower than a naive row count. 92,257 rows were superseded revisions and 7,090 were duplicate permit numbers across the active and cleared files.

Each permit is matched to a City address point to get coordinates, a ward and a neighbourhood. 94.1% match. The 59,054 that do not are still counted in city-wide and street totals, but they cannot appear on a neighbourhood or ward page.

What this does not cover

Builder names are mostly missing. The City records a builder on about 5% of permits. That is too sparse to rank or profile anyone honestly, so there are no builder pages here and no “top builders” lists. A firm’s absence means nothing.
Declared construction value is what the applicant filed, at the time they filed it. It is not an appraisal, it is not adjusted for inflation, and on many permit types it is entered as zero.
A permit is not construction. Permits get issued and never built, and work gets done without a permit. This is a record of paperwork.
Pre-2000 records are incomplete. The City flags its early data as partial, so the charts on this site start at 2000.
The current year is a part year. The last bar in every chart is shorter because the year is not over, not because activity collapsed.

Corrections

If a page here disagrees with the City, the City is right. Errors in the source data have to be corrected at the source — this site will pick the fix up on the next daily run. If the error is in how this site processed the data, that is worth reporting, and it will be fixed here.

Scale

158 neighbourhood pages, 8,516 street pages, 25 wards, 103 types of work, 153 structure types and 98 postal areas, rebuilt every day from 997,152 permits.