NYC DOB NOW filings explained — a guide for contractors
If you've worked a job in New York City in the last few years, you've bumped into DOB NOW. It's the Department of Buildings' electronic filing system — the thing every architect, engineer, and expediter uses to submit plans, pull permits, and request inspections. This guide is for the contractor who's heard the name but hasn't had to open it. By the end, you'll know what's in there, how to read it, and when it's worth your time.
What DOB NOW is, in one paragraph
DOB NOW is the online filing platform the NYC Department of Buildings rolled out starting in 2016 to replace the old paper-and-PDF "Building Information System" (BIS). It covers job filings, permit issuance, inspections, certificates of occupancy, and license renewals. Every action taken on a job — from the first application to the final sign-off — creates a record in DOB NOW. All of it is public. Most of it is queryable through the NYC Open Data portal.
The four data streams contractors care about
DOB NOW publishes dozens of datasets, but four are the ones that matter for business-development purposes:
- Job Application Filings — every new job proposed. This is the leading indicator. A filing here means an owner has hired a designer and is preparing to build.
- Permits — jobs that have been approved and are ready to break ground. This is the lagging indicator. By the time a permit shows up, a GC is almost always already signed.
- DOB NOW: Build — a subset focused on construction permits specifically, with more granular trade data (plumbing, mechanical, sprinkler).
- Electrical Permits — a separate feed, because electrical work goes through a different licensing track at DOB.
Most GCs want the Job Application Filings feed. Subcontractors typically want the Permits or DOB NOW: Build feed, because trade work often isn't bid until after the GC is picked.
Reading a filing
Every filing has a set of fields. Here's what matters and how to interpret each one.
| Field | What it is | Why you care |
|---|---|---|
job_filing_number | Unique ID for the filing | Use it to join to permits later |
bin | Building Identification Number | Every NYC building has one. Use it to dedupe filings at the same address. |
house_no + street_name | Project address | Your field team cares about this more than anything else on the list |
borough | Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, Bronx, Staten Island | Coverage filter for your target market |
job_type / job_description | Alt-1 (major alteration), NB (new building), Demo, etc. | The single best filter for "is this a real GC job?" |
estimated_job_costs | Declared project budget | Owners under-declare by 20–40% on average. Treat it as a lower bound. |
owner_name / owner_business_name | Who's funding the job | The decision-maker — or their agent — if you want to reach out |
applicant_professional_title | PE, RA, etc. | Tells you the architect or engineer of record. Useful for referrals. |
filing_status | Filed, Plan Exam in Progress, Permit Issued, etc. | Pre-issuance = opportunity. Post-issuance = already bid. |
The gotchas nobody tells you about
1. Filings can be withdrawn.
Roughly 10–15% of filings are superseded or withdrawn before a permit issues. An owner changes scope, fires the architect, or shelves the job. If you're reaching out to owners, check the filing status the morning of outreach.
2. Estimated cost is self-declared.
Owners under-declare because the filing fee scales with the declared cost. A $2M job often shows up as $800K. Use the declared value as a rough filter, not a firm price point.
3. The BIN is the right dedup key.
A single building can generate 10–20 filings a year (separate plumbing, electrical, alteration, façade inspections, etc.). If you're tracking contractor opportunities, dedupe on bin + job_type, not on filing number.
4. DOB NOW and the legacy BIS don't fully overlap.
Some older jobs still live in BIS and haven't been migrated. If a property has a job in progress from before 2020, you may need to check both systems to get the full picture.
5. The data updates on an uneven schedule.
The Open Data feeds refresh daily on business days, but lag by 24–72 hours behind the actual filing. If you want today's filings today, you need to hit the DOB NOW portal directly — which isn't straightforward to automate.
What to do with this
If you're a contractor trying to use DOB NOW data for business development, you have three realistic options:
- DIY. Pull the CSV weekly, open it in Excel, sort, filter, and work the top results. This takes 2–4 hours a week and you'll miss jobs filed between pulls.
- Build a pipeline. Hit the Socrata API on a cron, filter by borough and job type, dedupe by BIN, push the rest into a tool you can act on. Viable if you have engineering help; most small contractors don't.
- Use a service. Several companies resell graded DOB NOW leads to contractors. PermitPipeline is one of them — we score every new filing A+/A/B, filter out the noise, and email the top ones to you daily. See how it works →
Whatever you do, the general point stands: the data is public, it's valuable, and most contractors don't use it because the raw form is too much work to read. The edge is in the filtering, not the access.
See DOB NOW filings, already graded.
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