Methodology

What is a closure rate?

When a contractor pulls a building permit in Boston, an inspector needs to verify the work was completed correctly before the permit can be closed. A closure rate measures the percentage of an applicant’s permits that have been properly closed:

Permits with status “Issued” or “Stop Work” are excluded from this calculation — they haven’t reached a point where closure is expected.

The 365-day eligibility rule

Not every open permit represents a failure to close. A contractor who pulled a permit last month hasn’t had time to complete the work yet. To avoid penalizing recent activity, we only count permits that were issued more than 365 days ago when calculating closure rates.

This means a permit issued in January 2025 won’t affect anyone’s closure rate until January 2026. Permits issued within the last year are shown in the data but appear dimmed in the table and are not factored into the rate.

Which permits are included?

Boston issues many types of permits. Not all of them represent work where closure is meaningful or expected. We include only permits where a licensed professional performed inspectable construction or trade work:

What is excluded and why?

We exclude permits where closure is not a meaningful signal of contractor accountability. These fall into several categories:

Entire permit types excluded

Work types excluded from Short Form

The Short Form Building Permit covers a wide range of work types. Many have extremely low closure rates not because contractors are negligent, but because the work is inherently temporary or the permit process doesn’t lend itself to closure:

Work types excluded from Long Form

Global exclusion

The MAINT (Annual Maintenance) work type is excluded across all permit types. These are recurring inspection permits, not one-time construction work.

Leaderboard criteria

The “Worst Permit Closure Rates” leaderboard on the homepage applies two additional filters to ensure relevance:

• Minimum 20 rated permits — applicants with fewer than 20 eligible permits are excluded to avoid surfacing statistically insignificant data.
• Active in the last 3 years — the applicant must have at least one qualifying permit issued within the last 3 years. This prevents the leaderboard from being populated by inactive or defunct companies.

Data source

All data comes from the City of Boston’s Approved Building Permits dataset on Analyze Boston, published under the Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and License (PDDL).

The dataset is refreshed nightly. The full dataset contains over 700,000 permits dating back to the early 2000s. After applying our construction filters, approximately 588,000 permits are included in closure rate calculations.

Filtering by permit type

The leaderboard can be filtered by specific permit types using the tabs above the table. This lets you answer questions like “who are the worst electricians at closing permits?” or “which plumbers leave the most permits open?”

When filtered, the 20-permit minimum and 3-year activity requirement still apply, but only to permits of the selected type. An applicant who qualifies under the “All Types” view might not qualify when filtered to a single type if they don’t have enough permits of that kind.

Applicant detail pages

Each applicant has a detail page showing their full permit history. The page includes:

• A report card with overall closure rate, total permits, construction permits, and years active.
• Yearly summaries with per-year closure rates and permit counts.
• A full permit table showing every permit associated with the applicant, including permits that don’t count toward the closure rate. Non-qualifying permits and permits less than 1 year old are dimmed in the table.

Limitations and context

This site shows permit closure data. It does not evaluate the quality of anyone’s work. There are many legitimate reasons a permit may remain open:

• Client non-payment or non-cooperation — a contractor may complete the work but the property owner fails to pay, refuses to schedule the inspection, or becomes unresponsive. Without access to the property, the contractor cannot facilitate the final inspection needed to close the permit.
• ISD administrative backlog — the Boston Inspectional Services Department (ISD) may have inspected and approved the work but not yet updated the permit status in their system. Permits can remain “Open” in the dataset even after the work has been signed off on.
• Project delays and scope changes — construction projects can stall due to financing issues, design changes, disputes, or external factors like supply chain delays, weather, or pandemic shutdowns.
• Multi-phase or long-duration projects — large commercial projects or gut renovations may legitimately take years to complete.
• Permit holder vs. actual contractor — the “applicant” on a permit is the person who pulled it, which may be a general contractor, an architect, an owner, or a project manager — not necessarily the person doing the physical work or scheduling the inspection.

If permit closure is not something you personally value when choosing a contractor, this data may not be relevant to you. For those who do care, this site makes the public record easier to explore.

What this site does

This site organizes publicly available City of Boston permit data into per-applicant views so you can see who is closing their permits and who is not. It can help you find contractors with strong closure track records, or identify patterns you may want to ask about before hiring someone.

We exclude permit types and work types where low closure rates are systemic rather than specific to any individual. For example, the Massachusetts Mass Save insulation program generates thousands of permits that are almost never closed — not because of the contractors involved, but because the program’s permitting workflow doesn’t prioritize closure. Including those permits would misrepresent the data.

Similarly, we exclude roofing, siding, demolition, and boring permits whose industry-wide closure rates are uniformly low. The permits we do include — electrical, plumbing, gas, building renovations, fire alarms, and new construction — have meaningful baseline closure rates where individual patterns are visible.

Data accuracy

All data on this site comes directly from the City of Boston’s public dataset. If you believe there are inaccuracies with the underlying permit data, contact the Boston Inspectional Services Department at [email protected].