Building permits in Des Plaines, Illinois: what they show and who they help

Des Plaines is a city on the Des Plaines River next to O'Hare, with a casino and a large stock of mid-century homes.

The City of Des Plaines issues its own building permits for work inside its limits. A permit is a public record of work an owner has chosen to pay for, which makes the permit list a lead source for contractors in that trade and the ones that follow it.

Where Des Plaines's permit records come from

Des Plaines runs its permits through EnerGov. Our copy comes from part of the county permit portal's list (an older copy, not refreshed); the town's online permit system, collected on a schedule.

For each permit, the public rows we show carry: trade, permit type, month, job value (rounded), status, contractor.

What we hold for Des Plaines, as of October 26, 2026

Coverage: Complete: every new permit since we started collecting; full details from April 2023.

Permit records we can share, counted apart because they are different kinds of record:

• 9,381 from part of the county permit portal's list (an older copy, not refreshed), April 2023 to August 2026
• 6,648 from the town's online permit system, collected on a schedule, April 2023 to October 2026

See Des Plaines building permits with masked sample rows, or Permit Leads for new permits by trade.

We offer a trade for a town only after checking that our sorting of that town's permits into it is accurate, so the trades listed above can change.