How to Search Denver Building Permits Online

If you need to look up a Denver permit search result or pull up Denver building permits for a specific property, the City and County of Denver publishes most of this information online. The public records come from the Denver Community Planning and Development office, and you can reach them through the city's permitting portal. This guide walks through how to find a single permit on the official site, where that site falls short if you are looking for construction leads, and how to see new commercial filings before your competitors do.

As of July 17, 2026, PermitPursuit has tracked 258 new commercial permit filings in Denver, CO over the prior 30 days, an average of 60 per week, sourced from the City of Denver Community Planning and Development. The count updates daily on the Denver permit page.

Searching Denver Building Permits Online

Denver Community Planning and Development uses the Accela Citizen Access portal for public permit records. You can reach it at https://aca-prod.accela.com/DENVER. The portal is free to use and does not require an account to run a basic search.

Once you are in the portal, you generally have a few ways to find a record:

• By address. Enter the street number and name for a property to see permits tied to that location. This is the most common approach when you already know the site you care about.
• By record number. If you have a permit or application number from a prior search, a notice, or a document, you can pull the exact record directly.
• By date range. You can narrow results to permits filed or issued within a window of time, which helps when you want recent activity rather than the full history of a parcel.
• By record type. You can filter by the kind of permit, such as building, commercial, or demolition, so you are not sorting through every category at once.

When you open an individual record, you can typically see details like the project address, the permit or record number, the status, the type of work, key dates, and information about the parties tied to the application. That is usually enough to understand what is happening at a single property and where the project sits in the review process.

Where the Official Portal Falls Short for Lead Generation

The Accela portal is built for the public to check the status of one permit at a time. It does the job well for that. It is not built for a general contractor or subcontractor who wants to find new work across the whole city. If you are using permit data to generate leads, you will run into a few hard limits.

• Single-record lookups. The portal is designed around finding one permit at a time. You can search and filter, but the workflow assumes you already know roughly what you are looking for.
• No bulk export. There is no simple button to download every new commercial filing into a spreadsheet you can sort, dedupe, and work through with your team.
• No new-filing alerts. The portal does not email you when a new permit is filed. To stay current you would have to log in and re-run your searches by hand, day after day, and hope you did not miss anything between visits.

For a contractor, that last point is the real cost. The contractors who win work from permit data are usually the ones who reach the owner or developer first. If you are checking the portal manually every few days, you are always a step behind whoever is watching the feed every day.

How PermitPursuit Solves It

PermitPursuit monitors City of Denver Community Planning and Development filings daily, so you do not have to log into a portal and re-run searches yourself. Each Monday, we email you the new commercial filings from the prior week. Every filing in that email includes the address, the scope of work, the owner, and contact information, so you can start reaching out instead of digging.

That turns the permit record from something you check after the fact into a steady stream of leads that lands in your inbox at the start of every week. You see new commercial projects in Denver while they are still early, which is exactly when a GC or sub has the best shot at getting in the door.

You can see the live feed and current Denver activity on our Denver building permits page. We keep the numbers on that page tied to real filings rather than quoting a fixed count here, since the volume moves week to week. If you want to dig into other markets and permit topics, browse more permit guides on the blog.