Building Permit Search in BC: Every City, One Place

Searching for building permits in British Columbia sounds simple until you realize there’s no province-wide search. Each municipality runs its own system: Vancouver has an open-data portal, Surrey has another, Victoria, Kelowna, Burnaby, Nanaimo each have their own — different formats, different fields, different refresh schedules. If you work across more than one BC city, “search building permits” quickly becomes “check eight portals every morning.”

Here’s how BC permit search actually works, city by city, and how to watch the whole province at once.

There Is No Single BC Permit Database

BC permits are issued and published at the municipal level. The province does not run a unified permit search. Practically, that means:

• Each city decides whether to publish a permit feed at all, what fields to include, and how often to update it.
• Larger cities (Vancouver, Surrey, Burnaby) generally publish good open data. Smaller municipalities may publish little or require a request.
• The field names and work-type categories differ between cities, so even when two cities publish, the data isn’t directly comparable without normalizing it.

That fragmentation is the entire reason a cross-city tool exists.

What Each Major BC Market Publishes

We maintain city-by-city guides covering what’s available, where, and how to read it:

• Vancouver building permits — the deepest open-data feed in the province, but also one of the slowest issuance pipelines.
• Surrey building permits — Canada’s fastest-growing city; high volume of new residential.
• Burnaby building permits — Metro Vancouver’s most active suburban construction market.
• Victoria building permits — the capital region, steady institutional and residential work.
• Kelowna building permits — the Interior’s fastest-growing market, with notably fast issuance.
• Nanaimo and Vancouver Island — Island markets that most mainland contractors overlook.

For the province as a whole, see the BC building permits province-wide guide.

Issuance Timing: The BC Spread

Knowing where to search is half of it. Knowing how fast each market moves tells you how much lead time a permit actually gives you. From our dataset (trailing 12 months, as of June 2026), BC markets sit at very different speeds:

• Kelowna clears a median building permit in around 13 days — a fast market where you react the day a permit posts.
• Vancouver runs a median around 71 days — a slow pipeline where the smart play is to catch the application, not wait for issuance, because there are weeks of lead time before work starts.

So a “permit search” in Kelowna and a “permit search” in Vancouver are strategically different activities, even though they look the same. (More on the numbers in Vancouver permit approval times.)

Searching Manually vs. Watching the Province

If you only work in one BC city and don’t mind checking, the municipal portal is fine. You search by address, date, or work type and read the results.

It stops working when you:

• Cover more than one BC municipality.
• Want to be alerted to new matching permits instead of remembering to look.
• Want to filter by work type, value, and neighbourhood across cities at once.
• Want issuance-timing context so you know how fast to move in each market.

SiteWire pulls BC’s municipal permit feeds into one normalized, current dataset — search and filter every covered BC city in one place, with daily alerts for new permits that match your trade and service area. No eight-portals-every-morning.

If You Plan to Contact Permit Holders

Finding the permit is step one; reaching the right person within the law is step two. BC contractors are bound by Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL) for any cold outreach. Read CASL and cold outreach for Canadian contractors before you send — it’s a genuine edge to do this correctly while competitors don’t.

Search live BC building permits — no signup required →