A continuous record from 1994, current through July 2026 — and an honest account of where the record starts for each trade.
We deliberately do not publish a permit count for Saint Paul. The archive grows continuously as new records land and as we standardize how each city's own vocabulary is read, so any figure printed here would be wrong within days — and a stale number is worse than none. What is stable, and what actually matters when you are reading a property, is how far back the record reaches for each trade.
Not "is there a permit" — what the work was, when it happened, and who pulled it.
A finished basement, an addition, a rewire, a deck. If it was permitted in Saint Paul within the covered range, it is in the record with its date and description.
A re-roof or a replacement is usually a permit. That permit dates the component far more reliably than a seller's recollection. How roof age is established →
Where the permit names a contractor, the record keeps it — and we can show what else that firm has pulled nearby.
Work done before 1994, work in a trade the city did not computerise until later, and work nobody ever pulled a permit for. The record says so rather than implying the work never happened — and we quote the year it becomes dense, not the single oldest page, because a few stray early documents would overstate coverage by a decade. Where pre-digital archives exist for a city, adding them is work we are actively pursuing, so these starting points are expected to move earlier.
| Trade | Earliest record we hold |
|---|---|
| Roofing | January 2016 |
| Heating & cooling | January 1994 |
| Water heater | January 2016 |
| Plumbing | January 1982 |
| Electrical | January 1994 |
| Siding | January 1994 |
| Windows & doors | January 2016 |
| Solar | July 2015 |
Each trade has its own start date because cities computerised their permit desks at different times, and different trades moved onto those systems in different years. A single date for the whole city would overstate the older trades. These dates move only when we find genuinely older records — they are not a running total, and the archive is still growing behind them.
Saint Paul requires a Truth-in-Sale-of-Housing evaluation before most homes are sold. We hold over 1 thousand of those evaluations with their itemised findings — so the record can show what an evaluator actually wrote about a property, not just that an evaluation happened.