“Roof updated” leaves several questions open. Was the covering replaced or patched? When was the work completed, and did it pass inspection? A permit can supply those details: “tear-off and new TPO, permit finaled June 2019, $212,000 declared value” is much more useful on a submission. Permit records have gaps, but they often provide the best public evidence of work on the roof, electrical service, plumbing or HVAC.
Read the description and status together before assigning an update year. The examples below use San Francisco and Austin records to show what a permit establishes, what remains uncertain and where to look for supporting evidence. COPEData uses these records to derive system update years in its reports.
Why update years matter
Alongside construction class, system ages help assess potential losses. Roofs, electrical equipment and plumbing each deserve separate review.
Roofs: wind and hail
Wind and hail is the most frequent cause of loss in the homeowners book. Personal-lines data is the cleanest public series, and the pattern carries over to small commercial and habitational risks with similar roofs: across 2019–2023, ISO data published by the Insurance Information Institute shows 2.8 wind and hail claims per 100 insured homes per year, nearly twice the rate of water damage.
View data
| Category | Value (claims per 100) | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Wind and hail | 2.8 | Average claim $14,747 |
| Water damage and freezing | 1.5 | Average claim $15,400 |
| All other property damage | 0.88 | Average claim $9,043 |
| Fire and lightning | 0.23 | Average claim $88,170 |
| Theft | 0.12 | Average claim $5,524 |
Roof age matters inside that number. The Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety (IBHS) has run asphalt shingles on its aging farm for a decade; its September 2026 release reports that many products gain wind resistance in their first few years but most begin to decline between years five and ten, with loss of the sealant bond the biggest driver. Separate IBHS short-term aging work finds natural weathering measurably reduces hail impact performance, and repeated hail exposure accelerates the decline. A ten-year-old roof is not the same risk as a two-year-old one, even with identical materials.
Electrical: fire
- 46,652
- Home electrical fires a year
- 527
- Civilian deaths a year
- $2.4B
- Direct property damage a year
NFPA counts homes, not commercial buildings, but the mechanism is the same everywhere: aged panels, overloaded or modified circuits, and loose connections. A panel replacement permit identifies the authorized work; its inspection and completion records help establish what was checked. For commercial accounts, a service upgrade or panel replacement permit is the strongest electrical signal you will find without a site visit or infrared survey.
Plumbing and HVAC: water
Water damage and freezing is the second most frequent homeowners peril in the same ISO series, 1.5 claims per 100 homes a year at an average of $15,400. Supply lines, water heaters and fixtures are the usual sources. HVAC enters the water picture too: rooftop units penetrate the roof, condensate lines clog, and a failed heating plant in a cold snap turns into frozen sprinkler and domestic piping. Replacement permits for water heaters, boilers and rooftop units are routine, which is exactly why they are useful: they are frequent enough to date the equipment.
How long building systems last
Service life tells you how to read an update year. A 2012 water heater is past its expected life; a 2012 built-up roof is mid-life. The most widely cited public reference is InterNACHI's estimated life expectancy chart for homes. Treat it as a guideline that assumes normal maintenance, not a warranty.
View data
| Component | Estimated life (years) |
|---|---|
| TPO membrane | 7–20 |
| EPDM membrane | 15–25 |
| Modified bitumen | 20 |
| Asphalt shingle, 3-tab | 20 |
| Built-up roof (BUR) | 30 |
| Asphalt shingle, architectural | 30 |
| Metal | 40–80 |
| Water heater, conventional | 6–12 |
| Central air conditioner | 7–15 |
| Heat pump | 10–15 |
| Furnace | 15–25 |
| Boiler | 40 |
| Electrical service panel | 60 |
Commercial roofs deserve more care than a single number. Low-slope systems differ enormously by assembly:
| Roof system | What it is | Reading the permit |
|---|---|---|
| Built-up (BUR) | Alternating plies of felt and bitumen, often with gravel surfacing | Long-lived when maintained; look for "tear-off to deck" vs "recover" |
| Modified bitumen | Polymer-modified asphalt sheets, torch-applied, mopped or self-adhered | Often installed over an older BUR; check layer count |
| TPO | Single-ply thermoplastic, heat-welded seams | InterNACHI's range is wide (7–20 years); membrane thickness (45, 60, 80 mil) matters |
| EPDM | Single-ply synthetic rubber, adhered, fastened or ballasted | Ballasted systems carry wind-scour considerations |
| Metal | Standing seam or through-fastened panels | Long-lived; "retrofit" metal over an old roof is common |
| Asphalt shingle | Steep-slope; common on small commercial and habitational | Hail and wind sensitivity rises with age (see IBHS above) |
Compare the update year with the expected service life of that particular system. A 2009 modified bitumen roof (typical life about 20 years) has roughly three years left on paper; a 2009 metal roof has decades.
Anatomy of a permit record
Permit portals look different everywhere, but almost all of them carry the same core fields. Hover a row to match it with its note.
- Permit number
- BLD-2019-04718
- Type / subtype
- Building · Commercial reroof
- Description
- Tear off existing BUR to deck. Install 60-mil TPO, mechanically attached, over R-30 polyiso. 18,400 sq ft.
- Valuation
- $212,000
- Applied · issued · finaled
- 2019-03-04 · 2019-03-18 · 2019-06-27
- Status
- Finaled
- Contractor
- Example Roofing Co. (licensed roofer)
- 1Permit number. The jurisdiction's key. Prefixes often encode the trade (BLD, ELE, PLM, MEC) and the year applied, not the year issued.
- 2Type / subtype. The cleanest category signal when it exists. Many portals file reroofs under a generic “alteration” type, so read the description too.
- 3Description. The most informative field: scope (tear-off vs overlay), material, and area. Free text, so wording varies by clerk and contractor.
- 4Valuation. Declared job cost used to set fees. A rough proxy for scope; $3,500 on an 18,000 sq ft roof is a repair, not a replacement.
- 5Applied · issued · finaled. Issued means approved to start. Finaled means the last inspection passed. Use the final date (or issue date if final is missing) as the system year.
- 6Status. Expired, withdrawn, void or denied permits are evidence of intent, not completed work.
- 7Contractor. A licensed trade contractor on a roof permit supports the scope. An owner-builder on a large commercial job is worth a question.
A few practical notes on the fields:
- Type and subtype are only as good as the jurisdiction's taxonomy. San Francisco files nearly all reroofs under a generic over-the-counter alterations permit; Austin splits work into building, electrical, mechanical and plumbing permit types with a separate work class. Keyword the description as well as the type.
- Valuation is declared by the applicant to compute fees. It understates scope often enough that you should use it to separate repair from replacement, not to estimate replacement cost.
- Dates come in several flavors: applied, issued, inspected, finaled, expired. The issue date is when work was authorized; the final date is when the work was accepted.
- Contractor names let you sanity-check scope. A licensed roofing contractor on a reroof is expected; a general contractor on a reroof often means it was part of a larger renovation, which is worth knowing.
Issued, finaled, expired: the permit lifecycle
Under the International Building Code's administrative chapter, a permit becomes invalid if work does not start within 180 days of issuance, or if work is suspended or abandoned for 180 days after it starts. Most U.S. jurisdictions adopt some version of that rule. An expired permit therefore means one of three things: the work never happened, the work happened and nobody called for inspections, or the work happened under a later permit. The expired record alone leaves completion unconfirmed.
What real permit data looks like
Big-city open data portals publish their full permit tables. Two of them show both the value and the noise of permit history.
Reroofs in San Francisco
San Francisco requires a permit to reroof, and the Department of Building Inspection publishes its permit records going back decades. Counting permits whose description mentions "reroof" gives a steady 2,000–3,000 a year, rising to more than 4,000 in 2024.
View data
| Reroof permits | |
|---|---|
| 2000 | 2,847 |
| 2001 | 2,452 |
| 2002 | 3,010 |
| 2003 | 2,974 |
| 2004 | 2,910 |
| 2005 | 2,774 |
| 2006 | 2,878 |
| 2007 | 2,412 |
| 2008 | 2,495 |
| 2009 | 2,088 |
| 2010 | 2,097 |
| 2011 | 2,310 |
| 2012 | 2,033 |
| 2013 | 2,203 |
| 2014 | 2,170 |
| 2015 | 2,876 |
| 2016 | 2,421 |
| 2017 | 2,662 |
| 2018 | 2,395 |
| 2019 | 2,537 |
| 2020 | 2,019 |
| 2021 | 2,304 |
| 2022 | 2,719 |
| 2023 | 3,338 |
| 2024 | 4,124 |
| 2025 | 3,571 |
Completion records are less consistent. Of the 12,891 reroof permits filed from 2015 through 2019, two-thirds show as complete. Almost a third still show “issued” six to ten years later, without a recorded completion date.
View data
| Part | Value | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Complete (finaled) | 8,663 permits | 67.2% |
| Still “issued”, never finaled | 3,880 permits | 30.1% |
| Expired | 105 permits | 0.8% |
| Cancelled, withdrawn, other | 243 permits | 1.9% |
- 32 days
- Median, issue to completion
- 13–71
- Middle half, in days
- 8,663
- Completed permits measured
Completed reroofs usually closed out within a couple of months in this dataset. An “issued” status that remains for years therefore needs follow-up. The work may have been finished without a recorded final inspection; request an invoice, inspection record or other evidence before assigning a roof year.
Expiry rates by trade in Austin
Austin publishes building, electrical, mechanical and plumbing permits as separate types with a current status. For permits issued 2015 through 2019, between 6% and 15% ended up expired rather than finaled, and building permits expired at roughly twice the rate of trade permits.
View data
| Permit type | Issued | Final | Expired | Other |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Building | 81,260 | 67,314 (82.8%) | 11,964 (14.7%) | 1,982 (2.4%) |
| Electrical | 96,198 | 88,512 (92.0%) | 5,930 (6.2%) | 1,756 (1.8%) |
| Mechanical | 63,723 | 57,228 (89.8%) | 5,324 (8.4%) | 1,171 (1.8%) |
| Plumbing | 87,484 | 79,157 (90.5%) | 6,900 (7.9%) | 1,427 (1.6%) |
The status labels differ between cities, and neither dataset provides a complete record of finished work. Check how the local portal uses “issued” and “expired” before treating either label as evidence about a system's age.
Pitfalls that catch underwriters
Permits that expire without a final
Leave completion unconfirmed for an expired permit, then seek corroboration: a later permit for the same work, aerial imagery showing a new membrane or a contractor's invoice. The issue date alone doesn't establish a replacement year.
Reroof vs repair
"Roof repair," "replace damaged decking," "patch at RTU curb" and "reroof" all land in the same permit category in many jurisdictions. Use the description and the valuation together. A permit for a few thousand dollars on a 20,000 square foot roof is a repair; it does not reset the roof age. Watch for partial reroofs too ("reroof 4,000 sf over warehouse section B"): the rest of the roof is still original.
Overlay vs tear-off
A recover (overlay) puts a new covering over the old one. The model codes (IBC Chapter 15 and IRC Section R908) prohibit recovering when the roof already has two or more layers, and when the existing roof is water-soaked or deteriorated. An overlay gives you a new weathering surface but leaves the old layers, the old deck attachment and any trapped moisture underneath. If the description says "recover," "overlay" or "over existing," note it: the roof covering year changed, the deck and attachment did not.
Valuation as a proxy
Declared valuation drives permit fees, so it skews low, and some jurisdictions compute it from a schedule instead of the contract. It is useful for ranking (this job was bigger than that one) and for screening out repairs. It is not useful as a measure of replacement cost; use your SOV process for that (see the statement of values guide).
Unpermitted and exempt work
Absence of a permit is not evidence that nothing happened. Some jurisdictions exempt like-for-like replacements, small repairs or work below a dollar threshold, and some unincorporated counties issue few permits at all. Owner-performed and unlicensed work frequently goes unpermitted. A 1985 building with no roof permit in 40 years almost certainly has had roof work; the question is what kind.
Address and parcel matching
Permits are filed against an address or a parcel, and multi-building campuses, corner lots and condo conversions break the match in both directions. On a business park, the reroof may be for Building C, not the Building A you are writing. Check the description and the parcel number before assigning a permit to a location.
Where permit records live
Permits are issued by the authority having jurisdiction, which is usually the city for incorporated areas and the county for unincorporated ones. Some states run their own programs for specific trades, and some small towns contract permitting out to the county or a private inspection agency. The first job is working out which body issued permits at that address, and whether that changed over the years (annexation moves addresses from county to city files).
The records themselves sit in a few kinds of systems:
- Online permit portals. Most mid-size and large jurisdictions run a vendor permitting system with a public search page; common products include Accela Citizen Access, Tyler EnerGov and CentralSquare eTRAKiT. Search by address or parcel, then open each record for type, description, dates and inspections. Coverage before the system went live (often the 2000s) may be thin or missing.
- Open data portals. Large cities such as San Francisco, New York, Chicago and Austin publish full permit tables through Socrata-style APIs that can be queried without a key for light use. They are ideal for bulk analysis but use city-specific field names and status codes.
- Records requests. Older permits, microfiche and paper cards often require a public records request to the building department.
- Aggregators. Commercial data providers normalize permit records across thousands of jurisdictions into one schema. They save the jurisdiction-hunting step; coverage and update frequency vary by place, so check what they have for your area.
For exposure data that sits alongside permits (flood zone, hazard scores) see the FEMA flood zone guide and the National Risk Index guide.
How COPEData derives system update years
COPEData combines two permit sources for each address: records from the Shovels permit data API, which gathers permits from thousands of U.S. jurisdictions, and permits found by AI research of public sources such as city and county portals. Each permit carries its number, issue and final dates, type, description, valuation, status and source, so every system year can be traced back to a specific record.
- 1CollectMerge permits from the Shovels API with permits found by web research of public records.
- 2ClassifyAssign each permit to roof, electrical (including EV chargers, solar and generators), plumbing (including water heaters and gas) or heating/HVAC.
- 3FilterDrop permits whose status is pending, withdrawn, expired, void or denied.
- 4DateTake the latest remaining permit in each category as that system's update year, with a short summary of the work.
The rule is deliberately simple and conservative: an expired reroof does not move the roof year, and a pending HVAC permit does not count until it is issued.
Check the scope behind each derived year. An EV charger permit can set the electrical year even if the existing service and wiring were untouched. A partial reroof can likewise set the roof year without documenting a full replacement. Review the permit summary before crediting an update. The report includes a filterable timeline grouped by year, and the full list exports to CSV alongside the 51-column SOV workbook.
A checklist for the file
- Identify the permitting jurisdiction and confirm the address and parcel.
- Pull every roof, electrical, plumbing and mechanical permit back to the year built.
- For each, record status, final date (or issue date if no final), description and valuation.
- Discard expired, withdrawn, void and denied permits as evidence of completed work; flag open "issued" permits older than a year for follow-up.
- Separate replacements from repairs and recovers from tear-offs using the description and valuation.
- Compute remaining life from the update year and the system type, not the year built.
- Where the permit history is silent, ask: invoices, roof surveys and inspection reports fill gaps that permits never will.