How to Check Your Houston Building Permit Status in 2026

If you manage building permits in Houston, you have probably spent more time than you would like manually checking the City of Houston permit portal. Whether you are an architect, permit expeditor, or project manager, knowing the current status of your permits is critical to keeping projects on schedule.

The City of Houston Permit Portal

Houston uses the ILMS (Integrated Land Management System) to manage building permits. The public-facing portal allows anyone to look up permit status, plan review comments, and inspection results. The portal is hosted at pdinet.pd.houstontx.gov and is available 24/7, though it can experience occasional downtime during maintenance windows.

Step-by-Step: Checking Your Permit Status

1. Go to the Houston permit portal — Navigate to the City of Houston Public Works permit search page.
2. Enter your project number — This is the number assigned when your plans were submitted (e.g., 26014840). Enter it in the Project Number field.
3. Review the results — You will see your project description, address, applicant name, submission date, and current review status.
4. Check plan review comments — Click into the plan review section to see comments from each reviewing department, including the reviewer name, date, and status (Approved, Disapproved, or Conditional).

Common Permit Statuses Explained

Houston permits go through several stages. Here are the most common statuses you will encounter:

• Under Review — Your plans are currently being reviewed by one or more departments.
• Disapproved — One or more departments have flagged issues. Check the reviewer comments for details on what needs to be corrected.
• Approved — All departments have signed off. Your permit is ready for issuance.
• Conditional Approval — Approved with conditions that must be met before or during construction.
• Resubmittal Required — You need to address reviewer comments and resubmit corrected plans.

The Problem with Manual Checking

If you are managing more than a handful of active permits, manually checking each one every day is a significant time sink. Each lookup requires navigating to the portal, entering the project number, and scanning through comments to see if anything changed. For firms managing 10, 20, or 50+ permits, this can easily consume an hour or more each morning.

Worse, if you miss a day, you might not see a reviewer comment until days after it was posted — delaying your response and pushing back the entire project timeline.

Automating Permit Status Checks

This is exactly the problem TrackingPermits was built to solve. Instead of manually checking the portal, TrackingPermits scans the City of Houston portal every morning before 6am CT for every permit in your account. When something changes — a new reviewer comment, a status update, or an approval — you get an email digest with the details.

Your team sees reviewer comments the morning they appear, with the reviewer's name, department, phone number, and email. No more logging into the portal. No more missed comments.