What Columbus permit records show about bathroom work

The City of Columbus publishes every building permit it issues, and sixteen years of that record say something about how much residential plumbing work gets permitted here, when, where, and how long it takes. This page is those numbers, computed from the record itself, with the three things it cannot tell you stated first.

Last updated September 2026 · Figures computed from the City of Columbus permit record, permits issued January 2010 through December 2025 · No prices on this page; the Estimate Builder carries those · Part of the knowledge base

What the record is, and what it is not

The City of Columbus keeps a public record of every building permit it issues, and that record can be searched and downloaded. The figures on this page were computed from a December 2025 export of it covering permits issued from January 2010 through December 2025, about 650,000 permits in all. Three limits apply to every number below, and they are worth reading before the numbers.

• It covers the City of Columbus only. Westerville, Dublin, Worthington, Upper Arlington, Gahanna, New Albany and the townships each keep their own records under their own building departments. A ZIP code that straddles the city line, which many do, appears here only for the addresses inside Columbus.
• It counts trades, not rooms. A permit is categorized by the trade doing the work and the kind of building, never by which room the work is in. There is no bathroom category. A residential plumbing permit can be a tub-to-shower conversion, a water heater, a new sink line or a whole-house repipe, and the record does not say which.
• It counts permitted work. Work done without a permit does not appear, so the record measures the permitted part of the market rather than the whole of it.

What it can show honestly is the pace, the season, the geography and the duration of permitted residential plumbing work in the city, which is the permit a bathroom conversion pulls when it needs one. That is what follows. The page on whether your own project needs a permit is a different question, and this page does not try to answer it.

How many residential plumbing permits Columbus issues

Counting every plumbing permit issued for a one- to three-family home inside the city, including water heaters, the city issued between three and a half thousand and six thousand a year across the sixteen years in the record. Volume climbed through the 2010s, peaked in 2021, and has run lower since. The 2025 figure runs through December 23, the date of the export.

Two things are worth noticing. The market is steady rather than booming: no year moved by more than about a fifth against the year before it, and the sixteen-year picture is a slow climb followed by a slow easing. And the peak was 2021, when nearly six thousand permits were issued, which fits what most people in the trade remember about the two years after 2020.

The city changed how it categorizes permits in 2017, so the table combines the older residential type with the newer one- to three-family type. The line is continuous; the labels underneath it changed.

When people file

Adding up all sixteen years by calendar month, March is the busiest month for residential plumbing permits and December the quietest, and the gap between them is about a quarter. March runs about twelve percent above an average month; December runs about ten percent below it. The rest of the year is flatter than most people expect: April, May, June, August and October each sit a little above average, and there is no summer lull.

For a homeowner the practical reading is that there is no month in which the city is idle, and the spring rush is real but modest. A project planned for March is competing with about a quarter more filings than one planned for December, which affects inspection scheduling more than it affects anything else.

How long a permitted job stays open

Every permit carries the date it was issued and the date of its last status change. For permits that reached a final inspection, the gap between those two dates is how long the job stayed open on the city's books. In most years since 2013 the median permit reached its final inspection about five to seven weeks after it was issued, and a quarter of them closed within about two weeks. The slowest recent year was 2020, when the median stretched to about nine weeks. The early years of the record were slower still, with medians of nine to ten weeks in 2010 through 2012.

That gap measures the whole job, not the city. It includes the time the contractor took to do the work and to call for the final inspection, so it is a fair picture of how long permitted residential plumbing work takes from paperwork to sign-off, and not a measure of how quickly the city responds. The 2025 figure is left out because a permit issued late in the year had not had time to close when the export was taken.

How many permits reach a final inspection

Of the residential plumbing permits issued from 2010 through 2024, about seven in ten show a final inspection approved. Most of the rest still carry the status of issued, which means no final inspection was recorded against them, and about one in a hundred expired. A permit that was issued and never inspected is not evidence that the work was bad, but it is a real gap in the record, and it is one a homeowner can check for any contractor by name.

Where the permits are

Residential plumbing permits are spread across the whole city. The neighborhoods with the oldest housing sit at the top of the list, and newer areas on the north side follow close behind. The ten ZIP codes with the most permits over the sixteen years are below. Remember that a ZIP code is counted only for its addresses inside the city, so the Westerville ZIP appears here for its Columbus-annexed portion and not for the City of Westerville, which keeps its own record.

The pattern is not surprising once the housing is considered. Clintonville, German Village and the near south side are largely pre-war houses with one full bathroom, cast-iron tubs and original supply lines, which is exactly the housing where plumbing work is most often needed and most often permitted. The page on what is in Columbus bathrooms now goes through that stock decade by decade.

Who files them

More than fifteen hundred distinct company names appear on residential plumbing permits over the sixteen years, and between about 230 and 380 different companies file in any single year. The single largest filer in a recent year accounts for roughly one permit in six, and most of the rest of the top ten are general plumbing and mechanical contractors; one bathroom specialist has appeared in the top ten in recent years. Companies whose names identify them as bath or shower remodelers file between roughly three and six percent of residential plumbing permits in any year since 2014, filing under their own names. A specialist that has a plumbing subcontractor pull its permits appears under the subcontractor's name instead, so that share is a floor rather than a total. A small number of permits each year are filed by property owners themselves.

The useful fact for a homeowner is not who is biggest. It is that the record is public and searchable by business name at no charge, and that it shows for each permit whether a final inspection was ever approved. Any contractor's Columbus history is there, including a history of none.

One more trend, with a caveat

Structural alteration permits on one- to three-family homes, the kind a full gut with framing changes pulls, fell by about a third between 2020 and 2025 as the city categorizes them, from about 1,800 to about 1,250, while residential plumbing permits fell by less than a fifth over the same years. That is consistent with a larger share of the permitted work being fixture-for-fixture replacement inside an existing layout, which is what a tub-to-shower conversion that keeps the drain where it is amounts to. The caveat is that the city's categories changed in 2019 and again since, so the alteration series is shorter and less certain than the plumbing series, and the sentence above should be read as a direction rather than a measurement.

Common questions