Research · provisional
Detroit roofing permit activity
Counts of roof-related building permits in the City of Detroit export, grouped by our versioned classification rules. This page describes permit activity. It says nothing about prices.
- Classifications are rule-based and provisional (roof-scope-rules@1.0.0). They are not individually verified. 6,204 records are in the human review queue.
- The source has no roof-area field. Permit dollar fields are permit estimates, not installed prices, and are not shown here. The meaning of
amt_permit_costis undocumented. - We show no addresses or permit-level records.
The source file
Issued dates 2019-01-02 to 2026-09-26. File SHA-256 a43963d854734927…. Generated 2026-09-27.
Roof-related permits by issued year
| Provisional type | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 | 2026* |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Roof replacement (tear-off / re-roof) | 766 | 564 | 960 | 685 | 248 | 209 | 175 | 146 |
| Roof repair | 2 | 9 | 11 | 14 | 8 | 2 | 1 | 1 |
| Roof work, scope unclear | 71 | 344 | 324 | 513 | 973 | 945 | 642 | 213 |
| Roofing plus other work (mixed scope) | 150 | 87 | 191 | 193 | 224 | 273 | 220 | 177 |
| Roof recover (membrane over existing) | 10 | 8 | 5 | 4 | 1 | 2 | 2 | 1 |
| Roof coating (fluid-applied) | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Other roof restoration | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Roof mention only (antenna, solar, canopy, etc.) | 29 | 41 | 108 | 77 | 62 | 35 | 93 | 55 |
*2026 is a partial year. "Roof work, scope unclear" mostly covers descriptions like "Exterior alterations (ROOF)". Mixed-scope permits (roof plus gutters, siding, windows, interior work and so on) are kept separate and excluded from roof-only figures.
By building use (all years)
| Provisional type | residential | multifamily | commercial | institutional | unknown |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Roof replacement (tear-off / re-roof) | 3,489 | 54 | 96 | 39 | 75 |
| Roof repair | 22 | 4 | 14 | 3 | 5 |
| Roof work, scope unclear | 3,706 | 96 | 105 | 62 | 56 |
| Roofing plus other work (mixed scope) | 1,390 | 40 | 38 | 13 | 34 |
| Roof recover (membrane over existing) | 8 | 3 | 15 | 3 | 4 |
| Roof coating (fluid-applied) | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 |
| Roof mention only (antenna, solar, canopy, etc.) | 433 | 7 | 14 | 7 | 39 |
What changed from the earlier analysis
An earlier AI-assisted analysis of this file labeled some permits "confirmed roofing-only". Our rules disagree on several hundred of those. Most are rooftop solar installs, and others are roof-plus-gutter jobs. We treat both as not roof-only. Every disagreement is in the review queue. The file has 37 columns (the earlier report said 39). It has 1,180 empty descriptions (the earlier report said 1,457).
Coatings and recovers
Our rules keep coating, recover and other restoration separate. Across all years, 1 permit mentions a fluid-applied roof coating, and 33 describe a recover or overlay. None of these are verified coating projects or prices.