About

Neighbors Paid exists because of a gap that is easy to state: the cost of home renovation in America is public information that nobody publishes.

Every remodel that touches structure, wiring or plumbing needs a permit, and the permit records what the work is worth. Cities put those filings online. But the data arrives as millions of raw rows with inconsistent column names and free-text descriptions, so in practice it is read by contractors and data vendors — never by the homeowner about to spend $40,000.

Meanwhile the cost guides a homeowner does find are built the other way around: a national average, scaled by regional wage multipliers. That is a reasonable way to produce an estimate, and a poor way to answer "what does this actually cost on my street".

This site does the boring part — reading the filings, classifying the work, throwing out the $830 million pergolas — and publishes what is left. The methodology page is deliberately blunt about what permit values can and cannot tell you.

Contact

Corrections and city requests: [email protected]. If a number here looks wrong, we want to know — the underlying dataset is linked on every page so anyone can check our work.