DOB NOW Public Portal: How to Look Up a Filing

What is the DOB NOW public portal?

DOB NOW is the New York City Department of Buildings system where owners, architects, engineers and contractors file permits, applications and inspection results. The public portal is its open side: a search over the same records, available to anyone, with no account and no filing rights.

People reach it for three reasons. They want to know whether work happening next door is permitted. They are buying or renting and want the history of the building. Or they are the owner, and they want to see where a job their contractor filed has got to.

Do you need an account to search?

No. Searching and reading are open. An account is only needed to file, to sign an application, or to act as an applicant of record on a job. If a page asks you to sign in, you have crossed from the public side into the filing side — go back and search again from the public entry point.

This is the most common confusion around the phrase "DOB NOW login". Two different needs share one name: looking something up, which needs nothing, and filing something, which needs a registered account tied to a licence or an ownership role.

What do you need before you search?

• An address, with the borough. The city has repeating street names across boroughs, and a search without a borough returns the wrong building or none.
• Or a building identification number, the numeric identifier the city assigns to a structure. This is the most reliable input, because it survives address changes and corner-lot double addresses.
• Or a job number, if you are following one specific filing. It appears on the permit posted at the site and on any paperwork from your contractor.

Write down whichever you have before you start. Half of failed searches are a retyped address with the wrong suffix.

How do I look up a property or a job filing?

1. Open the public search on the Department of Buildings site — the section labelled for public use, not the applicant sign-in.
2. Choose what you are searching by: address, building identifier, or job number.
3. If searching by address, enter the house number and street separately if the form asks, and pick the borough from the list rather than typing it.
4. Submit and review the result list. One address can return several rows: different jobs, different filing types, different years.
5. Open the row you want. The record shows the filing type, the status, the applicant of record, and the dates the status changed.
6. Look for the documents section of the record if you need the actual drawings or the permit itself.

Note the job number of anything relevant before you close the tab. Returning by job number takes seconds; repeating an address search takes minutes.

Why does my address return nothing?

An empty result almost never means "no filings exist". Work through these in order:

• Wrong borough. The single most common cause.
• Street name form. Try the full word and the abbreviation, ordinal and numeral, and drop directional prefixes if the first attempt fails.
• Corner buildings. A building on a corner is filed under one of its two addresses, not both. Try the other street.
• Apartment number included. Filings attach to the building, not the unit. Remove it.
• The filing predates this system. Older jobs live in the department's previous information system, and a search here will not reach them.

When the address keeps failing, switch to the building identifier. Address matching is fuzzy; the identifier is exact.

Where are the older records?

New York City did not move every historic filing into DOB NOW. Newer filing types are here; older jobs, and certain categories that migrated later, remain in the department's earlier system. If a building obviously has decades of history and you see only a couple of recent rows, you are looking at the new system's slice of it, not the whole file.

Certificates of occupancy, violations and complaints are also held in their own sections rather than inside the job record, so a clean job list does not by itself mean a clean building.

What can you not do without signing in?

• Submit a new application or amend an existing one.
• Sign or seal a filing as a licensed professional.
• Request an inspection or schedule an appointment tied to a job.
• Pay a fee attached to a filing.
• See the internal correspondence on a job that is not public.

An owner who wants to do any of those registers as an owner and is linked to the job by the applicant of record. That link is done by the professional filing on your behalf, not by you.

Who do you contact when the record looks wrong?

Decide first what kind of wrong it is. If a status is stale — work finished, record still open — that is usually the applicant of record's job to close out, so start with your architect, engineer or expediter. If the underlying property data is wrong, such as the number of units or the address itself, that is a departmental correction and needs a request through the department's own channels.

Have the job number, the building identifier and a short description of the discrepancy ready before you make contact; the first question you will be asked is the job number. Verified contact details are shown above, and you can start from the company’s official website if you need the department's help section.