Austin Roof Permits by ZIP Code

All of them, ranked

Three things worth noticing

The busiest ZIP codes are not the wealthiest. 78704 leads with 1,285 and 78702 follows with 1,192 — both central, older and dense, where a reroof is a normal expense rather than an event.

The money runs the other way. Declared averages go from $10,168 in 78741 to $90,708 in 78746 — 8.9 times, in one city. Volume and value are almost unrelated.

12 ZIP codes have no contractor registered inside them at all. Crews work metro-wide routes so it changes nothing practical, but it does mean “your local 787XX roofer” usually describes where a company wants work rather than where it is.

What is not in this table

Three ZIP codes are missing on purpose: 78712 is the University of Texas campus, 78719 is the airport, and 78738 falls outside the city limits. None has housing or a permit record worth publishing, and padding them out would have been inventing.

One caveat that applies to every figure here: a declared permit value is what the owner or contractor wrote on the application before the old roof came off, not what the final invoice said. It is a reliable guide to scale and an unreliable guide to the cent — and still far better evidence than a national average with the word “Austin” dropped into it.

Sources: City of Austin issued building permits; Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts, active sales tax permit holders. Both public records, retrieved September 2026.

How this was put together, and what it cannot tell you

Two public files, joined locally. The City of Austin publishes every building permit it issues, with an address, coordinates, a date, a work description typed by whoever filed it, and a declared value. The Texas Comptroller publishes every business holding an active sales tax permit, with the date it first reported sales in the state. Neither office joins them to anything; that is the work.

Four limits worth stating plainly, because most sites quoting permit data do not:

• The record starts in 2006. Anything older is not in it, so nothing here describes how Austin roofs behaved before then.
• Small repairs never appear. A permit is required for replacement and structural work, not for patching. The counts are therefore a floor, not a total — and for work like tarping or inspection, which needs no permit at all, there is essentially nothing to count.
• The work description is free text. Somebody typed it. Searching for a category means searching for several spellings of it and accepting that a permit reading only “new roof” lands in no category at all.
• A declared value is not an invoice. It is written before the old roof comes off, which is exactly when nobody yet knows what the decking underneath looks like.

The ten lines a written quote should contain

Most of the difference between two roof quotes in Austin is not the shingle. It is what surrounds it, and what quietly went missing from the cheaper one:

• The material, named by manufacturer and product line — not just “architectural shingle”.
• The number of squares. Without it, two quotes cannot be compared at all.
• Tear-off or overlay, and how many existing layers come off.
• Decking replacement, priced per sheet. The single clause that most often turns a fixed quote into a variable one.
• Underlayment, and what specifically goes into the valleys.
• New flashing at every chimney, wall and vent — replaced, not reused.
• Ventilation: what is kept, replaced or added.
• Who pulls the permit, and whether the fee is inside the price.
• Cleanup, including a magnet sweep for nails.
• The warranty, split explicitly into labour and material.

A quote that is one line and one number is not a quote. It is an opening position, and you have no way of telling what was left out of it.

Where a sample is too small to average honestly, this site says so rather than publishing a number with a confident face on it. Every figure here can be reproduced from the same two files by anybody who wants to check.