Planning Intelligence France › Method
How we build France's planning figures — method and sources
Every number on the France pages comes from SDES — Ministère de la Transition écologique’s own published record, joined only to the official reference lists named below. This page says exactly how, and what the record does not contain.
One exception: the weekly neighbourhood bulletin also draws on four other public registers: BOAMP for works tenders, DECP for awarded contracts, BODACC for company movements and ADEME for energy certificates (DPE). Each publishes under the Licence Ouverte, and every record carries its own reference. The sites where work has started come from Sitadel itself: its declaration of the opening of works (DOC), which the owner files with the town hall, dated as filed.
Each figure is counted by its own rule, so they are not the steps of a funnel: a permit can be placed on the map from its commune even when the register gives it no description.
2 records name no municipality we can identify in the register. They count in the total but are not listed under any locality.
Where this data comes from
| Source | Publisher | Licence |
|---|---|---|
| Sitadel — liste des permis de construire | SDES — Ministère de la Transition écologique | Licence Ouverte 2.0 |
| BOAMP — appels d’offres de travaux | DILA | Licence Ouverte 2.0 |
| TED — Tenders Electronic Daily (appels d’offres européens de travaux) | Office des publications de l’UE | Décision 2011/833/UE |
| DECP — données essentielles de la commande publique | Ministère de l’Économie | Licence Ouverte 2.0 |
| BODACC — annonces commerciales | DILA | Licence Ouverte 2.0 |
| ADEME — diagnostics de performance énergétique (DPE) | ADEME | Licence Ouverte 2.0 |
We read what the authority publishes for bulk reuse. We do not scrape the public search interface, and we never sign in to anything.
What the register publishes
| Field | Status |
|---|---|
| Description of the works | Not published Not from us — how you can get it yourself: Sitadel publishes coded categories, floor areas and unit counts rather than written wording, so the works are classified from those. The wording itself is on the statutory site notice and at the mairie. |
| Applicant | Published |
| Architect or designer | Not published Not from us — how you can get it yourself: The file records when an architect was legally required but not the name. The Ordre des Architectes public directory resolves any architect to a practice and an address. |
| Decision | Published |
| Map location | Not published Not from us — how you can get it yourself: Each record carries its commune and cadastral parcel reference. The open cadastre can turn that reference into an exact outline, but we do not draw it yet: the map places each project at the centre of its commune, marked approximate. |
From a published record to a lead
- Ingest. We take the authority’s published file or API and keep the raw response, dated and unchanged, so every figure can be traced back to the exact bytes we received.
- Normalise. References, dates and decisions are mapped to one shared vocabulary so France can be compared with the other countries on this site.
- Locate. The authority publishes no coordinates, so each project is placed at the centre of its municipality using the national mapping agency’s open boundary data. This is labelled as approximate everywhere it appears.
- Match to a trade. Each description is read against a vocabulary for each trade. A project can need several trades. The vocabulary is written in the authority’s own language, because that is how it describes the works.
- Time it. Each trade has a procurement window: a permit granted today means glazing is usually bought nine to eighteen months later and HVAC twelve to twenty-four. Every permit appears once its register publishes it and our nightly run reads it - some registers publish daily, some weekly, some monthly - and each one shows, trade by trade, the window in which that work is usually bought, so you know when to call.
- Find who to contact. Where the published record names a party, the lead carries it directly.
What we deliberately do not collect
Where an application is made by a private individual rather than a company, we discard their name and address at ingest. They are never stored. Company and institutional applicants are recorded, because they are acting commercially. Privacy.
Known limits, stated plainly
These are the things this country’s pipeline does not yet do fully. They are tracked in public and updated as they close.
| Feature | Status | Where it stands |
|---|---|---|
| Architect / designer | Partial | Named only where the applicant is itself an architecture or engineering practice; otherwise the permit carries the company’s registered office from the open company register |
| Route to a human | Partial | The SIREN number on the permit, resolved through the public company directory |
| Legal review | Partial | Licence Ouverte 2.0, confirmed and attributed |
This table is the full list of known limits for this country.
How current is it
We check our sources every night. Each register publishes on its own schedule - some daily, some monthly - and every country page shows the date of the newest record we hold.
Source: SDES — Ministère de la Transition écologique · Licence Ouverte 2.0 · rebuilt 2026-10-12.
In France you can subscribe to: public works, the local market. Everything else on this site is free to browse.
Whichever you pick, everything it includes opens in full: who is behind the work, where it is, and the business contact where we hold one.
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