Most owners check a contractor the way they check a restaurant: reviews, photographs, a few phone calls. The license number gets looked up once, it comes back active, and the question feels closed. Then the architect starts preparing the filing and asks for something nobody had thought to collect: the name and credential of every party who will be on the permit, trade by trade.

That list is where a contractor’s real standing on your job shows up. It is also something the contractor owes you in writing before you sign, which makes it the most useful document in the whole vetting exercise.

The notice you are owed before the contract

Before you enter into a contract, a home improvement contractor has to hand you written notice of every permit the work in that contract requires. The notice has to cover five things: which permits, which party will obtain each one, the steps to obtain them, the estimated permit fees, and how you can check the status of each permit yourself. The requirement is set out on the city’s consumer page on hiring a home improvement contractor.

The fifth item is the one that changes the relationship. Once you know how to look up permit status, you no longer depend on the contractor to tell you whether the job is filed, approved, inspected or signed off. You can see it.

Ask for the notice while the contract is still a draft. Owners who wait until signing get it stapled to the back of the agreement, when there is no time left to read it.

What a good notice looks like, and a weak one

A notice written for your apartment reads like a plan. It lists the alteration filing and names the architect or engineer who will file it. It lists a plumbing permit if a fixture moves or a line is changed, and names the plumber. It lists electrical work if circuits or boxes change, and names the electrician. It gives fee estimates that differ from line to line, because the permits differ.

A weak notice reads like a disclaimer. “All required permits to be obtained as necessary.” One line, no names, no fees, nothing about how to check. It satisfies nobody, and it tells you the contractor has not yet looked at the scope closely enough to know what it will take to file.

The difference is worth noticing early, because the permit list is also a test of scope. If you plan to move the sink to the island and the notice mentions no plumbing permit, one of two things is true: the contractor has not understood the job, or intends to do the plumbing without filing it. Either one is a conversation to have before a deposit moves.

Every trade on the list has its own license

The general contractor’s credentials stop at the edge of two trades, and on a kitchen or a bathroom those two trades carry most of the filing.

Plumbing goes through a Licensed Master Plumber and a plumbing permit. Any change to the plumbing counts, and in a pre-war apartment, where the stack sets the limits of the layout, moving a fixture a couple of feet is always a change.

Electrical work is narrower. Replacing a light fixture, a receptacle or a switch like for like, on an existing box that is already correct, needs no permit. New wiring, a new box or a change to a circuit brings in a Licensed Master Electrician and an electrical permit. A kitchen with new under-cabinet lighting and a relocated range almost always crosses that line.

So the notice should give you three or four names, and each name is a separate lookup. Ask for the plumber and the electrician by name and license number when you ask for the general contractor’s credentials. A firm that renovates apartments in this city routinely will give you the same two names it has used for years, without pausing. A firm that has to go find a plumber once the job is signed is recruiting on your schedule.

The plumber is also the name most likely to set your calendar. On a bathroom the plumber is on site more days than anyone, and the plumbing inspection of the rough-in sits in front of everything that follows it: tile, fixtures, the glass. If the licensed plumber is booked 3 weeks out, the whole job is 3 weeks out.

Who files and who is named

 

In an apartment building, a multiple dwelling, the owner retains a registered design professional, an architect or an engineer, to file the plans for an alteration. The contractor does not file the drawings. The contractor is named on the job, under its own credentials, and those credentials have to be current on the day they are needed.

For a co-op or condo unit the contractor pulling the alteration permit needs General Contractor Registration with the Department of Buildings, whatever the height of the building, and a Home Improvement Contractor license from the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection as a separate credential. An active license alone does not let a contractor file on your building. In a building 4 stories or taller the registered contractor also needs DOB safety endorsements for construction, concrete and demolition work, and in Manhattan that covers nearly every co-op and condo. Each of these is checked, and a lapse in any one holds the filing.

That is also why the notice should say who obtains each permit. “The contractor” is an incomplete answer when the plans are filed by your architect and the plumbing permit is pulled by the plumber. A notice that names those parties correctly shows a contractor who understands the order of the filing. A notice that assigns everything to the general contractor shows one who does not.

The board is on the application now

One change this year affects how late a contractor can safely be replaced. Since February 2026, when the owner type on a DOB NOW filing is a condo unit owner or a co-op tenant-shareholder, the board automatically becomes a stakeholder on the application, and its representative has to attest before the filing moves forward. In practice that step adds something like 2 to 4 weeks by itself.

Before this, a board approval and a DOB filing could run side by side. Now the board is inside the filing. Replacing a contractor late does not undo the board’s attestation, but the new company still has to be approved by the building under the alteration agreement and entered on the permit under its own credentials, and each of those steps takes time before work can start again.

So the checking has a real deadline, and it is earlier than the contract. The permit notice, the trade names and the credential lookups belong before the alteration agreement is signed and before your architect files. After that, every change costs weeks.

The permit has to close too

The notice tells you how to check permit status, and that lookup is as useful at the end of the job as at the start. A renovation is finished when its permits are signed off, and the document that closes an alteration is a Letter of Completion. It is a different paper from a Certificate of Occupancy, which only comes into it when the occupancy of the apartment changes.

Ask for the sign-off before the final payment, and check the status yourself with the same method the notice described. Keep the Letter of Completion with the apartment’s papers. When you sell, a buyer’s attorney will look for open permits, and a job left unclosed by a contractor who has since moved on becomes your problem to close, years later, with whoever you can find.

What the notice says about the firm

The notice keeps working after the hiring decision. It is a written statement, made before signing, of who would pull which permit, and the status lookup lets you compare that statement against what was actually filed. If the two drift apart during the job, the gap is specific enough to raise with the contractor, and if that conversation goes nowhere, DCWP takes contract and quality-of-work disputes with home improvement contractors through 311.

A contractor who files carefully tends to close carefully, and the notice at the start is the earliest look you get at which kind you are hiring.