Public permit record
New Orleans HVAC permit explorer
The city's permit record, cut for air conditioning: New Orleans logged 2,139 mechanical HVAC permit filings in 2025 and 1,953 so far in 2026. Here is where that work happens, when it spikes, and when your own AC job needs a permit.
Page data: snapshot of data.nola.gov accessed 2026-10-16. The ingest pipeline refreshes weekly; the city updates the dataset nightly.
When AC work needs a permit
Short answer: almost always. The Department of Safety and Permits requires a mechanical permit if you plan to, in the city’s words:
“install, repair, replace, or alter any mechanical or gas-fired apparatus or equipment, such as air conditioning systems, electric or gas heaters, electric or gas furnaces or heaters, or gas lines.”
Homeowners cannot pull this permit themselves: the city issues HVAC permits only to contractors holding a New Orleans Class “A” Mechanical license. Questions go to the Mechanical Inspections Division at (504) 658-7153. If a quote skips the permit on a replacement, that is a corner being cut on the public record of your own house.
Permits by year
The counts below are permit filings with the Mechanical HVAC code, counted by filing date. The HVAC code first appears in the city’s data in May 2015, so 2015 is a partial year — and 2026 is still in progress.
| Year | Permits filed |
|---|---|
| 2015 (from May) | 1,982 |
| 2016 | 3,608 |
| 2017 | 3,852 |
| 2018 | 3,392 |
| 2019 | 3,242 |
| 2020 | 2,548 |
| 2021 | 2,735 |
| 2022 | 2,174 |
| 2023 | 2,197 |
| 2024 | 1,770 |
| 2025 | 2,139 |
| 2026 (year to date) | 1,953 |
The seasonal rush
Filings climb through late spring and peak in June;December averages the fewest. The table shows the pattern so you can see where your own project would land in the city’s queue.
| Month | Average filings |
|---|---|
| January | 244 |
| February | 209 |
| March | 245 |
| April | 239 |
| May | 268 |
| June | 276 |
| July | 213 |
| August | 242 |
| September | 208 |
| October | 241 |
| November | 195 |
| December | 185 |
Where the work happens
Neighborhood counts use the city’s Neighborhood Statistical Areas. These are the 3-year totals for 2023–2025. Areas with fewer than 5 filings are grouped in this table because small counts read as noise; the CSV download carries the full, ungrouped counts.
| Neighborhood | Permits filed |
|---|---|
| Central City | 394 |
| Seventh Ward | 280 |
| Audubon | 246 |
| Little Woods | 202 |
| Central Business District | 199 |
| Lower Ninth Ward | 197 |
| St. Roch | 181 |
| Lower Garden District | 175 |
| Hollygrove | 169 |
| Leonidas | 154 |
| Treme - Lafitte | 150 |
| French Quarter | 149 |
| Mid-City | 145 |
| St. Claude | 142 |
| Milan | 138 |
| 2 areas under 5 filings (grouped) | 6 |
Active contractors
329 distinct names appear in the contractor field of HVAC filings from 2025.The table lists the license holders of record on the most filings from October 2025 through September 2026, exactly as the city publishes them. The city records the individual Class “A” license holder, not a company name, and we do not merge spelling variants.
| License holder of record | Permits filed |
|---|---|
| Keefe John Ditta | 577 |
| Frank D Natal, III | 84 |
| Ira A Preuett | 58 |
| Jared Folks | 57 |
| Edgar NMI Young, Jr. | 41 |
| RNGD Builders LLC | 36 |
| Dale Martin Smith | 34 |
| Katawan Vashon Fletcher, Sr. | 32 |
| Harold Heidingsfelder | 29 |
| Damon Tyris Reed Sr. | 23 |
513 filings in this window list no contractor in the public dataset and are excluded from the table.
Get the data
Methodology
Aggregates are computed in code from a committed snapshot of the City of New Orleans “Permits” dataset (ID rcm3-fn58) on data.nola.gov, filtered to permit code HVAC (“Mechanical HVAC”). Tests hold the published numbers to that snapshot. A scheduled job also refreshes the same aggregates weekly into our database and validates the dataset’s schema first; if the city changes the fields, the job keeps the last good data and raises an alert instead of publishing something broken.
- Counts are by filing date and include every filing status — including permits that were never issued or were later withdrawn. A filing is a request to do work, not proof the work happened.
- The HVAC permit code first appears in the dataset in May 2015. Earlier mechanical work exists under other codes (general mechanical, fuel gas), so this page starts at 2015 and marks it partial.
- Neighborhoods are the city’s Neighborhood Statistical Areas, matched through the dataset’s own region field. Areas with fewer than 5 filings are grouped in the table above; the CSV download is ungrouped. 1 filings from 2023–2025 carry no neighborhood assignment and appear only in the by-month figures.
- The contractor field is free text naming the license holder of record. We publish it as-is: no merging of name variants, no company attribution, so distinct-name counts can run higher than the number of actual people. Blank contractor fields are counted and disclosed, not guessed.
- Permit filings track neither direction of the truth perfectly: withdrawn or never-issued filings can overstate completed work, and unpermitted work never enters the dataset at all. Treat these counts as a record of filings, not of jobs done.
- Monthly averages cover the complete years 2016–2025.
Last pipeline refresh: see snapshot date above.
Sources
- City of New Orleans "Permits" dataset (rcm3-fn58), data.nola.gov — updated nightly — accessed 2026-10-16
- City of New Orleans, Department of Safety and Permits — Mechanical Permit requirements — accessed 2026-10-16
- Neighborhood Statistical Areas boundaries, data.nola.gov — accessed 2026-10-16