Between 2021 and 2025, five cities issued 319,392 electrical permits and published what the contractor declared each job was worth. This study takes 22,739 of them, the ones classified as standalone panel or service work or whole-house rewires, and reports the declared value by city, by year and by job type. Declared value is what the applicant wrote on the permit application for fee assessment. It is not an invoice, it is not audited in any of these five jurisdictions, and it is not the same thing as what a homeowner paid.
Key findings
- Hold the job constant and four cities land close together. Restricted to permits that name 200 amps, the 2025 declared median is $6,500 in Seattle (n=524), $5,500 in Boston (227), $4,500 in San Francisco (418) and $4,000 in Chicago (612). Pooled across all five years it is $5,300, $4,800, $4,000 and $3,500. This control barely moved while the classification was rewritten five times and the raw medians moved by as much as 20 percent, which is why it is the figure to read first.
- The all-service-upgrade median, the secondary number. Seattle $6,000 (n=936), Boston $5,000 (424), Chicago $4,000 (1,296), San Francisco $3,000 (1,354). San Francisco sits below its own 200 amp control of $4,500 because a quarter of its 2025 service upgrades were declared at $1,000 or less, and none of those low rows carry commercial wording. That is under-declaration concentrated in 2024 and 2025, not smaller work.
- San Francisco permits naming a failure-prone panel brand went from one in twenty to one in four. The share naming Federal Pacific, Stab-Lok, Zinsco or Sylvania runs 5.4%, 10.6%, 7.8%, 27.4%, 25.7% across 2021 to 2025. Federal Pacific alone appears on 31 permits in 2021 and 379 in 2025. Permits whose description mentions insurance go from 0 to 76 over the same period. Seattle stays between 1.7% and 3.3% throughout and Boston never exceeds 1.7%. The insurance count is a floor rather than a rate, since it only catches applicants who volunteered a reason, and permit text cannot prove causation.
- A whole-house rewire runs two and a half to six times a service upgrade. 2025 declared medians: Boston multi-unit buildings $30,000 (n=57), Boston single family $20,000 (75), San Francisco single family $18,500 (136), Seattle single family $15,500 (258).
- In Chicago, going to 200 amps is declared about a third higher than staying at 100. New-service permits at 200 amps carry a 2025 median of $4,000 against $3,000 at 100 to 125 amps, a gap that has held every year since 2021 at between 33 and 60 percent. Permits at 400 amps rose from 49 in 2024 to 99 in 2025.
- Declared values rose everywhere except San Francisco service work. 2021 to 2025: Chicago service upgrades +60.0 percent, Seattle +50.0, Boston +42.9, San Francisco +0.0. Single-family rewires: San Francisco +85.0 percent, Boston +42.9, Seattle +3.3.
- October is the busiest month for panel work and December the quietest. Across 20,021 panel permits in five cities and five years, 10.2% were issued in October and 7.5% in December, against 8.3 percent for an even year. The spread is 2.7 points, so this tells you when the queue is longest, not when the declared value moves.
Table A: the 200 amp control
The like-for-like comparison. Every permit in this table names 200 amps, so the job is held constant and only the city changes.
| City | 2025 permits | 2025 declared median | 2021-2025 permits | 2021-2025 declared median |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Seattle | 524 | $6,500 | 2,788 | $5,300 |
| Boston | 227 | $5,500 | 1,041 | $4,800 |
| San Francisco | 418 | $4,500 | 1,781 | $4,000 |
| Chicago | 612 | $4,000 | 2,541 | $3,500 |
| Nashville | 177 | not published | 368 | not published |
Count and geography only, never a price: its priced cohort is the reconnect subtypes and 34.1 percent of that cohort is repair work.
Table B: 2025 declared value
| City | Job | Permits | 25th | Median | 75th |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Seattle | Panel or service upgrade | 936 | $3,500 | $6,000 | $8,500 |
| Boston | Panel or service upgrade | 424 | $3,475 | $5,000 | $7,500 |
| San Francisco | Panel or service upgrade | 1,354 | $1,000 | $3,000 | $6,000 |
| Chicago | Panel or service upgrade | 1,296 | $2,000 | $4,000 | $6,131 |
| Boston | Rewire, multi-unit building | 57 | $25,000 | $30,000 | $35,000 |
| Boston | Rewire, single family | 75 | $15,500 | $20,000 | $28,000 |
| San Francisco | Rewire, single family | 136 | $9,750 | $18,500 | $28,500 |
| Seattle | Rewire, single family | 258 | $12,000 | $15,500 | $25,480 |
Other subclasses, not part of the headline figures
| City | Subclass | Permits | Declared median |
|---|---|---|---|
| San Francisco | Subpanel | 260 | $1,200 |
| Nashville | Repair | 147 | $2,800 |
| Seattle | Subpanel | 76 | $3,020 |
| Boston | Component | 67 | $2,000 |
| Nashville | Component | 52 | $2,692 |
| San Francisco | Rewire, one unit | 44 | $8,250 |
| Seattle | Component | 40 | $3,300 |
| San Francisco | Component | 37 | $3,800 |
| Seattle | Rewire, unspecified scope | 24 | $12,500 |
| Seattle | Repair | 22 | $4,250 |
| Boston | Rewire, unspecified scope | 18 | $13,000 |
| San Francisco | Rewire, unspecified scope | 15 | $15,000 |
| San Francisco | Repair | 11 | $2,000 |
| Boston | Subpanel | 10 | $2,628 |
| Boston | Rewire, one unit | 8 | $12,500 |
| Boston | Repair | 5 | $3,400 |
| Nashville | Subpanel | 3 | $4,005 |
| Seattle | Rewire, one unit | 1 | $5,000 |
The brand-name wave in San Francisco
Share of each city's panel permits naming Federal Pacific, Stab-Lok, Zinsco or Sylvania. Chicago is excluded because its permit descriptions are templated and name no manufacturer.
Table C: declared median by year
| City | Job | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Seattle | Service upgrade | $4,000n=925 | $5,000n=1,009 | $4,770n=1,214 | $5,400n=1,031 | $6,000n=936 |
| Boston | Service upgrade | $3,500n=393 | $4,000n=398 | $4,500n=423 | $5,000n=439 | $5,000n=424 |
| San Francisco | Service upgrade | $3,000n=566 | $3,000n=574 | $3,500n=621 | $3,000n=1,007 | $3,000n=1,354 |
| Chicago | Service upgrade | $2,500n=1,166 | $3,000n=944 | $3,400n=779 | $3,000n=1,124 | $4,000n=1,296 |
| Boston | Rewire, single family | $14,000n=75 | $18,000n=69 | $20,000n=49 | $21,500n=68 | $20,000n=75 |
| San Francisco | Rewire, single family | $10,000n=55 | $12,000n=73 | $13,900n=84 | $14,000n=77 | $18,500n=136 |
| Seattle | Rewire, single family | $15,000n=210 | $19,000n=242 | $18,000n=204 | $18,000n=223 | $15,500n=258 |
Nashville is absent by design. Its trade permit history begins in September 2023, so it is a three-year city, and it carries no declared value here in any case.
Methodology
The three-stage filter
Raw is every electrical permit the city issued. Matched hits the class patterns. Clean removes solar, EV chargers, batteries, generators, temporary power and, where the dataset carries a residential flag, non-residential rows. Standalone removes permits that bundle other work onto the same job. Priced is what survived the value filters and reached the file.
| City | Class | Raw | Matched | Clean | Standalone | Priced |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Seattle | Panel | 129,444 | 16,717 | 12,644 | 5,883 | 5,770 |
| San Francisco | Panel | 73,698 | 12,638 | 11,151 | 5,566 | 4,948 |
| Boston | Panel | 44,861 | 7,656 | 5,232 | 2,550 | 2,546 |
| Nashville | Panel | 37,791 | 5,390 | 1,465 | 1,166 | 1,062 |
| Chicago | Panel | 33,598 | 10,074 | 9,009 | 5,905 | 5,695 |
| Boston | Rewire | 44,861 | 1,146 | 956 | 758 | 754 |
| San Francisco | Rewire | 73,698 | 2,660 | 2,564 | 1,536 | 684 |
| Seattle | Rewire | 129,444 | 3,194 | 2,995 | 1,294 | 1,280 |
The nine subclasses
| Subclass | Permits | What it means on the job | Published |
|---|---|---|---|
| service_upgrade | 17,242 | The panel or the service itself: a panel change, a service change, a capacity increase, or a named failure-prone brand coming out. | yes |
| single_family | 1,898 | A whole house rewired. | yes |
| multi_unit | 344 | A whole two to four family building rewired. | yes |
| component | 1,168 | Meter socket, main breaker, disconnect, riser, mast, bonding or grounding, with no panel or service change. | collapsed block |
| subpanel | 1,060 | A sub-panel added or swapped. Not the service, and declared far below one. | collapsed block |
| repair | 551 | Storm, tree, burnt, stolen or a utility reconnect. Emergency work, not a planned upgrade. | collapsed block |
| unit | 209 | One apartment or condo unit rewired, not the building. | collapsed block |
| unspecified | 267 | A permit that says only complete rewire and names no building. | collapsed block |
| partial | not in file | A floor, a room, or a handful of circuits. Never treated as a rewire. | no |
Rows removed by each review rule
The classification went through five rounds of review against random samples of matched and excluded permits. Each round added rules. These are the rows each one removed.
| Rule | What it removed | Permits |
|---|---|---|
| R1 | No whole-scope language at all | 1,341 |
| R1 | Hard partial markers: partial, selective, portion, areas of, some | 718 |
| R2 | Floor or room scope | 611 |
| P6 | Over 400 amps, or five or more meters | 603 |
| P3 | Temporary power, three phase, meter additions | 396 |
| P7 | Amendments, inspections, alarm and fire panels | 247 |
| R4 | Amendments, inspections, new construction including ADU | 141 |
| R6 | A room as the direct object of the rewire verb | 116 |
The $100 floor is a placeholder filter, not an outlier filter
1,889 rows were removed for falling below $100, and 1,840 of them carry a declared value of exactly $0 or $1. Those are the not-stated placeholders the portals use. Only 49 rows across five cities and five years were genuine values between $2 and $99. The upper caps, $250,000 for panel work and $500,000 for rewires, removed 30 rows in total.
Why the 200 amp control leads
Every panel figure leads with the 200A like-for-like control. The all-service-upgrade median is the secondary number. The control held at San Francisco $4,000, Boston $4,800, Seattle $5,300 and Chicago $3,500 across three successive revisions of the classifier, and that stability is itself a stated finding.
Limits
- Declared value is not price. Stated by the applicant before the work, for fee assessment, unaudited in all five cities, and it clusters on round numbers.
- Nashville is a three-year city. Its trade permit history begins on September 8, 2023, so it has no 2021 or 2022 and under four months of 2023.
- San Francisco rewires rest on about half the permits the city issued. Its placeholder zeros remove a large share of otherwise usable rows.
- San Francisco under-declares. One in four of its 2025 service upgrades was declared at $1,000 or less, and none of those rows carry commercial wording. Read the 200 amp control, not the raw median.
- Chicago cannot separate a replacement from an upgrade. Its permit template records the new service size, not the old one, so a like-for-like 200 amp swap and a 100 to 200 upgrade look identical.
- 1,341 permits that mention old wiring were excluded rather than assumed. They name knob and tube, aluminium or a rewire but never state that the whole house was done, so they sit outside the cohort instead of being counted as whole-house jobs.
Download the data
Download all 22,739 permits (CSV, 12 columns)
One row per permit, with a source URL that resolves to that single record on the issuing city's own API. Columns: city, permit_number, issue_date, class, subclass, subclass_tags, structured_type, description_raw, declared_value, residential_flag, source_dataset_id, source_record_url.
Frequently asked questions
How much does a 200 amp panel upgrade cost?
Across permits that name 200 amps, the 2025 declared median is $6,500 in Seattle, $5,500 in Boston, $4,500 in San Francisco and $4,000 in Chicago. Declared value is what the contractor stated at permit time for fee assessment, not an invoice. Treat it as the middle of a range, and get two written bids before you budget.
Does insurance require replacing a Federal Pacific panel?
The permits cannot answer that directly, but they show a pattern. San Francisco permits naming Federal Pacific went from 31 in 2021 to 379 in 2025, and permits mentioning insurance went from 0 to 76 over the same years. Seattle and Boston show no comparable rise. Ask your carrier, because policies differ.
How much does it cost to rewire a house?
For a whole single-family house in 2025, the declared median was $20,000 in Boston, $18,500 in San Francisco and $15,500 in Seattle. A whole two to four family building in Boston was declared at $30,000. Declared value is stated at permit time, not billed.
Why is San Francisco's panel number lower than Seattle's?
On comparable work it is not much lower. Holding the job to permits that name 200 amps, San Francisco's 2025 declared median is $4,500 against Seattle's $6,500. The raw all-permit figure of $3,000 is pulled down by under-declaration: a quarter of San Francisco's 2025 service upgrades were declared at $1,000 or less.
Is October a bad month to schedule panel work?
October is the busiest month in this data, carrying 10.2% of five years of panel permits against 7.5% in December. That means a longer queue, not a higher declared value. If your job can wait, booking in late autumn or winter gives you more of an electrician's attention.
Sources
Every permit in the file came from one of these five endpoints, pulled directly and cached with the exact query used.
| City | Dataset | ID | Portal |
|---|---|---|---|
| Seattle | Electrical Permits | c4tj-daue | data.seattle.gov |
| San Francisco | Electrical Permits | ftty-kx6y | data.sf.gov |
| Boston | Approved Building Permits | 6ddcd912-32a0-43df-9908-63574f8c7e77 | data.boston.gov |
| Chicago | Building Permits | ydr8-5enu | data.cityofchicago.org |
| Nashville | Trade Permits | Trade_Permits_View/FeatureServer/0 | datanashvillegov-nashville.hub.arcgis.com |
Keep reading
Panel upgrade costs in your city · House rewiring costs in your city · More NailThePrice research