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Home > Guides > Fax a building permit application
Maybe, but fewer cities accept faxed permit applications than the fax numbers on their websites suggest. Most building departments have moved to online portals, and some explicitly refuse faxed applications. Before faxing anything, check your city's current submission page and confirm they will actually process what you send.
Because websites are edited less often than policies. A building department that moved applications to an online portal three years ago often still shows the old fax number on its contact page, where it now serves a different job: fielding questions, receiving documents that do not fit the portal, or taking the occasional one-off submission the staff agreed to by phone. The number is real; the acceptance of full applications through it is not guaranteed.
Cape Breton Regional Municipality is the clearest example of the new normal. Its permits page states outright that completed applications must be submitted in person, and that applications sent by mail, fax, or email will not be accepted. That is the direction of travel everywhere: the fax number stays on the contact page while the accepted channels narrow to the portal and the counter.
| Channel | Current status | What it looks like |
|---|---|---|
| Online portal | Primary channel in most cities | Systems like Cloudpermit or BSA Online: upload plans, pay fees, track review status |
| In person | Still required in some places | Cape Breton accepts applications only at its citizen service centre |
| Limited and shrinking | Some offices take small applications by email; others have stopped entirely | |
| Fax | Rarely accepted for full applications | Usable for follow-up documents only where the office agrees to it |
Three things, and they tend to break together. First, plans do not fax. Building plans are drawn at sizes like 11x17 or 24x36, and a fax shrinks them to letter size, turning dimension lines and scale bars into guesswork. A plan reviewer cannot approve what they cannot read, so a faxed plan is usually a rejected plan.
Second, fees cannot ride a fax. Permit fees are paid by card through the portal, by cheque or card at the counter, or by whatever the office specifies. There is no mechanism to pay through a fax transmission, so even a perfect faxed application stalls until you pay separately.
Third, multi-page applications fragment. A permit application with its checklist, site plan, and supporting letters can run a dozen pages, and a fax that drops a page mid-transmission leaves the reviewer with an incomplete file and no easy way to know what is missing. Portals and in-person drop-offs both solve this; fax does not.
Ask for the application or plan-review number. Every building department assigns one when an application enters the review queue, whether it arrived through the portal or across the counter. If you faxed supplementary documents with the office's permission and nobody can give you that number, the documents are not in the queue yet.
And if you are dealing with a fax number you found on an old form, call the permit hotline before you dial. Ask two questions: is this fax number still monitored, and will you accept this specific document by fax? A thirty-second call beats a week of waiting for a confirmation that was never coming.
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