Four doors, one kind of record
Chicago sorts permit applications into separate review routes, and the route decides who examined the drawings before the permit issued — City plan reviewers, a private licensed professional, third-party reviewers, or nobody, because there were no drawings. The four the Department of Buildings describes are the Easy Permit Process, Standard Plan Review, Self-Certification and Developer Services.
All four end in the same artifact: a permit record, with an address, a date, a work description and a dollar value, presented in the same format as every other permit record in the City's data. Nothing in that presentation tells a casual reader which route produced it. That is the comparison this page exists to make, because the distance between the strongest route and the weakest is very large and entirely invisible at a glance.
One thing is common to all four and worth stating before anything else: none of them establishes that the work was inspected. Review and inspection are separate stages, handled by separate parts of the department, producing separate records. Everything below concerns the first stage only.
Easy Permit Process: no plans, therefore no plan review
The Easy Permit Process covers small repair and replacement work that does not require architectural plans. The Department's guide lists window and door replacement; furnace, boiler or water heater replacement in buildings of four or more units; drywall over 1,000 square feet; sheds of 70 square feet or more; new garages of 600 square feet or less with no rooftop deck; non-brick fences 5 to 6 feet tall; solar panel systems under 13.44 kW; tuckpointing; light fixtures; chimney repair; security alarm installation; and sewer repair. The guide states that Easy Permits are generally approved the day of application.
What the applicant supplies is a signed contract with a licensed contractor or trade professional, not a set of drawings. Most projects on this route still need zoning approval, and landmark buildings and buildings in Landmark Districts still need landmark approval from the Department of Planning and Development.
For a reader of the record, the consequence is blunt. No plan review occurred, because no plans were submitted. An Easy Permit record proves the City was told what would be done, confirmed a licensed trade was engaged, and took a fee. It does not prove anyone evaluated how the work would be carried out, because that question was never put to anyone. Standing alone, it is among the thinnest records in the Chicago system.
Standard Plan Review: City reviewers read the drawings
Standard Plan Review is the route for small to mid-size new construction and renovation. Applications are filed through the City's electronic plan system and assigned a Project Manager, and City plan reviewers examine the submitted drawings for code compliance.
The guide bounds the route at buildings up to 80 feet high, residential properties up to 49 units, and commercial properties under 150,000 square feet. Those thresholds are reproduced as the document states them; the same guide says its code information is correct as of July 2017, so whether each number still holds is unverified here and should not be treated as a current legal test.
This is the route that carries the most review weight, and it is the baseline against which the other three are best understood. When a reader asks whether a City official actually looked at how a project was designed, Standard Plan Review is the route where the answer is unambiguously yes. It remains silent, like every other route, on whether the finished work matched the drawings.
Source: Guide to Building Permits, City of Chicago Department of Buildings, October 2019.
Self-Certification: a private professional reads them instead
Self-Certification allows an Illinois-licensed architect or structural engineer, registered with the Department as a Self-Certification Professional, to certify that an eligible project complies with the code. The Department's own page states plainly that because the registered professional certifies compliance, Department plan reviews are skipped, and that the professional takes full responsibility for code compliance. The same page states that permit expediters cannot upload self-certified applications; the professional must submit them.
The program is bounded by occupancy class, height and floor area — broadly, detached single-family houses up to four stories, small multiple-dwelling buildings, and modest business, mercantile and mixed-occupancy projects, with disqualifiers that exclude unit-count increases, large assembly occupancies and anything above four stories or 55 feet. Those limits come from the program rules as published in 2018, which may have been superseded.
Self-certification is the route where the record most badly understates the difference. A self-certified permit and a Standard Plan Review permit are typographically identical in the public data, and the substantive difference between them is that in one case a City reviewer read the drawings and in the other no City reviewer did. Zoning review, by contrast, is retained on this route, so a self-certified permit does evidence a City review — of use and bulk, not of construction.
Source: Self-Certification Permit Program, City of Chicago Department of Buildings.
Developer Services: review happens, partly privately
Developer Services handles large and complex projects. The guide describes it as the route for buildings over 80 feet, residential buildings with 50 or more units, and foundations 12 feet or deeper, and notes that third-party plan reviews carry an added cost and that the process begins with an appointment request.
What this means in the record is a qualified yes. Review certainly happened, and on projects of this scale it was substantial. But part of it may have been performed by a third-party reviewer engaged for the purpose rather than by the City's own plan examiners. The permit record does not distinguish the two, and the distinction can matter if a reader is trying to establish whose judgment stands behind a particular approval.
The Department's guide also describes a Homeowner Assistance route, under which owner-occupants of single-family homes can get help preparing plans for certain renovations. That is an assistance service attached to the application process rather than a separate standard of review, and it does not add a fifth tier to the comparison above.
A fifth name, and an unresolved question
A term appears in the data that does not appear in the 2019 guide. The Building Permits dataset's documentation for its issue-date field states that for most permit types the date is when the City determined the permit was ready to issue subject to payment of fees, but that "for Express Permit Program, date when permit issued." The Express Permit Program also appears on the Department's current porch and demolition pages, where non-structural porch repairs correcting a violation are described as able to use it, and where wood frame private garages replaced through it are exempt from a demolition permit.
Whether Express Permit Program is the Easy Permit Process under a newer name, or a distinct route, could not be established from primary sources. This site does not assert that they are the same and does not assert that they are different. A reader encountering either term should note which document is using it and when that document was published, rather than mapping one onto the other.
That the City once measured these routes as separate programs is independently visible. Four performance-metrics datasets exist on the Data Portal for time to issue Easy Permits, Standard Plan Review permits, Developer Services permits and Green Permits. Three of the four were last updated in August 2014, so they are evidence that the routes existed and were tracked separately — not current performance data. The Green Permit program's present status is unverified.
Reading the route off a record
The route is carried in a field the City calls REVIEW_TYPE, defined in the dataset documentation as the "process used to review permit application." It is the most useful column in the permit data for this question and the one least often surfaced in the summaries most readers see.
Ranked by the weight of review behind them: Standard Plan Review is strongest, with City plan reviewers on the drawings. Developer Services is strong but partly private. Self-Certification carries a licensed professional's certification and no City plan review. Easy or Express Permit carries no review of method at all, because no method was described in reviewable form.
Two cautions close the comparison. First, the ranking concerns review only — field inspection obligations are not what distinguishes these routes, and none of the four tells a reader whether an inspector attended. Second, a permit record is a record of authorization. Even the strongest route establishes that a design was approved, not that the building in front of you matches it.
Source: Building Permits dataset metadata, City of Chicago.