Pulling a building permit in Boca Raton
The city runs two separate systems and most first-time applicants only find the second one after their application stalls. What each is for, and the order to use them in.
Before anything else: confirm the property is actually inside the city. Roughly two in five Boca Raton addresses are not, and those permits are the county's. See which Boca Raton are you in.
The thing that catches people out
The city uses two separate systems, and they do different halves of the job.
Boca eHub is where you apply, check status, pay fees, book inspections and search records.
Boca ePlans, which the city also calls ProjectDox, is where the drawings go for review.
Applying in the first and never uploading to the second is the most common way a permit sits still. Nothing rejects it. It simply waits for plans that were never sent. The city publishes video tutorials and a naming-convention guide for the upload step, and they are worth the ten minutes — files named the wrong way get returned.
The order
- Check the jurisdiction. City or county. Get this wrong and the rest is wasted.
- Create a Boca eHub account and start the application under the case type that matches the work.
- Upload the drawings to Boca ePlans, following the naming conventions.
- Answer review comments in ePlans. Reviews come back with corrections more often than not; that is normal and not a rejection.
- Pay the fees in eHub once the permit is ready to issue.
- Book inspections in eHub as the work reaches each stage.
- Download the approved plans from ePlans. Keep them on site.
If the online route is not workable
The city will sit down with you. Appointments are at City Hall, 201 West Palmetto Park Road, Room 220 — the main number is 561-393-7700. Ask for the Building Department. This is a real option and not a fallback for the incompetent; the two-system split confuses people who do this for a living.
What we are not going to tell you
Fees, and whether your specific job needs a permit at all.
Both change, and both depend on the work. A guide that prints a fee schedule is wrong within a year and somebody budgets off it. The city's permit process pages carry the current numbers, and the Building Department will tell you over the phone whether what you are planning is permittable work. Ask before you start, not after an inspector stops by.
Where this comes from
Checked against these on 2026-08-31. Fees, deadlines and portals change — if one of these pages disagrees with this one, the official page is right and we would like to know.
- City of Boca Raton — permit process information
- Boca eHub
- Boca ePlans (ProjectDox)
- City of Boca Raton — ePlan information and video tutorials
September 2026 — First published.
We record when a guide was published and when it was last revised. We do not yet record what changed, so this is a dating record rather than a changelog.
Written and checked by a person, and carrying the month they were published and the month they were last revised. Where a rule or a fee applies we link the official source rather than quoting a number that will go stale.
A fee that has changed, a link that has moved, an answer that is no longer right — tell us and we will check it and say we did.
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