Massachusetts towns publish building permits on a weekly rhythm that nobody designed. Across 37,361 dated permits from 31 municipal sources, Friday carries 12.8% of the records - barely half of any other weekday. In Hingham, across 900 weekday permits spanning 13 calendar Fridays, the count is exactly zero.
This is about what towns publish, not what they do. The date on a permit record is the date the town wrote it down, and the data proves it: 704 permits in this dataset are dated to a Saturday or Sunday, across 20 of 31 sources. Building departments are not issuing permits at the weekend. That column is a recording date, and every number below should be read as a fact about municipal record-keeping.
Monday through Thursday sit within a couple of points of each other - 21.7%, 22.2%, 20.8% and 20.6% respectively. Then Friday drops to 12.8%. It is not a gentle taper; it is a step down, and it repeats across towns that share no software, no vendor and no county.
| Day | Share of dated permits |
|---|---|
| Monday | 21.7% |
| Tuesday | 22.2% |
| Wednesday | 20.8% |
| Thursday | 20.6% |
| Friday | 12.8% |
| Saturday | 0.9% |
| Sunday | 1.0% |
Hingham publishes on 49 distinct days between 2026-05-20 and 2026-08-17, carrying 900 weekday permits. None of them is a Friday, and the window contains 13 of them. The most likely explanation is mundane - a clerk who batches the week's entries, or a system that stamps records on the day they are keyed rather than the day they are approved. It is still the clearest illustration in the dataset of why a permit date is a filing artifact.
The spread between towns is wider than the national pattern suggests. Boston files 18.3% of its permits on a Friday; Reading manages 2.7%.
| Source | Weekday permits | Friday permits | Friday share |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hingham | 900 | 0 | 0.0% |
| Reading | 220 | 6 | 2.7% |
| Bridgewater | 899 | 52 | 5.8% |
| Chatham | 261 | 17 | 6.5% |
| Norwell | 721 | 59 | 8.2% |
| Mansfield | 900 | 83 | 9.2% |
| Lexington | 1,148 | 121 | 10.5% |
| Sudbury | 273 | 29 | 10.6% |
| Milton | 900 | 100 | 11.1% |
| Fairhaven | 877 | 98 | 11.2% |
| Foxborough | 900 | 104 | 11.6% |
| Braintree | 869 | 103 | 11.9% |
| West Bridgewater | 429 | 51 | 11.9% |
| Plymouth | 2,485 | 296 | 11.9% |
| Cohasset | 710 | 85 | 12.0% |
| Worcester | 6,018 | 743 | 12.3% |
| Avon | 290 | 36 | 12.4% |
| Easton | 854 | 112 | 13.1% |
| Rockland | 743 | 99 | 13.3% |
| Sandwich | 843 | 113 | 13.4% |
| Taunton | 900 | 125 | 13.9% |
| Cambridge | 2,951 | 417 | 14.1% |
| Stoughton | 863 | 124 | 14.4% |
| Attleboro | 876 | 129 | 14.7% |
| Mashpee | 855 | 126 | 14.7% |
| Falmouth | 900 | 136 | 15.1% |
| Hanson | 481 | 73 | 15.2% |
| Amherst | 277 | 46 | 16.6% |
| Randolph | 861 | 146 | 17.0% |
| Barnstable | 881 | 152 | 17.3% |
| Boston | 5,572 | 1,017 | 18.3% |
If you work permit records as leads, the practical consequence is that a Friday pull is the thinnest of the week almost everywhere, and Monday and Tuesday carry the backlog. That is a scheduling fact about town halls, not about demand.
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How are Massachusetts building permits distributed across the days of the week, as published?
All 37,361 rows in the dataset that carry a parseable date. The per-source table shows every source with at least 100 weekday rows (31 of 31). The zero-Friday finding additionally requires a window spanning at least 6 calendar Fridays.
31 municipal sources.
None. Every source that publishes a date is included; sources below the row threshold are counted in the totals but not listed individually, because a percentage on a handful of rows is noise.
The date column is a published or recorded date, not a verified municipal issuance timestamp - 704 weekend-dated rows across 20 sources prove it. This article measures publication behaviour and should not be read as a claim about when work was approved.
Computed 2026-08-18 from a dataset fetched 2026-08-18. Download the figures behind this page (JSON).
They publish fewer. Friday carries 12.8% of dated records against roughly 22.2% on Tuesday, but the same dataset contains 704 weekend-dated permits, which shows the date column records when a permit was entered rather than when it was approved.
Hingham. Across 900 weekday permits published on 49 distinct days between 2026-05-20 and 2026-08-17, none is dated to a Friday, in a window containing 13 of them.
31 Massachusetts municipal sources publishing their own building-permit records, compiled by MassPermits. Every figure is recomputed from the live dataset each time the page is built, and the underlying numbers are downloadable.
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