Philadelphia publishes an enormous amount about itself — who's paid what, who owns what, what's being built, and what's gone wrong. Almost none of it is published as an answer. This guide maps what's actually public, where each category lives, how it's regulated, and how ALKARTIS turns it into something you can use.
"Public record" covers more than most people assume. In Philadelphia, it includes six broad categories that between them touch nearly every civic question a resident, journalist, or official might ask:
Payroll records — every city employee's title, department, and salary, published through OpenDataPhilly and updated as new pay periods are recorded. Property assessment records — the Office of Property Assessment's valuation of every parcel in the city, along with recent comparable sales. Permits and licenses — Licenses & Inspections (L&I) building permits, business licenses, and code violations, both active and historical. 311 service requests — resident-filed reports on everything from potholes to illegal dumping. Housing court filings — public eviction filings and rental licensing status. And market and neighborhood data — comparable sales, walkability, transit, and school information, published across several separate systems.
Each of these is genuinely public — free to look up, and, for most categories, not something you need to file a formal request for. Update frequency is not uniform across them, though: payroll and assessment data typically refresh on a set cycle tied to the city's budget and reassessment calendar, while permits, violations, and 311 requests are closer to continuously updated as departments process them. That difference matters if you're comparing a number you pulled today against one from a report published months ago — they may not reflect the same underlying snapshot.
The legal foundation underneath most of this is Pennsylvania's Right-to-Know Law, which presumes government records are public unless a specific exemption applies. In practice, that presumption plays out in two very different ways depending on the category. Categories like payroll, property assessments, and most permit and violation data are published proactively — the relevant department posts them on a recurring basis, and no individual request is required to see them. Other records — internal communications, certain investigative files, or anything not already part of a proactive publication — may require filing a formal Right-to-Know request directly with the holding agency, which then has a statutory window to respond.
The practical implication for most of the questions in this guide: if you're asking about salaries, assessments, permits, violations, or service requests, you're almost certainly looking at data that's already published somewhere — the challenge is locating and interpreting it, not obtaining legal access to it in the first place.
A payroll export tells you a title and a number. It doesn't tell you whether that number is unusual for the role, whether it's grown faster than peers, or whether it's part of a pattern worth asking about. A permit filing tells you an address and a project type — not whether it's one of a hundred similar filings on the same block this quarter, which is usually the more interesting fact. A single assessment notice tells you what the city thinks your property is worth — not whether three nearly identical homes on the same block were assessed twenty percent apart, which is the fact that actually determines whether an appeal is worth filing.
This is the gap between a record and an understanding of it. Philadelphia meets its transparency obligations the moment a file is posted; whether anyone can actually use that file is a separate question entirely, and one the raw export was never built to answer. Closing that gap generally means three things: cross-referencing multiple datasets that weren't designed to be joined (permits and assessments rarely share a common identifier), establishing a baseline or peer comparison so a single number has context, and tracing every figure back to the specific record it came from so the answer can actually be checked rather than taken on faith.
Below are the four categories ALKARTIS connects into working products today, each with the records behind it and where to read more.
Every city employee's title, department, and pay, tracked quarter by quarter since 2016.
Product: CompensationAtlas
Read: Who Got the Biggest Raise in City Hall, Philadelphia City Salaries Guide, Police & Fire Overtime Spending
Live assessment records and comparable sales, flagged for likely over-assessment.
Product: TaxAssessmentIQ
Read: Rate vs. Reality, How to Appeal Your Property Tax Assessment
A landlord's full public record — violations, licensing status, and eviction filings, in one place.
Product: LandlordEye
Read: Philadelphia Tenant Rights & Landlord Violations
Construction and permit activity, tracked by area — where investment is accelerating or slowing.
Product: BuildSignal
Read: Permits as a Leading Indicator
Every category above is technically available without ALKARTIS — through OpenDataPhilly, the Office of Property Assessment, and L&I's own systems. What that route costs you is time: cleaning inconsistent formats, matching addresses across systems that don't share an identifier, and knowing which department-specific code means what. For a practical, step-by-step walkthrough of doing this yourself, see Open Data 101: How to Actually Find and Use Philadelphia's Public Records. For what ALKARTIS does instead, see Data & Sources.
Rather than publishing a portal that mirrors the city's own — one more place to browse the same raw rows — each ALKARTIS product starts from a specific question people actually ask, and works backward to the records that answer it. CompensationAtlas doesn't just show payroll; it shows whether a raise is unusual for the role. TaxAssessmentIQ doesn't just show an assessment; it flags whether that assessment is likely over-valued relative to comparable homes, and drafts the appeal packet if so. LandlordEye doesn't just show violations; it connects them to the owner across every property they hold, including ones filed under a different LLC.
That connective step — joining records that were never designed to be joined, and showing the specific source behind every figure so it can be checked — is what we mean by Information Intelligence. It's the same underlying engine behind every product in this guide, described in more depth in The Intelligence Framework.
Yes. Records like payroll, property assessments, permits, violations, and 311 requests are published through the city's open data channels and are free to look up. The cost isn't access — it's the time it takes to clean, cross-reference, and interpret raw exports.
It's the state law establishing that most government records are presumed public and requestable. Many categories — payroll, permits, assessments — are published proactively and don't require a formal request at all; others may need one filed with the relevant agency.
It varies by dataset and department — some feeds refresh continuously, others on a quarterly or as-published basis. ALKARTIS products note the refresh cadence and source directly on the relevant product page.
No — this guide is written for anyone trying to answer a real question, not for people who want to write their own queries against raw city exports. Where a raw-data approach is genuinely useful, we link to it.