The building permit process is a crucial aspect of the construction industry, as it ensures the safety and compliance of buildings with local regulations. A significant improvement in terms of accuracy, transparency and efficiency would be brought from digitalization, therefore several projects are being developed on the topic. However, to reach high maturity levels, it is necessary to address the several parts of building permit systems in a structured way, by considering the several subsystems composing the main issue thoroughly (e.g., legislative, organizational, technological, procedural). Therefore, this article proposes a taxonomy of building permit systems that can be the reference to guide and assess related developments across diverse countries, allowing their interpretation in a common framework. Different methodologies for taxonomy developments were applied in this study, including a combination of committee approaches and empirical methods, with a final validation against a use case. The obtained high-level taxonomy of building permit systems can serve as a basis for future improvements in the building permit digitalization and could be the basis for an extended ontology.