Monthly index · US Census Building Permits Survey · year to date through July 2026

Flat on top, falling underneath

American residential building permits are almost exactly level with last year — 852,234 units against 852,819, a change of +0.1%. That number is a composite of two opposite movements, and it is the only one most people will read. Three of the four categories the Census Bureau counts fell. The one that rose is apartment buildings.

Houses against apartments

Three of the four categories fell. The fourth cancelled them.

Change in permitted units by structure size, year to date through July, 2025 against 2026. Source: US Census Bureau, Building Permits Survey.

Single-family permits are −3.2%, from 565,344 to 547,278 units. Two-unit buildings are −5%; three- and four-unit buildings −7.1%. Only buildings of five units or more — the multifamily category — rose, by +8.1%: 20,501 additional units, which is more than enough to offset the 18,066 houses that were not permitted this year.

Single-family permits by county

Half of US counties are building fewer houses than last year

Across the 567 counties large enough to measure reliably, 285 — 50% — permitted fewer single-family homes than in the same months of 2025. This is not concentrated in one region: those counties sit across 50 states.

When the headline misleads

In 72 counties, "permits are up" means houses are down

290 of those counties permitted more housing units this year than last. In 72 of them — 25% — single-family permits fell at the same time. In those places a true statement about the local permit total carries the opposite implication about the house market.

The 12 largest counties by permit volume where the total rose and single-family fell. Full list in the CSV below.

Your county

Look up any of the 567 counties

Where houses fell hardest

Counties permitting at least 250 houses in 2025, ranked by the change in single-family permits. Smaller counties are left out because a handful of houses there swings the percentage wildly.

Where houses rose most

The same counties, ranked the other way.

How this was counted

The Census Bureau's Building Permits Survey publishes residential permits for every US county each month. This compares the year-to-date file through July 2026 against the file for the same months of 2025, so the two cover identical calendar windows. Both files are linked at the foot of this page.

3,020 counties appear in the Census file and 567 of them are shown here. If yours is missing, it is for one of two reasons.

It is too small for a percentage to mean anything. 2,141 counties permitted fewer than 100 units in one of the two years. Where a county permitted eleven houses, a single subdivision is a ninety-percent swing.

Too much of the number is estimated. The Census Bureau imputes permit counts for offices that do not report, and the file marks which units were actually reported. In 312 counties fewer than 80% of the units were reported by an actual permit office, so they are left out. In some the figure is entirely modelled — hundreds of units on file for a county where no office reported anything. That is an estimate of a county rather than a record of it.

What the numbers don’t show

Permits are not completions. A permit is an intention to build, filed at the start. Some of these units will not be finished, and the ones that are will be finished across several years.

Units are not buildings. The apartment figures count units, so a single approval can move a county by hundreds. The house figures count buildings and units together, because a single-family permit is one of each.

This is a count, not an explanation. Interest rates, land cost, local zoning changes, labour, insurance and disaster rebuilding all plausibly contribute to any county's movement, and nothing here separates them. Where a county's figure looks dramatic, the cause is usually local and specific, and finding it means reading that county's own records.

These figures are revised. The Census Bureau updates earlier months as late reports arrive, so a county's number can shift slightly between one month and the next.

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