Census Building Permits Survey

Monthly figures run from January 2020, annual figures from 2013, in both cases through the most recent release.

"Most recent release" is not the same as today. The Census Bureau publishes on a lag, and the newest periods are revised as late reports arrive. We load the latest data the Bureau has published at the time of our refresh, so the end of any series trails the present date by some months and the final period or two may still move.

The Bureau publishes permits for counties, metro areas, and individual permit-issuing places. None of these are census tracts, which is the grain Birdseye displays.

Where a tract has no directly published value, it takes the value of the smallest published geography containing it. This carries a real limitation: permit activity is not evenly spread within a county or a city, and we do not estimate how it is distributed. See how we combine geographies.

The Bureau retired its legacy metro series at the end of 2023 and began publishing on current CBSA definitions in January 2024. We load both and present them as one series, so metro-level comparisons spanning that boundary cross a definitional change. County and place series are unaffected.

A permit is not a housing unit. Permits can expire unbuilt, and the lag between permit and completion varies by market. Read permit counts as intent rather than delivered supply.

Coverage follows permit-issuing jurisdictions, so areas without a local permit office are represented only at the county level.

Birdseye figures derived from this source are our own estimates. Per Census Bureau guidance, the Bureau is cited as the source of the original data only, and is not responsible for our calculations.