Building Permits

Building Permits are the permits section of the monthly New Residential Construction release from the Census Bureau and HUD, the housing department, published since 1959. They count new privately owned housing units authorized by permit offices, not homes under construction or completed homes. The Building Permits Survey covers about 19,900 permit places and collects reports from about 8,400 of them, or over 99% of private building. It excludes public housing, areas needing no permit, group quarters such as dormitories, and treats permit valuation as unreliable for true building cost.

Each release covers permits authorized during the prior calendar month, as offices report at the start of each month by mail, phone, fax, or online. Preliminary data arrive on the 12th workday after the survey month at 8:30 a.m. Eastern, with national and regional totals alongside starts and completions. Revised data follow on the 17th workday at 8:00 a.m. with state, metro, county, and place data, with final annual totals once a year. A move counts as real only when its 90% confidence interval, the estimated error range, excludes zero, and trends need about 3 months for permits.

The headline breaks down by structure type, from single family houses to large multifamily buildings, plus permit valuation and local detail.

• 1-unit structures: single family houses, attached and detached combined, forming the core of the headline.
• 2-unit structures: buildings with 2 units, a small slice folded into the national 2 to 4 unit total.
• 3- and 4-unit structures: buildings with 3 or 4 units, grouped with 2-unit buildings for the national 2 to 4 unit total.
• 5-or-more-unit structures: multifamily buildings, counted both as units and as separate building totals.
• Valuation: total permit valuation by structure type, flagged as unreliable for comparing true construction costs.
• Geography: state figures adding up to census divisions, census regions, and the nation, with metro, county, and place detail in revised releases.

April 2020 (released May 19, 2020) showed permits falling first in the COVID-19 collapse, with units at a pace of 1,074,000 after seasonal adjustment. That was 20.8% (±0.9%) below March 2020 and 19.2% (±0.9%) below April 2019, with single family down 24.3% to 669,000 and 5-or-more-unit buildings at 373,000. Starts fell further to 891,000, down 30.2%, while completions barely moved at 1,176,000, down 8.1% within a range containing zero. The episode teaches the pipeline order: permits react first, starts follow harder, and completions lag because they reflect work started months earlier.

1. Collect: Monthly reports of units, buildings, and valuation by structure type arrive from about 8,400 permit offices, plus survey field teams and purchased commercial data.
2. Edit: Checks flag odd unit counts, units per building, and cost per unit or building, using limits set by region and metro status.
3. Item imputation: When an office reports at least 2 of units, buildings, and valuation, the missing item is filled from relationships updated yearly.
4. Unit imputation: Offices missing the month get estimates equal to their prior year data times a cell factor built from current reporters. For example, a place with 600 prior year units and a factor of 0.06 contributes 36 imputed units.
5. Valuation: Place type value equals its monthly units times its prior year average value per unit, so a 36 unit place at $250,000 totals $9,000,000.
6. Aggregate: State data add up to census divisions, census regions, and the nation, covering all places since January 2022, so sampling error cannot be measured. Other errors, such as late or wrong reports, can still occur.
7. Seasonal adjustment: Monthly patterns are removed with X-13ARIMA-SEATS software, re-estimated monthly, and the seasonally adjusted annual rate equals the adjusted month times 12. For example, 115,000 adjusted units scale to 1,380,000 annually, and national and regional months are later revised to annual totals.