vs Last Month
+0.022M
Tiny uptick. Small monthly noise is normal.
Leading Housing Indicator · SAAR
Today's Building Permits
1.485
M
+0.022M
vs. last month (0.000M)
Past 12 months
1.380 – 1.580
vs Last Year-0.085
5-Yr Avg1.510M
2006 Peak2.419M
Permits ticked up to 1.485M annualized — a hint of life in single-family construction even with mortgages still at 6.78%. Watch this number for the first signal a housing recovery is real, before starts and sales follow.
Historical trend
Monthly seasonally-adjusted annual rate.
Source: FRED · PERMIT
The long view: since 1972
Five decades of permits — every recession leaves a clear scar.
Peak 2.419M · Jan 2006
Trough 0.513M · Mar 2009
Today 1.485M · May 17, 2026
How today stacks up
vs Last Year
−0.085M
Still soft year-over-year — high rates restrain building.
5-Year Average
1.510M
Today is 25K below the 5-yr average.
All-Time Range
0.51–2.42M
Today sits in the middle third of the 50-year range.
Use this number
Tools for planning home decisions.
About Building Permits
Building permits authorize the construction of new privately-owned housing units in the United States. The Census Bureau collects permit data from about 20,000 local jurisdictions monthly and publishes the seasonally-adjusted annual rate (SAAR) — meaning today's 1.485 million reading means the current monthly pace, if it held for a full year, would produce 1.485 million new authorized housing units. Permits are a leading housing indicator: they precede actual housing starts by 30–90 days and finished homes by 6–12 months, so a slowdown in permits today shows up as a construction lull next year.
Why this matters beyond housing
Building permits are one of the ten components in the Conference Board's Leading Economic Index because they capture early decisions made by builders, banks, and developers about future demand. A persistent decline in permits — like we saw in late 2022 through mid-2023 — typically signals that rate-sensitive sectors are slowing first, before the broader economy. Recovery in permits historically precedes turns in housing starts, new home sales, and eventually GDP.
Reading today's number
Permits running at 1.485M annualized is below the pre-pandemic norm (2019: ~1.33M) but recovered from the 2022–23 trough. The post-pandemic peak hit 1.88M in December 2021 when mortgage rates were 3% and homebuilders were sprinting to meet pent-up demand. Today's level reflects the cooling effect of 6%+ mortgage rates: builders are being more cautious about pulling permits than they were three years ago, but not retreating to recession-style lows.
Related trackers
Other live numbers that move with — or against — this one.
Frequently asked
What this number means, and what it doesn't.
A permit is the legal authorization to build. A start is when crews actually break ground (foundation poured). Permits lead starts by 30–90 days on average. Not every permit results in a start — about 5–8% are abandoned or delayed indefinitely, especially during rate-shock periods like 2022–23.
Raw permit counts swing dramatically with weather and seasons — homebuilding falls in winter, peaks in spring. SAAR strips out that seasonality and annualizes the monthly pace, so trends are comparable across months. A 1.485M SAAR reading means the current pace would produce 1.485M permits over 12 months at this rate.
The Census Bureau releases the "New Residential Construction" report around the 17th–20th of each month at 8:30 AM ET, covering the previous month's data. The report includes permits, starts, and completions in one release. The exact schedule is published a year in advance at census.gov.
Yes — both the prior month and the year-ago month are typically revised when each new release comes out, sometimes by 5–10%. Permit numbers tend to be revised UP as late-arriving local reports get incorporated. Treat any single month's print as preliminary; the three-month moving average is more reliable.
Permits peaked at 2.419M annualized in January 2006 at the height of the housing bubble. Today's 1.485M is about 60% of that peak — and given how much demographic and structural housing demand has shifted since 2006, today's pace is widely considered closer to "normal" while 2006 looks in hindsight like a clear bubble signal.
Methodology
Source
Pulled from FRED · PERMIT and cached on the EvvyTools server.
Update schedule
Refreshed automatically by our cron whenever the upstream source publishes a new value. Historical values are not revised after publication.
How we compute
Display value is the raw published number, unrounded. Comparison stats use the closest available reference date. We never edit the underlying data.