H1 2026Austin builds new, and will not tell you what it costs.
56% of Austin permits in the half are new construction — the highest new-build share of any market in this series, and roughly five times New York's. It is also the one market where we will not print a dollar headline: Austin states a construction cost on 7.0% of its permits, and the median stated value on those is $1. The permit count is solid. The money column is not, and we would rather say so than publish a number a demo cannot defend.
Steady volume, slightly down.
Between 2,100 and 2,900 permits a month across eighteen months, ending the half 2% below H1 2025. No value series is drawn for Austin: it would come from the 7% of permits that state a cost, and a chart of that would read as the city's construction spend when it is nothing of the kind.
Permits issued by month
2 signals inside the market
56% new construction, 40% existing buildings
8,352 of 14,915 classified permits are for new construction.
June 2026 led the half
2,847 permits issued in Jun against a monthly average of 2,486; the quietest month, February 2026, issued 2,162.
We would rather show you nothing than the wrong map.
236 Austin permits carry coordinates and not one of them lands in Austin. Our geocoder resolved these addresses against an Ontario context, so they plot in southern Ontario instead — a bug on our side, not a gap in the city's data. We check every coordinate against the bounding box of the city it claims to be in, which is why this section is empty rather than showing you a map of the wrong place.
Re-geocoding is queued. Every other number on this page reads from the permit record itself and is unaffected — the map is the only section that depends on coordinates.
The permit list is a trade contractor list.
IES Residential, Victory Plumbing, In Charge Electrical, Landmark Electric, Mustang Plumbing. These are the electrical and plumbing subs pulling their own permits at production-homebuilder volume — a direct read on who is already awarded across the new-build market.
Top 10 applicants of record
| # | Applicant of record | Permits | Screened value |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | IES Residential Inc | 601 | n/a |
| 2 | Victory Plumbing Company | 457 | n/a |
| 3 | In Charge Electrical Services, LLC | 238 | n/a |
| 4 | Landmark Electric | 202 | n/a |
| 5 | Mustang Plumbing | 192 | n/a |
| 6 | Casa Mechanical Services | 162 | n/a |
| 7 | Protex Plumbing & Mechanical, LP | 162 | n/a |
| 8 | Christianson Plumbing | 155 | n/a |
| 9 | AEI Electric LLC | 135 | n/a |
| 10 | Airtron | 121 | n/a |
| 11 | Airco Mechanical | 118 | n/a |
| 12 | Harvey-Cleary Builders ***MAIN*** | 116 | $1M |
| 13 | LED ES Electric | 111 | n/a |
| 14 | Milestone Community Builders, LLC(MAIN) | 92 | n/a |
| 15 | Protex Plumbing and Mechanical | 92 | n/a |
| 16 | Loredos Plumbing | 88 | n/a |
| 17 | Airco Mechanical LTD | 73 | n/a |
| 18 | JRV Construction | 71 | n/a |
| 19 | Paradisa Homes, LLC***MAIN*** | 70 | n/a |
| 20 | Novo Construction **Main** | 64 | $19M |
The most new construction on this list.
56% of classified permits are for new construction — the highest ratio of new to existing on this list.
Work category
- New construction8,352 56%
- Renovation / alteration5,983 40%
- Demolition580 4%
Permit type as the city files it
Permit type table
| Type | Permits | Value |
|---|---|---|
| New | 8,352 | n/a |
| Remodel | 3,890 | n/a |
| Addition and Remodel | 2,093 | n/a |
| Demolition | 580 | n/a |
The ten largest stated jobs of the half.
Ranked by the construction cost stated on the permit, after the value screen described in the methodology. These are single permits, not whole developments — a tower can appear as several. Because only 7% of Austin permits state a cost, this is a ranking of the permits that did, not of the market.
The ten largest permits of the half
| # | Work | Applicant | Stated cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Eplan: expedited review - new construction of parking garage.62 EAST AVE UNIT GAR1 | Summit Design Build | $154.0M |
| 2 | Construction of a new 3-story building to include science labs and cte spaces additional parking and landscape pupr25600 SUNSHINE DR BLDG J | Adolfson & Peterson Construction | $35.6M |
| 3 | Eplan: commercial expedited review - [smart housing] new construction of multi family building for supportive housing…1326 LAMAR SQUARE DR | Bailey Elliott Construction, Inc. D/B/A BEC Austin | $32.5M |
| 4 | Eplan: expedited review - new construction of dumpster enclosure for multi-family mixed use complex (189 sf)6311 S 1ST ST UNIT DP | Marcus Building Company | $32.0M |
| 5 | Eplan: commercial expedited review - [public project] new construction of elementary school. building a consists of adm…6801 NORTHEAST DR BLDG A | Rogers-O'Brien Construction | $25.0M |
| 6 | Phase a of interior renovation to existing industrial facility for photo metal & etch chemical storage and imp areas wi…3733 DROSSETT DR | Braintec USA, Inc. | $23.9M |
| 7 | Phase b of interior renovation to existing industrial facility cu area with added new exterior equipment including wet…3733 DROSSETT DR | Braintec USA, Inc. | $23.9M |
| 8 | Eplan: commercial expedited review - new construction of genset with enclosure.3505 MONTOPOLIS DR BLDG GEN | ZAPALAC/REED CONSTRUCTION CO., LP | $22.0M |
| 9 | Eplan: commercial expedited review - new construction of 4 story admin office building (56903 sf).3505 MONTOPOLIS DR BLDG J | ZAPALAC/REED CONSTRUCTION CO., LP | $22.0M |
| 10 | Eplan: commercial expedited review - new dumpster enclosure and irrigation cistern.3505 MONTOPOLIS DR BLDG DP | ZAPALAC/REED CONSTRUCTION CO., LP | $22.0M |
The same half, in every market Builtie tracks.
Permit counts are directly comparable. Dollar figures are not fully comparable across borders and jurisdictions — each city defines "construction value" its own way, and the coverage column shows how many of its permits state one at all. A market is marked withheld where that share is too low to stand behind.
Permits issued, H1 2026
| Market | Permits | YoY | Screened value | Avg per costed permit | Cost coverage |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| New York | 53,624 | n/a | $17.14B | $376K | 85% |
| Miami | 20,481 | +0% | $9.88B | $495K | 97.4% |
| Toronto | 15,118 | +67% | $5.94B | $1.1M | 34.6% |
| Austinthis report | 14,915 | -2% | withheld | n/a | 7% |
| Calgary | 9,603 | -14% | $2.93B | $333K | 91.6% |
| Nashville | 4,287 | -1% | $1.69B | $394K | 100% |
| Chicago | 3,667 | -1% | $4.88B | $1.3M | 100% |
| Seattle | 3,011 | -1% | $1.80B | $604K | 99.1% |
| Hamilton | 2,337 | -7% | $897M | $405K | 94.7% |
| Vancouver | 2,036 | -9% | $3.11B | $1.6M | 98.2% |
What is behind every number above.
A report is only worth the disclosure attached to it. This is the whole of it.
How the figures are built
- Source
- Austin's own published building-permit record, ingested into the Builtie platform and read live from it. No third-party estimate is mixed in.
- Period
- Permits issued between January 1, 2026 and June 30, 2026. Applications and cancellations are excluded.
- Declared value
- The construction cost stated by the applicant on the permit. It is not a contract value, and it excludes land and soft costs. 1,037 of 14,915 permits (7%) state one; the rest contribute to the count and not to the value.
- The value screen
- Two classes of bad value are removed before any total: any single permit at or above
$1,000,000,000, and any value at or above$10,000,000that repeats on five or more permits in the same city — a parent project total stamped onto its sub-permits, which would otherwise be counted once per sub-permit. 93 Austin permits were screened out this half. A percentile trim was tested and rejected: it cannot tell a corrupt value from a genuine large tower. - Rounding
- Values are rounded to the nearest million before display; shares are rounded to the nearest whole per cent, so columns may not sum to exactly 100.
What this page does not tell you
- No approval timeline
- This feed sets the application date equal to the issue date on every row, so we cannot say how long Austin takes to approve a permit. The field is 100% populated, which is exactly why it is easy to mistake for real: it is a placeholder, and a "same-day approval" chart drawn from it would be a fabrication. The GTA report carries this section because Toronto publishes a genuine application date.
- No density map
- 236 permits carry coordinates and every one of them falls outside Austin — our geocoder resolved the addresses against the wrong region. Coordinates are validated against each city's bounding box before anything is plotted, so the section is withheld rather than wrong. Re-geocoding is queued.