H1 2026Fewer permits. Much bigger jobs.
Chicago issued 1% fewer permits than last year and 74% more screened construction value — $4.88B against $2.81B. Its average stated permit is $1.33M, second only to Vancouver in this series. And 1,783 of its 3,667 permits, 49%, are filed by a named individual rather than a firm: Chicago is simultaneously a big-project market and a homeowner market, with very little in between.
The value line pulled away from the count.
Permit volume tracks last year almost exactly. Value does not: March and April 2026 each cleared $1B against roughly $400M in the same months of 2025. That gap is the whole story of the half.
Permits issued by month
3 signals inside the market
Ten permits carry 53% of the half's value
10 permits out of 3,667 account for $2.57B of $4.88B in screened declared value. The thousands of smaller permits are volume, not dollars.
$730.0M on one filing
Dds 2019 cbc: full building permit for the superstructure, enclosure, and interior fit out of satellite 1 con… — 10000 W Ohare St. Issued February 25, 2026.
19% new construction, 72% existing buildings
698 new-building permits carry 51% of declared value. New builds are a minority of the filings and a majority of the money.
We would rather show you nothing than the wrong map.
1,856 Chicago permits carry coordinates and not one of them lands in Chicago. 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.
Half of Chicago's permits are pulled by a person.
The firm table below is thin on purpose — once individual filers are set aside, Chicago's named applicants are mostly the city's own demolition department and event contractors. The signal here is the split itself: 1,783 permits with a homeowner on the form, and a value line driven by a small number of very large jobs that the applicant field does not name.
Top 10 applicants of record
| # | Applicant of record | Permits | Screened value |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | ALLIANCE DEMOLITION AND EXCAVATION SERVICES INC | 49 | $2M |
| 2 | VIEWPOINT SERVICES INC DBA BROPHY EXCAVATION | 41 | $1M |
| 3 | EXECUTIVE CONSTRUCTION , INC. | 38 | $61M |
| 4 | FRACKIEL BUILDERS, INCORPORATED | 38 | $1M |
| 5 | SKENDER CONSTRUCTION LLC | 34 | $116M |
| 6 | JC ANDERSON INC | 29 | $26M |
| 7 | MCDONAGH DEMOLITION, INC | 27 | $3M |
| 8 | POWER CONSTRUCTION COMPANY, LLC | 27 | $221M |
| 9 | BUILDER LUXURY INC | 26 | $1M |
| 10 | MK CONSTRUCTION & BUILDERS, INC. | 25 | $8M |
| 11 | DEVELOPMENT SOLUTIONS, INC | 24 | $20M |
| 12 | BEAR CONSTRUCTION COMPANY | 22 | $22M |
| 13 | CLUNE CONSTRUCTION COMPANY, L.P. | 22 | $28M |
| 14 | BULLEY & ANDREWS, L.L.C. | 21 | $111M |
| 15 | ALL-BRY CONSTRUCTION COMPANY | 19 | $20M |
| 16 | CHICAGO ROOF DECK & GARDEN, LLC | 19 | $1M |
| 17 | ALL CONCRETE CONTRACTORS INC | 18 | n/a |
| 18 | ANM MECHANICAL SERVICES LLC | 17 | $4M |
| 19 | BIG CONSTRUCTION LLC | 17 | $24M |
| 20 | REDMOND CONSTRUCTION CORP. | 17 | $27M |
Seven in ten renovation.
72% of classified permits touch a building that already stands; new construction is 19%. New builds carry 51% of the declared value.
Work category
- New construction698 19%$2.51B
- Renovation / alteration2,645 72%$2.35B
- Demolition324 9%$25M
Permit type as the city files it
Permit type table
| Type | Permits | Value |
|---|---|---|
| PERMIT - RENOVATION/ALTERATION | 2,645 | $2.35B |
| PERMIT - NEW CONSTRUCTION | 698 | $2.51B |
| PERMIT - WRECKING/DEMOLITION | 324 | $25M |
The ten largest 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.
The ten largest permits of the half
| # | Work | Applicant | Stated cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Dds 2019 cbc: full building permit for the superstructure, enclosure, and interior fit out of satellite 1 concourse ter…10000 W OHARE ST | HUNT CONSTRUCTION GROUP INC | $730.0M |
| 2 | Dds 2019 cbc: interior buildout of new 7-story casino, parking, and event center building and 34-story hotel tower. cai…705 W CHICAGO AVE | BALLYS CHICAGO OPERATING COMPANY, LLC | $580.0M |
| 3 | Work is to include construction of an elevated transit station on the loop elevated line at state street and lake stree…200 N STATE ST | F.H. PASCHEN, S.N. NIELSEN & ASSOCIATES, LLC. | $445.0M |
| 4 | Ds 2019 cbrc: revision to full building permit 101056000 for the renovation of existing space and addition of approxima…10000 W OHARE AIRPORT | CLARK - W.E. O'NEIL JV | $250.0M |
| 5 | Dds 2019 cbc: full building permit for the confined spaces portions of consolidated tunnel between future ohare global…10000 W OHARE ST | HUNT CONSTRUCTION GROUP INC | $220.0M |
| 6 | Dds 2019 cbc: superstructure only permit for a proposed 4-story stadium with no basement on piles. piles only permit un…1331 S WELLS ST | PEPPER CONSTRUCTION COMPANY | $102.0M |
| 7 | Dds 2019 cbc. new construction for a one story 73,485 sf storage facility, containing a storage (s-1) classification wi…4443 S WESTERN BLVD | ARCO/MURRAY NATIONAL CONSTRUCTION COMPANY LLC | $92.4M |
| 8 | Dds 2019 cbrc: interior alterations to levels b2, b1, l1, and l2 for building shared amenity space. work to include sel…100 W RANDOLPH ST | SKENDER CONSTRUCTION LLC | $50.1M |
| 9 | Dds 2019 cbrc: interior and exterior alterations to existing 17 story office building to convert it to a mixed-use buil…19 S LA SALLE ST | POWER CONSTRUCTION COMPANY, LLC | $50.0M |
| 10 | Direct developer services 2019 cbc. full building permit: mixed-use commercial 3 story building addition to united cent…1901 W MADISON ST | JAMES MCHUGH CONSTRUCTION CO | $50.0M |
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% |
| Austin | 14,915 | -2% | withheld | n/a | 7% |
| Calgary | 9,603 | -14% | $2.93B | $333K | 91.6% |
| Nashville | 4,287 | -1% | $1.69B | $394K | 100% |
| Chicagothis report | 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
- Chicago'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 2, 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. Every permit in this market states one.
- 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. 5 Chicago 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 Chicago 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
- 1,856 permits carry coordinates and every one of them falls outside Chicago — 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.