Six months. 15,118 permits. $5.9B in declared construction value. And underneath it: who is building, who is designing, which shows draw them out, and where the next wave breaks. Know the projects. Reach the decision makers.
Toronto kept building through the slowdown narrative.
Monthly permit issuance more than tripled from early 2024 (around 826 a month) to 2026 (regularly past 2,500 a month). On a clean quarter-over-quarter basis, Q1 2026 issued 6,999 permits against 3,930 in Q1 2025, a 78% jump, with declared value up 114% to $3.40B. H1 2026 as a whole closed at 15,118 permits and $5.9B in declared value, up 66% and 60% year-over-year versus H1 2025 (9,087 permits, $3.70B).
Permits issued and declared construction value
A handful of permits carry the market
New-building (BLD) permits were just 1,504 of H1 volume yet accounted for $2.39B, roughly 92% of all declared value. The thousands of smaller permits are noise on the dollar line.
One node, $808M
The Yonge and St. Clair pocket logged just 38 permits but $808M of declared value in H1, the fingerprint of a single mega-development moving through approvals.
3,612 new homes, mostly mid-rise
February and March alone created 3,201 dwelling units. Unit creation clusters in transit-served corridors, not the luxury single-family pockets that dominate the dollar charts.
The capital map is a Yonge Street story.
Filtered to H1 permits with a resolved neighbourhood, declared value concentrates hard along the Yonge spine: St. Clair, the Bay corridor, Eglinton. A further $833M sits in permits not yet geo-tagged, an enrichment gap we quantify in the data section.
The build map: all 158 neighbourhoods, live
Every Toronto neighbourhood shaded by mapped construction activity, brighter lime means busier. Toggle between project count and declared value, and hover any area for its numbers.
Top neighbourhoods by declared value
What the geography tells a trade
Two completely different markets are hiding in one city. The value map (St. Clair, Bay, Eglinton) is high-rise: long timelines, large GCs, consultant-heavy teams. The volume map (Annex, Rosedale, Banbury, Stonegate) is renovation and infill: shorter cycles, owner or small-builder decision makers, faster yes.
A cabinetry or HVAC trade should not chase the same postal codes as a structural or curtain-wall specialist. Builtie segments both so a rep works the corridor that actually buys their scope.
Who actually moves the GTA.
Ranked by total declared construction value across the tracked permit history. Public infrastructure (Metrolinx, TTC, the city agencies) sits at the very top by sheer dollars, but the names a trade dreams of working with are the private residential developers right beneath them, and every one is reachable in Builtie with a website, LinkedIn, and contact.
Top 12 builders by declared construction value
The full leaderboard
| # | Builder / Developer | Type | Declared value | Permits | Projects | Res % | Reachable |
|---|
The firms that draw the city before it is built.
Ranked by distinct projects each firm appears on across the tracked development record. Architects and design consultants are the upstream signal: they are on a project years before a trade is awarded, which makes them the earliest reachable relationship in the entire chain.
Architecture firms
| # | Firm | Projects | Reach |
|---|
Interior design firms
| # | Firm | Projects | Reach |
|---|
Landscape architecture
| # | Firm | Projects | Reach |
|---|
Engineering & performance consultants
| # | Firm | Projects | Reach |
|---|
Rankings tell you who is big. This tells you who they hire, and whether the seat is taken.
Every major GTA builder, scored by how concentrated their consultant and trade choices are. "Locked" means one firm owns most of the work. "Spreads" means the account is winnable.
| Builder | Role | Their firm | Share | Projects |
|---|
Every booth is a company spending money to be found.
A firm that pays for an exhibition stand is a firm in growth mode, telling the market it is open for business. Builtie proved the model on the Toronto Home Show: the full exhibitor list was captured and matched to live company records, decision-makers and ad activity. The result is a ready-made, high-intent outreach cohort pulled from a single event.
The exhibitor funnel
From a raw exhibitor list to an outreach-ready cohort, in one pass.
The GTA event calendar to scale into
Two events are captured. These are the next targets. Ingesting each exhibitor list and scoring it the same way turns the whole calendar into a pipeline.
What is coming, and how tall.
Beyond permits, Builtie tracks 5,774 named GTA developments and their construction status. The pipeline is heavily front-loaded: 3,440 projects sit in pre-construction and 668 are actively under construction. That is more than 4,100 live or imminent projects, each one a team of trades waiting to be mapped.
Development pipeline by status
Pipeline at a glance
3,440 pre-construction projects are the leading indicator: design teams locked, trades not yet awarded. This is the prospecting frontier.
668 under construction are live job sites today, the window for material, finishing and late-trade scopes.
Only 111 projects are cancelled or on hold, under 2% of the record. The GTA pipeline is not stalling, it is stacking.
The skyline in the pipeline
The tallest towers currently pre-construction or under construction, by storeys. Each carries a full known project team in Builtie, from developer down to consultants.
Toronto is approving faster.
The median permit now issues in a month, and the worst-case wait has halved since 2024.
Median days by year
The slow 10% now clears in
The job sites of September are already in the queue.
At the current 30-day median, most of this issues in H2. These are the job sites of September.
You're in.
Unlocking the full H1 2026 report…