H1 2026The most expensive median permit on this list.
Seattle's median permit states $139,508 — higher than Nashville, Chicago, Vancouver, Calgary or New York. Volume is flat at 3,011 and screened value is up 27% to $1.80B. Seattle does fewer, larger, better-documented jobs: 99.1% of its permits state a construction cost.
Flat count, stronger value.
Monthly volume sits between 350 and 620 in both years with no trend. The value line runs consistently above 2025 from February onward.
Permits issued by month
3 signals inside the market
Ten permits carry 36% of the half's value
10 permits out of 3,011 account for $652.8M of $1.80B in screened declared value. The thousands of smaller permits are volume, not dollars.
$127.6M on one filing
Demolish institutional building [uw chemistry library] per plan. — 3923 Okanogan Ln Ne. Issued June 24, 2026.
24% new construction, 68% existing buildings
715 new-building permits carry 27% of declared value. Value tracks volume here; the work is spread across many mid-sized jobs.
We would rather show you nothing than the wrong map.
1,633 Seattle permits carry coordinates and not one of them lands in Seattle. 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.
We will not rank this market on 2.2% of it.
Only 2.2% of Seattle permits name an applicant — 65 of 3,011. A leaderboard built on that would rank whoever happens to have been recorded, not whoever is busiest.
Builtie resolves the firms behind a project from company and decision-maker records rather than from the permit form alone, so this gap constrains this page — not the platform. Ask for live sample projects in this market and you will see named companies against them.
A quarter new, two thirds alteration.
68% of classified permits touch a building that already stands; new construction is 24%. New builds carry 27% of the declared value.
Work category
- New construction715 24%$488M
- Renovation / alteration2,060 68%$557M
- Demolition236 8%$759M
Permit type as the city files it
Permit type table
| Type | Permits | Value |
|---|---|---|
| Building / Addition/Alteration | 1,990 | $493M |
| Building / New | 715 | $488M |
| Demolition / Demolition | 159 | $633M |
| Demolition | 73 | $124M |
| Building / Tenant Improvment | 70 | $64M |
| Demolition / Deconstruction | 4 | $2M |
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 | Demolish institutional building [uw chemistry library] per plan.3923 OKANOGAN LN NE | — | $127.6M |
| 2 | Demolish northern portable classroom accessory to aki kurose middle school per plan.3928 S GRAHAM ST | — | $100.0M |
| 3 | Demolish southern portable classroom accessory to aki kurose middle school per plan.3928 S GRAHAM ST | — | $100.0M |
| 4 | Phased project: construct mixed-use apartment building with below-grade parking occupy per plan. mechanical included wi…1740 NW MARKET ST | — | $52.6M |
| 5 | Demolish existing commercial building per plan.1766 NW MARKET ST | — | $49.2M |
| 6 | Demolish existing commercial building per plan.1752 NW MARKET ST | — | $49.2M |
| 7 | Demolish commercial building per plan.1740 NW MARKET ST | — | $49.2M |
| 8 | Demolish existing commercial building per plan.1734 NW MARKET ST | — | $49.2M |
| 9 | Construct addition & substantial alterations to institutional building (aki kurose middle school) occupy per plan. mech…3928 S GRAHAM ST | — | $41.9M |
| 10 | Demolish existing multifamily building per plan.2404 2ND AVE | — | $34.0M |
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% |
| Chicago | 3,667 | -1% | $4.88B | $1.3M | 100% |
| Seattlethis report | 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
- Seattle'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. 2,985 of 3,011 permits (99.1%) 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. 3 Seattle 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 Seattle 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
- 1,633 permits carry coordinates and every one of them falls outside Seattle — 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.
- No applicant leaderboard
- The applicant field is populated on 2.2% of Seattle permits — too few to rank anyone honestly.