Building Permits Survey (BPS)

The purpose of the Building Permits Survey (BPS) is to provide national, state, and local statistics on new privately-owned residential construction. The United States Code, Title 13, authorizes this survey, provides for voluntary responses, and provides an exception to confidentiality for public records. Data are available monthly, year-to-date, and annually at the national, state, CBSA (formerly MSA), county and place levels.

9/18/25 - Notice: 2024 annual data for Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands have been revised based on corrections and late data received from those jurisdictions. In addition, 2024 CBSA data for Puerto Rico has been released for the first time. These corrections only impact these specific U.S. territories and their jurisdictions and do not impact any other jurisdiction or aggregate estimate for the rest of the United States. The following files have been updated to reflect the new data:

2024islandareas.txt
2024puertoricoCBSA.txt
st2024a.txt
annualhistorybystate.xls
annualhistorybystatebystructure.xls

Available Data

Current (2019 - present)

Download our latest U.S., Region, State, and CBSA (formerly MSA) -level data in excel format. Revised permits are usually released on the 17th workday of the month. (See Release Schedule for actual dates.)

Historical (1995 - 2019)

Download historical State and MSA-level data in text format.

ASCII files by State, CBSA, County or Place

Download detailed State, CBSA (formerly MSA), County, or Place level data in comma-delimited text format. (See the documentation folder for instructions on how to convert text files into excel format.)

Annual Tables, Charts, and Graphs

View charts, maps, and graphs from the latest annual release. Annual data are released on the first workday of May for the previous year.

Data Visualizations

Explore building permits data with infographics and visualizations.

Announcements

View current or previous announcements related to the Building Permits Survey. Annual estimates for 2022 were released on May 1, 2023.

Related Information

New Residential Construction press release

Preliminary building permits for U.S. and Regions are included in Table 1 of the New Residential Construction report. This is usually released on the 12th workday of the month. (See release schedule for actual dates.)

Time Series/Trend Charts tool

Create your own customizable time series. Data is available at U.S. and Census Region level from 1960 - present.