Building permits (BPS)
New privately owned housing units authorized by building permits each year, by the number of units in the building, from the Census Bureau's survey of local permit-issuing offices.
Figures
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Building Permits Survey, Annual. Data period 2025. Published .
| Measure | Value | Period |
|---|---|---|
| Housing units authorized by building permits2025 | 17,944 | 2025 |
Pages built on this dataset
Publisher
- Organization
- U.S. Census Bureau
- Publisher’s dataset
- Building Permits Survey, Annual
- File or API used
- https://www2.census.gov/econ/bps/
- Methodology
- https://www.census.gov/construction/bps/methodology.html
Coverage
- Geography
- Nation, all 50 states and DC, Idaho's 44 counties and 19 Idaho cities
- Time coverage
- 1980-2025
- Update frequency
- Annual
- Published
- May 14, 2026
- Retrieved
- October 16, 2026
- License of the records
- Public domain. U.S. federal government work.
- Rows
- 21,400 observations, 1980-2025
Measures
| Measure | What it measures | Unit |
|---|---|---|
| Housing units authorized by building permits | New privately owned housing units authorized by building permits during the year, in buildings of every size. | count |
| Housing units authorized, by size of building | New privately owned housing units authorized during the year, by the number of units in the building: single-family houses, duplexes, three and four unit buildings, and buildings of five units or more. | count |
Caveats
- A permit authorizes construction; it is not a completed home. Some permitted units are started late or never built, and the Census Bureau does not track that at the state or county level.
- Counts cover only places that issue building or zoning permits. The Census Bureau puts more than 99 percent of new privately owned homes nationally in such places; construction where no permit is required is not counted, so a rural county's figure can understate what was built there.
- Figures include the Census Bureau's imputation for permit offices that did not report every month of the year; they are estimates, not a count of every permit.
- Manufactured (mobile) homes are not included, nor are additions, conversions or group quarters such as dormitories.
- State and county history starts in 1980 and 1990; city figures start in 2010, the first year the city files carry the identifiers used to match a city across years.
- The set of permit-issuing places surveyed was redrawn in 1984, 1994, 2004 and 2014 (from about 16,000 places in 1978 to about 20,100) and is updated every year since 2023, so part of a long-run rise can reflect wider coverage rather than more building.
How to cite
Understand Idaho, “Building Permits Survey, Annual”, compiled from U.S. Census Bureau, Building Permits Survey, Annual. Retrieved October 16, 2026. https://understandidaho.com/data/census-bps/.
Cite U.S. Census Bureau directly for the figures themselves.
This page was last updated .