If you want the earliest signal of where the United States is adding homes — months before a foundation is poured and long before anyone moves in — you look at building permits. Today we're adding the U.S. Census Bureau's Building Permits Surveyto PUMSdata: monthly and annual permit counts, mapped and cross-comparable across every state, metro area, county, and city. It's our first dataset beyond ACS PUMS, and the start of turning PUMSdata into a home for more than one Census product.

You can jump straight in — browse building permits by geography or open the map explorer and switch the data source to Building Permits— or read on for what the data is, what we've loaded, and the few caveats worth knowing.

Why permits are the leading indicator of housing

Housing data comes in stages: a permit is authorized, then construction is started, then a unit is completed, and only later does it show up as occupied in a survey like the ACS. Permits sit at the very front of that pipeline, which is exactly what makes them useful. They are a forward-looking measure of intended supply — a read on builder activity and local demand that moves before the slower lagging indicators do. When economists talk about housing “in the pipeline,” permits are where the pipeline begins.

They're also one of the few housing measures published at fine geography on a monthly cadence. The ACS tells you the housing stock that exists; permits tell you what is about to be added, and where, almost in real time.

What the Building Permits Survey is

The Building Permits Survey (BPS) is a long-running Census program that collects, from the roughly 20,000 permit-issuing jurisdictions across the country, counts of new privately-owned residential building permits. Each permit is broken out by the size of the structure it authorizes — a critical distinction for anyone thinking about housing supply:

Single-family (1-unit structures)
2-unit structures
3-to-4-unit structures
Multifamily (5-or-more-unit structures)

For each category the survey reports the number of buildings, the number of housing units, and the reported construction valuation. From those we also surface a couple of derived measures — total units permitted and the multifamily share — so you can see at a glance whether a place is growing through detached homes or apartments.

One thing to keep straight: a permit is an authorization, not a finished home. Not every permitted unit is built, and timing between permit and completion varies. Permits are the best leading indicator of supply — they are not a count of homes that exist.

New to permit data? Our building-permits glossary defines every key term here — structure types, valuation, imputation, CBSAs, year-to-date, and more — in plain English.

How it differs from PUMS — and why that's the point

If you know our PUMS data, building permits will feel different in a healthy way. PUMS is microdata: a weighted sample of individual records that you tabulate yourself, where the survey weight is the whole game. The Building Permits Survey is the opposite shape — it's a published count. There are no samples, no weights, and no margins of error to reason about; a permit was issued or it wasn't. That makes permits simpler to read and a natural complement to PUMS: one tells you who lives somewhere and how, the other tells you what is being built there next.

Supporting two such different datasets cleanly is why, under the hood, PUMSdata is now a multi-source platformrather than a PUMS-only tool. Building permits is the first addition; it won't be the last.

What we've loaded

We've built the survey out at four levels of geography, so you can move from the national picture down to a single city:

States — all 50 plus DC.
Metro areas — every Census metropolitan and micropolitan area (CBSA), ~920 of them. See the metro leaderboard →
Counties — ~3,100 nationwide, on the classic county choropleth.
Cities & places — the ~20,000 permit-issuing jurisdictions, scoped within each state.

For time, you get both granularities: the most recent ~18 months at a monthly cadence, and annual totals back to 2019 for states, counties, and cities. Toggle between Monthly and Yearly in the explorer, and use Compare to put two periods side by side — the map and table show the change from the older period to the newer one (for example, this April versus the same month a year ago, or 2024 versus 2025).

How to use it

Open Explore, set the data source to Building Permits, and the rest of the controls adapt to the new dataset:

Pick a measure — total units, single-family, multifamily, buildings, reported value, or multifamily share.
Choose your geography — view counties or metros nationwide, or flip to Within a stateto drill into one state's counties or cities. Click a county on the national map to zoom straight into its state.
Compare over time — turn on Compare and pick a second month or year to map the percent change, on a diverging scale built to handle the volatility of small-area counts.
Save & export — every view exports to CSV or Excel, and the map to PNG, the same as our PUMS tools.

Prefer to read rather than build? Every geography has its own page with an 18-month trend chart and a structure-type breakdown — for instance Maricopa County, Arizona (one of the most active counties in the country) or the Dallas–Fort Worth metro.

A few honest caveats

Permit data is wonderfully timely but has a couple of rough edges worth respecting. The Census publishes with roughly a two-month lag and revises recent months as more jurisdictions report, so the latest figures firm up over time. Small jurisdictions sometimes report late or not at all in a given month, which is why a small city can read zero one month and spike the next — permit activity is genuinely lumpy at that scale. And because counts at the city level are small, month-over-month percentage changes can swing wildly; we lean on the trailing 12-month total and year-over-year comparisons to tell the steadier story. As always, the figures come from the U.S. Census Bureau; PUMSdata is an independent product and not affiliated with the Bureau.

This is the first of several

Adding building permits was as much about the plumbing as the data: PUMSdata can now host fundamentally different Census products side by side, each with its own geographies and cadence, in one familiar map-and-table interface. Permits are step one. If there's a public dataset you'd like to see mapped this way, we'd love to hear it — and in the meantime, you can start exploring building permits now.

Now on PUMSdata: U.S. Building Permits, Mapped for Every State, Metro, County & City