Austin Apartment Permits Are Up 22% After a 3-Year Slide

The City of Austin issued building permits for 6,326 new apartment units between January 1 and November 9, 2026. That is 22% more than in the same stretch of 2025, the first year-over-year increase since 2022, and it is still 58% below the 15,219 units permitted in that window four years ago.

Permits are the earliest hard count of what renters will be able to choose from two years out. They explain why Austin rent fell for three years, and they are the best public clue about when the room to bargain on a lease starts to shrink. Here is what the city's records show, where the new buildings are, and how to use it when you sign or renew.

The count: 6,326 units in 118 buildings

We counted every City of Austin building permit for a new building with five or more homes (the city's class "C-105, Five or More Family Buildings") by the date it was issued, leaving out voided and withdrawn permits. Each year below covers the same window, January 1 through November 9, so 2026 is compared like for like.

Three things stand out. The peak was 2022, at 15,795 units for the year. The floor was 2025: 5,677 units, the smallest full-year total since 2017. And 2026 has already passed all of 2025 with seven weeks left.

The rebound arrived in the summer. Through June, 2026 was running about even with 2025: 2,401 units against 2,323. Then the city issued permits for 2,705 units between July and September, compared with 1,712 in the same three months of 2025. Another 1,220 units have been permitted since October 1.

A note on method, because it changes the total. The city sometimes issues several permits for one building, one per construction phase, and each repeats the building's full unit count. One downtown building shows up three times this year at 232 units apiece. We counted a building once when the address and unit count matched. Without that step the raw 2026 total is 6,880 units and the 2025 total is 5,468; the direction is the same either way.

Where the 2026 permits are

The 118 buildings sit in 16 ZIP codes. Three of them hold 52% of the units.

78660 is a Pflugerville mailing ZIP; these are the parts of it where Austin is the permitting city. 78744 is southeast Austin, 78702 is East Austin just across I-35 from downtown, and 78752 and 78758 run along the North Lamar and Burnet corridors. This is a list of where permits were issued, in order of unit count. It is not a ranking of places to live.

The map has moved since the peak. In the same window of 2022 the largest totals were in 78747 (2,628 units), 78753 (1,591), 78717 (1,309) and 78723 (1,214). Of those four, only 78753 is among this year's eight largest.

The buildings are a mix of sizes. Seventy-eight of the 118 have fewer than 50 units, often the separate buildings of one larger complex, permitted one at a time. Twenty-eight have 100 units or more, and those 28 hold 3,530 units, 56% of the total. The median building has 36 units; the largest single permit is for 241.

A permit this fall is an apartment in about two years

A permit is permission to build, and building takes a while. The Census Bureau's Survey of Construction puts the national average for a building with 20 or more units at 19.1 months from the start of construction to completion in 2025, and 18.4 months in the South. Add the time between permit and groundbreaking, then the months a new building spends leasing up, and what Austin permitted this summer and fall is more likely to be taking tenants in 2028 than in 2027.

That makes the low years the ones to watch. By the same arithmetic, the apartments that open in 2027 come mostly from the permits of 2024 and 2025, when the city approved 6,807 and 5,677 units. Compare that with the 15,795 and 11,969 units permitted in 2022 and 2023, the buildings that have been opening over the last two years.

The wider county shows the same arc. Census Bureau building permit survey records in our database show Travis County jurisdictions authorized 19,421 units in buildings of five or more in 2021 and 9,780 in 2025.

What rent is doing now

Private market reports describe a market near the bottom of its slide. They measure different things, so the figures are not interchangeable with each other or with ours.

• Apartment List, November 2026: the median rent in the City of Austin is $1,323, down 0.2% during October and down 1.3% from a year earlier. A one-bedroom is $1,172 and a two-bedroom $1,426. The metro median is $1,296, down 1.2% over the year.
• Northmarq, second quarter 2026: Austin-area apartment vacancy was 10.3%, down 1.6 percentage points in a year. Effective rent rose 1.8% in the quarter to $1,316, which the firm called the first quarterly increase in three years, and was still 5.0% lower than a year before.
• Northmarq on supply: about 6,300 units were delivered in the first half of 2026, down 43% from about 11,000 in the first half of 2025. Roughly 18,100 units were under construction at midyear, 46% below the 2024 high. The firm expects about 14,900 completions in 2026, against nearly 20,000 in each of the past two years.

Put together: fewer new buildings are opening, about one apartment in ten was vacant at midyear, and rent is close to flat. For the longer view, our earlier piece covers how rent and income have moved in Travis County since 2010.

What this means if you're renting here

The choice is widest now. Most of what was permitted in 2022 and 2023 has had time to open, and a vacancy rate near 10% at midyear means there are empty units to choose from. If your lease ends in the next few months, price the new buildings near you before you accept a renewal number. Ask each one for the effective rent, meaning the monthly cost after any free weeks are spread over the lease, so you compare like with like.

The 2027 class is smaller. Fewer units were permitted in 2024 and 2025 than in any two consecutive years since 2017 and 2018. Nobody can tell you what rent will do, and we won't try. What the records do show is that the number of brand-new buildings competing for tenants next year will be lower than it has been. A longer lease term locks today's price for longer; whether that suits you depends on how settled your plans are.

A special is not the rent. One month free on a 12-month lease cuts the average monthly cost by about 8%, so ask whether a renewal would be priced from the full rate or the discounted one. Austin landlords now have to give you an itemized list of fees before you apply, which makes the real monthly number easier to pin down. If your plans change mid-lease, here is what Texas law lets you do about ending a lease early.

Construction next door is knowable. If you are looking at an apartment beside an empty lot or a fenced site, the city's permit records will tell you whether a building is coming and how big it is. Our guide walks through how to find out what is being built near an address, and Zabalist keeps the permit records themselves.

What this means if you're buying or selling

If you own a rental house or condo, new apartments are the competition for your next tenant, and the ZIP table above shows where more of them are coming. If you are deciding between renting another year and buying, the same numbers bear on the rent side of that comparison. This is general education, not advice about your lease or your finances.

If you want a second set of eyes on the rent-or-buy math for a particular part of town, a local agent can walk through it with you.

Sources

• Austin Local Team analysis of City of Austin issued construction permit records (dataset 3syk-w9eu), synced November 14, 2026, latest permit date November 12, 2026; city feed last updated November 13, 2026. Building permits, class C-105, work class New, by issue date, excluding voided and withdrawn permits; a building is counted once when address and unit count repeat. The yearly totals before that step were checked against the city's feed directly. Percentages, shares, medians and quarterly sums are our arithmetic.
• Austin Local Team analysis of U.S. Census Bureau Building Permits Survey records, Travis County annual files, source date August 31, 2026.
• City of Austin, Issued Construction Permits.
• U.S. Census Bureau, Length of Time tables, Survey of Construction, average months from start to completion, 2025, read November 14, 2026.
• Apartment List, Austin Rent Report, November 2026, read November 14, 2026.
• Northmarq, Austin Multifamily Market Insights, Q2 2026, read November 14, 2026.