Between August 3 and September 27, the City of Austin issued 1,205 permits for new single-family houses. That is about 150 a week, and the weekly count never dropped below 134 or rose above 176. Three ZIP codes, 78744, 78747 and 78754, account for 490 of them, or 41 percent.
Permits are the earliest public record that a house is really going to exist. They come before the slab, before the listing and long before a closing. This week's housing record is the permit counter, so here is what it says, and just as important, what it cannot say.
The count, week by week
We counted permits in the city's class "R- 101 Single Family Houses" with a work class of "New," by the date the city issued them. Our database and the city's own feed agree: ours shows 1,204 for the eight weeks, the city's open data portal shows 1,205.
| Week beginning | New house permits |
|---|---|
| Aug. 3 | 139 |
| Aug. 10 | 176 |
| Aug. 17 | 154 |
| Aug. 24 | 134 |
| Aug. 31 | 149 |
| Sept. 7 | 164 |
| Sept. 14 | 148 |
| Sept. 21 | 140 |
| Sept. 28 (Mon.-Fri., still filling in) | 139 |
The last row is not final. In our database, a permit shows up a median of five days after its issue date, and about one in ten takes 23 days or longer, so the most recent week will grow. The eight full weeks above add up to 1,204 in our database.
How 2026 compares
For the same January 1 to September 27 stretch in each year, the city's feed shows more new-house permits in 2026 than in any of the three years before it.
| Year | Single-family houses (R- 101) | Two-family buildings (R- 103) |
|---|---|---|
| 2023 | 5,115 | 233 |
| 2024 | 5,012 | 233 |
| 2025 | 5,950 | 984 |
| 2026 | 6,479 | 468 |
Single-family permits are up about 9 percent on 2025 and about 29 percent on 2024. That works out to roughly 168 a week across the year so far, a bit above the 150-a-week pace of the last eight weeks. Two-family buildings tell a different story: 468 this year against 984 at the same point in 2025, a drop of 52 percent. The 2025 figure is the outlier, not 2026. Both are far above the 233 recorded in each of 2023 and 2024.
We are reporting what was permitted, not why. The city's records do not say whether a change comes from lot rules, builders' plans, financing or the calendar, and we would rather leave the reason blank than guess.
Where the permits landed
The city's records carry a ZIP code on each permit address. The eight weeks looked like this at the top of the list.
| ZIP code | Permits |
|---|---|
| 78744 | 224 |
| 78747 | 139 |
| 78754 | 127 |
| 78702 | 62 |
| 78757 | 59 |
| 78653 | 57 |
| 78652 | 57 |
| 78745 | 57 |
One detail changes how to read the first row. The city tags each permit with a jurisdiction. Of the 1,205 permits, 864 are in the "Austin Full Purpose" jurisdiction and 341 in "Austin Limited Purpose." In our copy of the records, 218 of the 224 permits in 78744 are limited-purpose, which means they sit in areas the city has annexed only for some purposes. The distinction is the city's own, and it matters when you look at a specific lot: check which jurisdiction an address falls in with the city before you assume anything about it.
ZIP codes are a mailing convention, not a neighborhood, and these counts say nothing about the people who live in or near them. They say where the city issued permits.
What a permit does and does not tell you
- It is not a sale or a price. The record includes a location, a class and dates. The city's feed carries no valuation, and the valuations in our copy are mostly zero on residential permits, so we did not use them.
- It is not a completed house. A permit can be issued months before a house is finished, and some never get built. Counting permits is a measure of what has been cleared to start.
- It is not every kind of new housing. Apartment buildings are permitted under other classes, and an accessory dwelling or a rebuild after a demolition can be a different class again. The single-family class is one slice.
- It is not a listing. We do not use MLS data in this analysis and this piece makes no statement about home prices or sales.
What this means if you're buying, selling or living nearby
If you are buying a new build. Ask the builder for the permit number and look it up on the city's portal before you sign. The permit record shows the dates it was applied for and issued, and its current status. If a builder cannot point you to a permit for the address, that is worth knowing early.
If you are buying or selling a resale home on a street where building is active. Construction is a fact of the street for a while: delivery trucks, noise during work hours, a changed view. You can check what has been permitted near an address for free. Our partner research site Zabalist keeps a permit history by address, and its "who built my house" search is the quickest way to read it. This piece does not say what any of this does to a particular house's value, and nobody honest could say that from a permit count.
If you are reading the tax side. County tax bills can start mailing October 1. We walked through what that does at a closing in Austin's 2026 tax bill and what it does at closing.
How we counted
The source is the City of Austin's Issued Construction Permits dataset, which the city updated on October 3, 2026, with permits issued through October 2. We selected permit class "R- 101 Single Family Houses" and work class "New," grouped by issue date and by the ZIP on the permit address. Our copy of the same records lives in the Zabalist research database; its freshness table flagged the daily ingestion job as having an error on October 4, so we confirmed the headline eight-week total against the city's feed directly, and the year-to-date and ZIP tables here come from the city's feed. Percent changes and weekly averages are our arithmetic. For more of the records we keep on Austin homes, see our research hub, and for a street-level look at development filings see Austin development.
One next step
If you are weighing a specific block or a specific new build, a local agent can pull the permit and parcel records for that address with you before you make an offer. Start at our get started page.