Canadian building permit volume

How this is built

Every figure is a count of building permits published by Canadian municipalities and collected by BuildData. It counts permits, not dwelling units or construction value. A three-hundred-unit tower and a detached garage each count once.

It is a sample, so read the change and not the level

Coverage is the municipalities BuildData ingests, not all of Canada, so the absolute number is lower than a countrywide total and is not comparable to one. The year-over-year change is the signal, and it is calculated only across cities that reported in both months. Without that restriction the newest month, which is always missing a few batch-publishing cities, would show a change that is partly just which cities happened to file.

The figure is preliminary and revises upward

Permits keep arriving after a month ends. Measured on July 2026, the first month with clean arrival timestamps:

A month is therefore held back until five days after it closes, and the published figure still revises upward by roughly one to two percent as the remaining cities report. That is one month of evidence, not a long record, and the policy will be restated as more accumulates.

Against the official statistic

Over sixty overlapping months this series tracks Statistics Canada's monthly permit count at a correlation of 0.94 on levels and 0.81 on year-over-year change (table 34-10-0292, unadjusted). It is not a replacement for that statistic and makes no claim to countrywide coverage. What it offers is timing: the official figure is published on roughly a two-month lag, and this one is published within a week.

Use it

Free to cite and republish with attribution to BuildData.