Residential building permits by metro

Compare residential permits by metro before expanding

Compare a metro’s housing-unit total with its structure mix before deciding where to pursue work. This table covers 2025 authorizations and 2024 totals for the national top 75 metros and every metro containing a North Carolina county.

The Census definition counts housing units. One apartment building can contribute many units. Read the one-unit, two-to-four-unit, and five-plus-unit columns separately when choosing builders or projects to investigate.

Metro figures cover the whole published area. Cross-state metros such as Charlotte-Concord-Gastonia and Virginia Beach-Chesapeake-Norfolk include their out-of-state counties. They are not NC-only totals. Counties outside metropolitan areas are absent, so summing these rows cannot produce a state total.

For the Triangle, compare Raleigh-Cary and Durham-Chapel Hill separately. Check actual projects and your travel or delivery limits before extending your service area. An authorization precedes a construction start and does not identify an open subcontract, available crew, or financed schedule.

Key findings from the recorded data

• The CSV contains 86 unique metros: the national top 75 and all 16 NC-containing metros. Five metros belong to both selections and appear once in the CSV.
• Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington ranks first with 66,179 authorized units in 2025. Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands ranks second with 65,075.
• Raleigh-Cary ranks 15th with 17,543 units: 11,760 in one-unit structures, 241 in two-to-four-unit structures, and 5,542 in five-plus-unit structures. Its 2024 total is 18,979, a 7.6% decline.
• Durham-Chapel Hill ranks 53rd with 6,100 units: 3,751 one-unit, 86 two-to-four-unit, and 2,263 five-plus-unit. Its 2024 total is 3,858, a 58.1% increase.
• All 1,462 data cells in the 86-row, 17-column CSV are populated. Published zeros remain zero.

Compare these authorizations with the construction workforce by trade research when preparing market questions. Neither dataset establishes who can take your next project.

How to use the table

Use in_top_75 for the national selection or is_north_carolina for every metro containing NC counties. Sort by national_rank or total_units, then compare structure mix and both years’ totals. Keep the five-digit CBSA code as text when importing.

Percent change is 100 × (2025 total − 2024 total) / 2024 total, rounded to one decimal. A value of 10.0 means a 10.0% increase. Preserve whole-metro notes when sharing cross-state rows. Do not count the five overlapping metros twice.

Method and caveats

The source research used Census’s final annual 2025 and 2024 Building Permits Survey workbooks, retrieved October 14, 2026. The 2025 final release was published May 14, 2026. Source workbook categories were checked against the annual text files.

The national ranking covers 387 metros in the 50 states and DC, using the metropolitan header codes in the Census file documentation. It excludes micropolitan areas and Puerto Rico. Descending 2025 units determine rank; ascending CBSA code breaks ties. NC membership was checked against the July 2023 county delineation file. Two-unit and three-and-four-unit counts were added to form the combined column.

The figures are unadjusted Census estimates with imputation, including missing-response procedures. They exclude publicly owned housing, HUD-code manufactured homes, and units created within existing structures. Remodeling, starts, completions, and cancellations are not measured. Coverage and boundary changes were not reconstructed for every metro, so annual changes compare published totals without that adjustment.

Where Cercha fits

Cercha starts in the Raleigh-Durham Triangle. Use this research to prepare local conversations, then find builders, trades, and suppliers through profiles and location search. View portfolios and use Messages to ask about actual work. Permit totals do not establish a member’s projects or availability. People outside the initial market can ask about the beta for a waitlist response.