If you sell building products, build homes or lend on construction, monthly building permit counts are one of the earliest demand signals you can get. The US Census Bureau publishes them for every state, county and permit-issuing place through the Building Permits Survey (BPS), free.
The catch is the format.
Why the raw files are hard to use
- BPS is published as dozens of fixed-layout text files per month, one per geography level and region.
- Columns are positional and split by structure type: 1 unit, 2 units, 3-4 units and 5+ units, each with buildings, units and valuation.
- State files report valuation in thousands of dollars while place files report dollars, so a naive join gives you numbers that are off by 1,000x.
- The newest month appears with a lag, and you have to work out which month is the latest one published.
Doing it by hand
- Browse the BPS data directory on
www2.census.govand pick the geography (state, county, place, metro) and period (monthly, year-to-date, annual). - Parse the fixed-width columns using the layout notes for that file type.
- Convert state valuations from thousands to dollars before comparing them with county or place figures.
- Add FIPS codes so the table can be joined to anything else you have.
Doing it in one run
I packaged those steps as an Apify Actor: US Building Permits by City, County & State. It finds the latest published month, downloads every file for the periods and geography you choose, and returns one row per place per period with named columns such as units1, units5plus and totalValueUsd, already in dollars. You can filter by state, by name and by a minimum number of units, and export to CSV or Excel.
Reading the numbers sensibly
Permits are authorisations, not starts or completions, and some places issue none at all, so a missing small town is not the same as zero construction. Single-family and 5+ unit counts move for different reasons, so look at them separately rather than only at the total.
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