Building permits, month by month, August 2026
The Seattle metro permitted 990 housing units in August 2026. Against the trailing twelve months — 20,152 units — that single month is worth roughly 5% of a year.
This is the raw monthly series, and it is here to show how little a single month is worth. One large apartment building can be several hundred units filed on one day, so the line swings between 386 and 4207 without the construction industry doing anything unusual. Every ‘permits plunge’ story is built on a chart like this one.
The twelve-month sum is the series to read for the trend, and it is the one this site leads with. Keep both: the smoothed line says what is happening, this one says how much to trust any single reading of it.
Source: U.S. Census Bureau Building Permits Survey, Seattle–Tacoma–Bellevue MSA, monthly, not seasonally adjusted, via FRED. Auto-generated each build.