Miami Metro Building Permits 2026: 14,906 Units Authorized, and the Map Moved North

Every pipeline figure in a Miami real estate story traces back to somebody's list, mine included. The Census Building Permits Survey does not. It is compiled from the permit-issuing offices themselves, published every month, and it has run continuously for decades. When a reporter writes that South Florida is building more, or building less, this is the series the claim is supposed to rest on.

So this page publishes it, for the Miami metro and each of its three counties, with the exact vintage stated and the federal file linked so any figure here can be checked in one click. Through August 2026 the metro authorized 14,906 new privately owned residential units, 122 fewer than the same eight months of 2025. That reads like a market holding still. It is not. Underneath a 0.8 percent change, Miami-Dade gave up 2,975 units of authorization and Palm Beach County added 3,044.

What the Census Counts, and What It Does Not

This is the distinction that gets this series miscited, so it goes first. The Building Permits Survey counts residential units authorized by building permit. A permit is legal clearance to begin. It is not a shovel in the ground, not a topped-out tower and not a closing table.

The Census publishes construction that has actually started in a separate release, New Residential Construction. Authorized units can be permitted and then resized, resold, stalled or abandoned outright, and permits can expire. South Florida has a long memory of this: the sign below has stood on an empty Brickell lot for years, in front of a project that was announced, marketed and never delivered. If you quote 14,906 as units coming to market, you have quoted the wrong thing.

Three more scope limits are worth stating plainly.

• Privately owned units only. Housing built directly by a government agency is outside the series.
• Counted by permit-issuing place. A unit lands in the jurisdiction that issued the permit, not necessarily the neighborhood a listing will name.
• No tenure recorded. The survey does not say whether a building will be condominium or rental, so a 5-or-more-unit figure covers both.

The geography here is CBSA 33100, the Miami-Fort Lauderdale-West Palm Beach Metropolitan Statistical Area, which is made up of exactly three counties: Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach. Every metro row on this page is the sum of those three county records, because that sum is the MSA.

The Metro Is Flat. The Three Counties Are Not.

Here is the whole story in one table. Same eight months, same source, both years.

A metro that moved 0.8 percent contains a county that fell by nearly a third and a county that more than doubled. Anyone quoting the metro line as evidence that South Florida development is steady is averaging those two together and losing the only thing that happened.

Palm Beach County More Than Tripled Its Multifamily Authorizations

Strip out houses and look only at buildings of five or more units, which is where condominium and apartment towers live, and the shift is sharper still.

Palm Beach County went from roughly one in ten of the metro's multifamily authorizations to one in three in a single year. It did it across 78 buildings against 52 a year earlier, so this is not one enormous project distorting a small base. Its single-family side rose too, from 1,655 units to 2,483, a 50.0 percent increase, which makes Palm Beach the only one of the three counties growing on both sides of the ledger.

Miami-Dade Gave Up a Third of Its Multifamily Permits

The Miami-Dade decline is almost entirely a tower story. Its single-family authorizations barely moved, from 1,552 units to 1,533, a 1.2 percent dip. Everything that fell, fell in buildings of five units or more. Here is the full 2026 breakdown by structure size.

Miami-Dade still carries the most expensive permits in the metro. Its 5,321 multifamily units carry $1.87 billion of declared construction valuation, about $350,700 per unit, against $170,800 per unit in Palm Beach County. The county is authorizing fewer units and more expensive ones, which is what a market shifting toward the luxury end of the stack looks like in permit data.

Broward Authorized Fewer Units Than Either Neighbor

Broward is the smallest permit market of the three and has been for years. It authorized 1,788 units through August 2026, about one in eight of the metro total, including 1,225 in buildings of five or more across just 33 buildings. Its two-unit and three-to-four-unit categories have almost emptied out, at six and four units respectively for the whole eight-month period.

Six Years of the Series: 2020 Through 2025

Year-to-date figures only mean something against the full-year record. These are the revised annual files, so they are the settled numbers rather than a running count.

2024 was the trough of the period at 16,352 metro units. 2025 rebounded to 23,453, the second strongest year in the six, and 16,535 of those were in Miami-Dade, its highest count in the series. That is the run that is now reversing. Palm Beach County, by contrast, spent 2023 through 2025 below its own 2020 and 2021 levels, so its 2026 surge is a return toward where it was rather than a leap past it.

How Much of This Is Counted, and How Much Is Estimated

The Census imputes for permit offices that do not report in a given month, which means a share of any BPS figure is an estimate. The survey publishes the reported-only columns alongside the totals, so the split is checkable. For multifamily units in the three counties through August 2026 it looks like this.

This matters for the headline finding specifically. The Palm Beach increase is the best-reported figure on the page at 96.1 percent, so it is not an artifact of a county office that stopped filing and got estimated upward. Broward carries the most imputation of the three, so treat its small category counts as the softest numbers here.

Gerardo's Read: What a Permit Count Can and Cannot Tell a Buyer

I use this series for one thing, and I want to be honest about how narrow that one thing is. A permit count is a supply signal with a three to five year lag. It tells me roughly how crowded a delivery window will be, long before any of those buildings have a sales gallery or a price sheet.

The question I get asked most often is whether a drop in permits means prices are about to move, and the answer is no, not on any timeline a buyer is shopping on. Miami-Dade authorizing 2,903 fewer multifamily units than last year changes what delivers around 2029 and 2030. It does nothing to the inventory someone is touring this month. For today's prices I look at months of supply and price per square foot, not permits.

Where I do put weight on it is the choice between a pre-construction contract and a resale. When a buyer is weighing a 2029 delivery, the thing I tell them to ask is how much else is cleared to deliver into that same window in that same county. On the Palm Beach numbers above I would want a developer there to explain what makes their building different, because the county has just authorized three times the multifamily it did a year ago and some of that is going to land in the same quarter. In Miami-Dade I would be asking the opposite question, which is whether the thinner 2029 and 2030 pipeline is worth paying today's premium for.

The other thing I do with it is sanity-check marketing. If a sales team tells me a project is permitted, that claim should be traceable to a permit record, and the county totals here are the aggregate of exactly those records. Our stage-by-stage pipeline report tracks that question project by project, and the developer due diligence guide covers what else to check before a deposit.

Methodology, Scope and What This Cannot Tell You

Every figure on this page comes from the US Census Bureau Building Permits Survey county files published at census.gov/construction/bps. The current vintage is the year-to-date file through August 2026, co2608y.txt, read on October 3, 2026. The prior-year comparison uses co2508y.txt, the same eight-month window one year earlier. Annual rows use the revised calendar-year files, co2020a.txt through co2025a.txt.

The CSV published alongside this page carries one row per area per period, with these columns:

• period and period_type, either a calendar year or a January-to-August year-to-date window
• area and fips_or_cbsa, the three counties plus the metro row
• units authorized in 1-unit, 2-unit, 3-to-4-unit and 5-or-more-unit structures
• units_total and value_usd_total, the declared construction valuation

Nothing is modelled, interpolated or estimated by LuxuryDade. A deterministic script reads those federal files, extracts the three county records by FIPS code (Miami-Dade 12086, Broward 12011, Palm Beach 12099), sums them for the metro row and writes both the figures on this page and the CSV linked below. Census data is a US federal government work and is in the public domain.

What this cannot tell you: whether any authorized unit will be built, when it will deliver, what it will sell for, or how many of these units are condominiums rather than rentals. The survey does not record tenure, so a 5-or-more-unit building here may be a condo tower or an apartment block, and both compete for the same land and the same construction capacity. Year-to-date figures are also subject to revision in later releases, which is why the annual rows above and the 2026 row are labelled differently.

Last verified October 3, 2026. The Census updates this series monthly with a lag of about five to six weeks. This page is on a 90 day refresh schedule, so the next scheduled update is January 2027, rebuilt from the federal file rather than carried forward.

Related Resources

• Download the three-county permit series as CSV, 2020 through August 2026
• South Florida Condo Pipeline Stage Report: which tracked projects have actually been permitted
• South Florida Development Watch: every tracked project, one card each
• Miami Condo Delivery Calendar 2026-2030: when the towers already under way finish
• Miami Months of Supply 2026: the resale half of this market
• IRS County Migration: the demand side of these three counties
• New Construction Condos Miami-Dade 2026
• Miami Price Per Square Foot 2026
• How to Vet a Miami Developer Before You Sign
• South Florida Projects: the wider development set we track
• Every Miami luxury building we track

Gerardo Gonzalez

Licensed Real Estate Agent at Compass | LuxuryDade