Note: The Maryland State Data and Analysis Center (SDAC) has made changes to how it presents building permit data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Building Permits Survey (BPS). Improvements include coverage for all permit-issuing places in Maryland captured in the BPS, as well as reporting for all BPS residential structure types. Additionally, there was a change in the source of the monthly data to the Detailed Revised Monthly file, which incorporates historical revisions from the “current” month back through the beginning of the calendar year. Please note that due to differences in the source data and the methods of preparation, the BPS data presented here may not match the tables from the prior version of this webpage.
The Census Bureau’s BPS data includes building permit information for privately-owned new residential construction for the state, counties, and permit-issuing places. Datapoints include the number of buildings, number of units, and estimated value by residential structure type. SDAC is presenting this building permit data for all covered Maryland geographies, all available residential structure types, and for annual, monthly, and year-to-date (YTD) time-periods.
Details on the methodology of the Census Bureau’s Building Permits Survey can be found on the Census website.
Monthly and Year-to-Date Data
SDAC is presenting monthly and YTD permit data from the BPS for the current year, as well as for the previous calendar year (until the annual data is finalized and released each May). Once the annual data for the previous calendar year is released, it will be accessible in “Annual Reports”, and this section will contain information only for the current calendar year.
In order to provide the most up-to-date and accurate information available from the Census Bureau, the monthly and YTD data included in SDAC’s tables are drawn from the Detailed Revised Monthly file. This file is historically revised each month, back to the beginning of the calendar year, and reflects corrections as well as late submissions. The tables presented in this section include data for each month of the year (January through current), as well as YTD totals. Due to the historical revisions, there may be differences in the data presented for a given month – with each monthly release.
Annual Reports
Annual building permit data from the BPS is the most complete and reliable, as it includes both revisions to account for late data submissions and corrections, as well as responses from permit-issuing places that report only on an annual basis. Because it includes a full year of data, the annual dataset is often used by researchers, planners, and businesses to understand long‑term trends in housing development. The data is presented for years 2000 through the most recently available calendar year. Annual data is released each May for the previous calendar year.
