Building Permits

New privately-owned building permits, leading indicator of future housing starts.

Building Permits is part of the Housing category. Housing is the most interest-rate-sensitive sector of the economy and often the first to roll over heading into a downturn. Mortgage rates feed directly into affordability and demand, while building permits signal future supply. Home price indexes like Case-Shiller capture the wealth effect that drives consumer confidence and spending.

Building Permits is updated once per month when the releasing agency publishes new data. Each metric page on Convex shows the exact time of the last data update and provides historical data going back up to five years.

Convex sources Building Permits data from the Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED) API, maintained by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Data is fetched automatically and displayed alongside interactive charts, AI analysis, and historical context.

The Building Permits page includes an interactive chart with selectable time ranges (1 month to 5 years), percentage changes over multiple timeframes, a table of recent readings, AI-generated analysis, and links to related metrics and comparisons.