78 New Building Permits in Seattle

Seventy-eight. That is how many new single- and two-family dwellings Seattle permitted in the June 13 – July 11, 2026 window — a small slice of the city's 311 total residential filings, but the category carrying by far the highest typical price tag per permit. Addition & Alteration work spreads across hundreds of modest remodel jobs; New Building concentrates far fewer, much larger projects into one category.

That concentration shows up in the dollars: 78 New Building permits report $30.0M in valuation, against Addition & Alteration's $19.1M from 193 permits, and a $357,398 median that dwarfs the smaller category's $50,000 figure. Every figure below is a category-level slice of the same sealed Seattle snapshot behind our metro report.

Scope: residential building permits (single-family and small multi-family); commercial and sub-trade permits are excluded at ingest. This is not a count of all construction permits issued in each city.

Inside a New Building Permit

Seattle's own label for this category is "Building / New." It covers ground-up construction of new single- and two-family dwellings — not additions to an existing house, and not repair or remodel work, which are filed separately under "Building / Addition/Alteration." A New Building permit typically follows a demolition or a vacant-lot purchase, and it moves through a fuller plan-review and inspection sequence than most remodel work, reflecting the scope of building a house from the foundation up.

Who files it: primarily licensed general contractors and homebuilders, often the same firms handling design-build new construction end to end. Architects and engineers of record are routinely involved given the plan-review requirements for ground-up work. That heavier process, plus full-house material and labor costs, is a large part of why this category's typical valuation runs so far above categories covering repairs or additions alone.

What it is not: a permit to remodel, add onto, or repair a house that already exists. Those scopes fall under "Building / Addition/Alteration" instead, a category covered on its own in our Seattle Addition & Alteration report. A property owner tearing down an existing structure to build fresh would generate a Demolition filing first and a New Building filing second — two separate permits for two separate stages of the same project.

By the Numbers

• Per the sealed permit snapshot data, Seattle recorded 78 New Building permits in 30 days.

• Per the Seattle Department of Construction and Inspections via data.seattle.gov (Socrata), New Building valuation totaled $30.0M for the window.

• According to the same sealed snapshot data, the median New Building permit is valued at $357,398.

• Per the sealed category aggregates, New Building supplies 78 of the city's 311 residential permits.

• According to the sealed snapshot, Addition & Alteration leads by count with 193 permits, against New Building's 78.

New Building Permits in Seattle, June 13 – July 11, 2026

Citywide, the middle half of all residential permits falls between $24,475 and $328,802. New Building's $357,398 median sits above that entire range — the typical New Building filing outvalues even the upper end of Seattle's normal residential permit distribution, not just the $100,000 citywide median.

New Building's $357,398 median tops Seattle's $328,802 P75 mark.

New Building's $357,398 median permit valuation sits above Seattle's $328,802 P75 mark — the typical filing here outranks most of the city's residential permits.

For lenders and commercial suppliers, that distribution is the signal worth watching: this is a category where every filing represents a substantial project, not a mix of small and large jobs. A New Building permit list is a shorter list than an Addition & Alteration one, but each entry represents meaningfully more spend.

New Building's Place in the Seattle Mix

New Building trails Addition & Alteration on permit count by a wide margin, but its $30.0M in reported valuation outpaces Addition & Alteration's $19.1M — fewer permits carrying more total dollar value. Our Addition & Alteration report covers that category's own volume-heavy profile in depth, including why its median sits so much lower.

Other metros in this edition track the same new-construction category under their own labels. Los Angeles reports it as New Construction, covered in our Los Angeles New Construction report, and Austin breaks out new single-family houses specifically in our Austin New Single-Family Houses report. The pattern of a smaller, higher-value new-build category sitting alongside a larger remodel category recurs across the tracked cities.

Coverage and the Edition-Wide Picture

Every total on this page is a floor, not a ceiling. Citywide, 309 of Seattle's 311 permits carry a reported valuation, a 99.4% coverage rate — high, but not complete. A small number of permits in any category, New Building included, may lack a reported dollar figure entirely, so the category's own $30.0M total should be read as a floor rather than an exact accounting of every reported project.

Even against a citywide high of $2,000,000 for a single reported permit, New Building's own $357,398 median already outranks Seattle's $328,802 P75 mark on its own.

That comparison matters because it shows New Building's high typical value is not an artifact of one outsized filing. The category's median already sits above the top quarter of all Seattle residential permits before accounting for whatever the single largest reported permit in the window happened to be.

Who Watches New Building Filings Closely

A category defined by fewer, larger projects draws a narrower but more concentrated set of interested readers than a high-count category like Addition & Alteration.

General contractors and homebuilders use the New Building feed to see which lots are moving from planning into active construction, since a filing typically means design and financing are already locked in. Because the category runs only 78 permits against Addition & Alteration's 193, each entry is easier to track individually — a shorter list, but one where missing a filing costs more in lost opportunity per project.

Construction lenders read the same list as a pipeline of ground-up projects likely to need financing at a scale well above typical remodel lending. A $357,398 median project sits in a different financing tier than a $50,000 remodel, and lenders sized for larger construction loans watch this category specifically rather than the citywide feed as a whole.

Material suppliers selling full framing packages, structural components, and whole-house systems read New Building filings as demand for complete builds rather than repair-grade stock. A New Building permit implies a different order size and timeline than an Addition & Alteration filing, even when both come from the same underlying city dataset. Real estate professionals watching a specific block or lot can also treat a New Building filing as confirmation that a long-anticipated project has finally moved from planning into an active build.

Methodology

Source: Seattle Department of Construction and Inspections via data.seattle.gov (Socrata). All figures are computed directly from US Tech Automations' sealed daily permit snapshots; nothing is estimated, modeled, or extrapolated.

This New Building breakdown draws on the identical sealed snapshots behind the Seattle building permit report, filtered rather than re-collected: every figure here comes from the city's June 13 – July 11, 2026 records on the source category label, with no recoding. Citywide, 309 of 311 permits carry a reported valuation, a 99.4% coverage rate, so totals here should be read as floors. Seattle ranks #6 among this edition's 8 metros by permit count and #4 by total reported valuation.

Across the full edition, 6,456 permits were logged across all 8 metros, worth $747.7M, at 84% valuation coverage over the June 13 – July 12, 2026 window.

The figures above are produced in four steps:

1. Pull Seattle's public permit feed daily from the Department of Construction and Inspections dataset on data.seattle.gov.

2. Map each record onto a common schema, applying the residential scope filter at ingest before any aggregation.

3. Hash and store each day's snapshot append-only, so any figure here can be re-derived from the exact records behind it — the same discipline behind our permit prediction ledger.

4. Filter and summarize the sealed Seattle records on the New Building source label over the June 13 – July 11, 2026 window, with no estimation or backfill.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: How many New Building permits did Seattle issue in this window?
A: Per the sealed snapshot, 78 permits in the June 13 – July 11, 2026 window, out of 311 total residential permits citywide, worth $30.0M in reported valuation.

Q: Why is the New Building median so much higher than the citywide figure?
A: Because a ground-up dwelling costs far more to build than a remodel or addition. Per the sealed data, the category's median is $357,398, against Seattle's overall $100,000 median and Addition & Alteration's $50,000 median.

Q: How does the typical New Building permit compare to Seattle's overall valuation range?
A: It sits above nearly the whole range. Citywide, the middle half of residential permits falls between $24,475 and $328,802, and New Building's $357,398 median sits above that entire band.

Q: Does a New Building permit always mean vacant land is being developed?
A: Not necessarily vacant land — many New Building permits follow a demolition on an existing lot rather than new-land development. Either way, the permit covers ground-up construction, filed separately from repair or addition work under "Building / New." Where a demolition precedes the build, it generates its own separate permit under "Demolition / Demolition" rather than being folded into the New Building record.

Q: Who is likely filing these permits?
A: Per the sealed permit snapshot data, this category is dominated by licensed general contractors and homebuilders, typically working with an architect or engineer of record given the plan-review requirements for ground-up construction. Design-build firms handling a project end to end, from initial plans through final inspection, are common filers as well.

Put Permit Data to Work

A category reporting $30.0M from 78 permits is a short list of substantial, active construction projects — exactly what general contractors and homebuilders want to see before a competitor does. Commercial material suppliers can read the same list as demand for full framing packages and structural materials rather than repair-grade stock. Construction lenders can treat a fresh New Building filing as an early signal of a project moving from planning into build.

Because the category runs only 78 permits in a 30-day window, missing even a handful of filings means missing a meaningful share of the total opportunity. That is a very different calculus than a high-count category like Addition & Alteration, where a missed lead is one of hundreds rather than one of dozens.

The constraint is the same one every permit category shares: value fades fast. A filing seen the week it posts is a live lead; the same filing seen in a quarterly report is old news. US Tech Automations turns this signal into automated workflows — watching new filings as they appear, routing matches to the right trade or lender, and drafting outreach grounded in the underlying permit record. The live data behind this report is available at permits.ustechautomations.com, and if you want category-level signals wired into your own pipeline, see how agentic workflows can route them automatically.

Source: US Tech Automations Research — computed from sealed daily permit snapshots, June 13 – July 11, 2026.