Massachusetts Building Permits, August 2026: 13,829 Filed

Which municipalities. The 45 Massachusetts cities and towns whose own permit portals we have read continuously since January 2025, each with at least one construction permit in every month from January 2025 through September 2026. Every page in this series uses the same 45, so months and years compare like with like. They are not a random sample of the state: Boston alone is 22% of the total, so read the figures as these municipalities, not as a statewide count.

Which records. Construction permits only: building, electrical, plumbing, gas, mechanical and sheet metal, fire protection, trench, sign and demolition permits. Licences, food and health permits, inspections, certificates of occupancy, zoning applications and similar records that some portals publish alongside permits are excluded (27,138 such records across the whole file).

Which date. The filing (application) date, not the issue date or the date we collected the record. Permits filed late in the period can still reach the portals, so the most recent month may rise slightly when we refresh.

Duplicates. Records flagged as duplicates are excluded. A 2026 re-import of Cambridge loaded each permit twice under two number formats; the second copy (7,289 records) is removed.

Left out on purpose.Municipalities we read through a third-party records portal (Viewpoint) are not in this series. We checked that feed against Plymouth's own monthly reports and found it held a fraction of the town's permits, and a smaller fraction in 2025 than in 2026, which would show growth that did not happen. Boston and Cambridge, checked against their open-data portals for March 2025 and March 2026, matched within a few percent in both years.

Data. Town, month and permit count for all 45 municipalities: massachusetts-building-permits-august-2026.csv. No owner, applicant, contractor or address fields. Free to reuse under CC BY 4.0 with a link to this page.