Permit-application momentum in New York City and San Francisco, measured monthly from the cities' own records.
Edition: September 2026 · covering June–August 2026 · data extracted September 28, 2026
New York City
92.1
18,241 initial job filings vs 19,816 a year earlier
San Francisco
113.1
6,492 applications vs 5,742 a year earlier
The PermitPipeline Preconstruction Activity Index is a year-over-year momentum measure centered on 100: the latest three complete months' permit applications against the same three months one year earlier. 100 means unchanged; 90 means activity is down 10%. Each city is compared only with itself. A permit application is an early public indication of intended work, not proof that construction will proceed; PermitPipeline treats it as an early signal.
New York City, monthly initial job filings
New York City monthly initial DOB job filings, August 2024 to August 2026. Highlighted bars are the current index window.
San Francisco, monthly building-permit applications
San Francisco monthly building-permit applications, both permit systems, August 2024 to August 2026. Highlighted bars are the current index window.
This edition
Initial NYC job filings were down 7.9% year over year in June–August; San Francisco applications were up 13.1%. In New York the decline in initial filings does not show in total filing counts, because filings attached to existing DOB jobs moved the other way: initial filings were 44.1% of August's 13,252 distinct filings, while total filing volume fell 0.4%. San Francisco is now counted across both of the city's permit systems: the city has been moving routine permit types into its new PermitSF portal, and the legacy system alone would have read 78.6. By permit category, San Francisco's over-the-counter permits (92.8% of applications) rose 15.7% and type 3 additions, alterations and repairs fell 7.1%; the categories are not a measure of project size.
Editions are immutable. Each new edition re-extracts the full history; a prior reading that moves
materially is corrected with a dated revision note rather than edited silently. Each edition re-reads the previous
edition's windows and publishes how far they drifted.