Calgary has been one of Canada’s fastest-growing construction markets for the past three years. Understanding the permit data tells you where the growth is happening, and where it is going next.
Calgary’s permit volume
Calgary issued 26,356 building permits in 2024 ($8.17B declared value) and 24,684 in 2025 ($8.85B declared value), across all categories. Both figures come from SiteWire’s permit warehouse, verified 2026-08-30. The breakdown matters more than the total:
- New residential, single detached, semi-detached, and row housing in the suburbs
- New commercial, industrial in the southeast, office in the Beltline and downtown
- Renovation and alteration, steady across all quadrants
- Demolition, concentrated in inner-city redevelopment zones
Where the growth is happening
Southeast Calgary continues to see the highest concentration of new industrial construction. The logistics and warehousing sector is driving demand for large buildings in areas like Shepard Industrial and the southeast corridor.
Northwest and northeast residential, communities like Livingston, Glacier Ridge, and Cornerstone are among the most active for new single-family and townhouse construction.
The Beltline and inner city, multi-unit residential shows strong permit activity, driven by infill densification policies.
How to read Calgary’s permit data
Calgary uses the Socrata open data platform. The permit feed includes:
- “statuscurrent”, In Review, Issued, Cancelled, Expired
- “workclassgroup”, New Construction, Addition/Alteration, Demolition
- “originaladdress”, full address
- “applieddate”, when the application was submitted
- “issueddate”, when the permit was approved
- “totalprojectcost”, declared value
One thing to note: Calgary does not publish elapsed-days data (time from application to permit issuance) in its open data feed, so approval-time figures you may see cited elsewhere are not drawn from the public permit record. The applieddate and issueddate fields are both present, but SiteWire does not publish aggregate processing-time statistics for Calgary because the underlying data is not structured to support them reliably.
Using pre-permit signals in Calgary
Calgary publishes development permit applications separately from building permits. Development permit applications are filed before a building permit, but Calgary’s feed does not carry a matching issuance date on those records, so the gap cannot be stated as a number of days. SiteWire’s Pre-Permit feed tracks Calgary development applications currently in review, including land use redesignation filings that signal future large-scale development.