Vancouver issued 5,137 building permits in 2025, representing about $5.6 billion in declared construction value. Every number in this report comes from the City of Vancouver’s open permit data as indexed in SiteWire’s warehouse, and the numbers tell a more interesting story than the headline suggests.
Volume dipped, then recovered
Vancouver’s permit volume over the past four full years, from the City’s issued-permit data:
- 2022: 5,936 permits
- 2023: 4,690 permits
- 2024: 4,912 permits
- 2025: 5,137 permits
Volume fell hard in 2023 and has been climbing back since, though 2025 still finished below the 2022 peak. Early 2026 is softer: the City issued 1,101 permits in the first quarter, down about 15% from 1,288 in the same period of 2025, which lines up with broader construction market softening in Metro Vancouver.
What types of permits dominate
Breaking down Vancouver’s 2025 issuances by the City’s own work-type field:
- Addition / Alteration: 2,491 permits, 48% of the total, carrying $1.2 billion in declared value
- New Building: 1,234 permits, 24%, carrying $4.4 billion, the bulk of the dollar volume
- Demolition / Deconstruction: 772 permits, 15%
- Salvage and Abatement: 599 permits, 12%
- Temporary structures and other: the small remainder
The pattern worth noticing: alterations dominate the permit count, but new buildings dominate the money. New Building permits were 24% of 2025’s volume and roughly three quarters of its declared value.
Where the volume concentrates
Permit activity is not evenly distributed across Vancouver’s local areas. The neighbourhoods with the most permits issued in 2025:
- Downtown: 691 permits
- Kensington-Cedar Cottage: 368
- Hastings-Sunrise: 326
- Dunbar-Southlands: 295
- Renfrew-Collingwood: 288
- West End: 247
Downtown leads on both count and value, driven by commercial and multi-family work. The East Side neighbourhoods (Kensington-Cedar Cottage, Hastings-Sunrise, Renfrew-Collingwood) run on steady infill, renovation, and secondary suite volume.
How long approvals actually take
Vancouver publishes the elapsed time from application to issuance with each permit record, so this section is measured, not estimated. For permits issued in 2025:
- Addition / Alteration: median 45 days, average 74 days
- New Building: median 168 days, average 192 days
- Demolition / Deconstruction: median 121 days, average 152 days
The spread matters more than the averages. A routine alteration clears in about six or seven weeks at the median, while a new building takes close to six months. If you bid on new construction, the permits being applied for today are your bid pipeline for two quarters out.
Rejection rates: the data does not exist
You will see “Vancouver permit rejection rate” statistics quoted around the industry. Be skeptical: the City’s open data covers issued permits only. There is no public dataset of rejected or withdrawn applications, so any rejection-rate percentage you read is an estimate at best. We track the issued-permit record and we do not publish numbers the source data cannot support.
What a permit value tells you (and what it doesn’t)
Vancouver permits include a declared construction value. Treat it as a directional signal, not a budget figure: it is self-reported by the applicant, and the permit fee is calculated from it, which gives applicants little reason to round up. Use declared value to rank projects by scale and spot outliers, but don’t model revenue assumptions directly from it.
Using this data to time bids
New Building permits issued now started their applications roughly six months ago, and construction typically follows issuance within weeks to a few months. If you’re tracking permit volume to forecast your pipeline, watch new applications and issuances together, and lag your workload projections accordingly.
SiteWire updates Vancouver permit data daily and lets you filter by work type, neighbourhood, and minimum declared value. You can set alerts so new permits matching your criteria arrive each morning instead of requiring a manual check.