These are Seattle's development figures at mid year, read from our live pages on July 30, 2026. Our March trends post stays up unedited as the record of what we published then, and you can read it here, Seattle construction trends in 2026.
One thing has to come before the numbers. In July we changed how BuildVue counts the projects in a neighborhood, so the March figures and today's figures are not two readings of the same measure.
How we count neighborhoods now
Until early July, a neighborhood page counted every project that fell inside a rectangle drawn around the neighborhood on the map. Those rectangles overlap and reach past the edges of the areas they stand for. A single project could fall inside two neighborhoods at once, and a page could count buildings that nobody in that neighborhood would call theirs. The old method counted too many.
Neighborhood pages now count the neighborhood recorded on each project instead of anything drawn on a map. Those are the accurate numbers, and they are what every neighborhood figure in this post uses.
Two things follow. Today's counts come in lower than March's for most areas, and that is the counting change rather than anything that happened on the ground, so the two sets should not be subtracted from each other. And the neighborhood list on the Seattle hub page still runs on the old rectangle method, which is why its counts read higher than the neighborhood pages do. Where the two disagree, the neighborhood page is the one to trust.
The citywide totals changed for a related reason. We spent part of July on data quality work in the project records themselves, which changed which projects are tracked and how they are attributed. The March and the July citywide figures are each an accurate record of what the page showed on that date. Neither the size of the gap between them nor its direction measures the market.
Citywide at mid year
The Seattle page shows 723 total projects, 49,060 residential units, and $15.4B in estimated construction value.
For the historical record, in March we reported more than 680 tracked multi family and mixed use projects, more than 540 of them active, nearly 63,000 residential units, and more than $18 billion in construction value. That is the March record, on the basis we used in March.
The unit figure is a minimum rather than a total. Many tracked projects have no unit count in the permit record and add nothing to the sum, so the real number of units in the pipeline is higher than 49,060. The value figure is a rough scale. It mixes early design estimates, which are often placeholders, with the real values on issued construction permits.
We do not publish a year over year filing comparison and this post does not start one. Our monthly filing counts for spring 2026 are incomplete, so a claim that filings rose or fell this spring would be wrong either way.
The citywide page shows a total without an active split, so the active counts below come from the neighborhood pages.
What is actually being built
The word construction in a permit system means more than a fenced site with equipment on it. A project can have a construction status while its building permit is under review for months. Look at the issued construction permit instead, the document a project needs before work starts.
The Downtown page shows 23 of its 41 tracked projects under construction. That label follows the permit status, so some of those 23 still need a permit before work can start.
Our largest active construction projects post from July 6 read the permits directly and found about 130 Seattle projects with an issued building permit and work underway. That figure is from July 6, so read it as the recent scale rather than a live count. To check one project, look for the issue date on its construction permit.
Neighborhood counts at mid year
Every row is read from that neighborhood's own page on July 30, 2026, under the current counting method. The last column shows what the March post published under the old rectangle method, included as the historical record only. The two are not comparable.