Denver Metro Permit Index Census Building Permits Survey · 2016–2025 37 jurisdictions
Which Denver-metro cities are keeping pace?
Ten years of building permits for 37 cities, towns, and county areas, each measured against the metro as a whole. At 1.0×, a place is permitting new homes at the metro’s pace for its size.
How pace works. In 2025 the metro permitted 12.6 new homes for every 1,000 it already had. A city that permitted 6.3 per 1,000 ran at 0.5× the metro pace; one that permitted about 25 ran at 2×. Interest rates and the economy move the whole metro together, so pace shows how each place is doing against its neighbors.
Lakewood fell far behind the metro. Littleton raced past it.
Two built-out suburbs, with most of their homes built before 2000. After 2019 they went in opposite directions.
Lakewood
0.13× the metro pace, 2023–25
Down 81% from 0.67× in 2016–19. It went from 829 homes a year to 131.
Littleton
1.96× the metro pace, 2023–25
Up 2.7× from 0.72× in 2016–19. It went from 260 homes a year to 577.
Use the left and right arrow keys to step through the years.
Show the numbers
Read this with care. Permits don’t say why. Lakewood voters capped housing growth at 1% a year in 2019, about 730 homes. Since state law preempted the cap in 2023, Lakewood has permitted fewer than 200 homes a year. Littleton’s jump rests on two years: 1,728 homes in 2024–25, after 454 in the seven years before.
Every jurisdiction
Grouped by how built-out each place is. Compare within a group: a town with open land will out-build a built-out city whatever its policies. Open a row for its year-by-year permits.
No jurisdiction matches that search.
What permits can’t tell you
Permits are the only free, nationwide record of how much housing a city approves. They are also easy to over-read.
How long it took
Permits record when a building permit was issued, not how long entitlement took. A project that spent four years in review appears as one clean permit.
Why it happened
Water tap availability constrains Front Range construction as hard as zoning does. A city can be pro-housing and functionally out of taps.
What anyone intended
A falling line is consistent with restriction, with running out of land, and with a single developer walking away. It narrows the question; it does not answer it.
Method and sources
- Pace. Homes permitted per 1,000 existing homes, divided by the same rate for the whole metro that year. The 2016–19 and 2023–25 figures pool those years’ permits.
- Permits. Census Building Permits Survey, final annual place files, 2016–2025: new privately owned homes in buildings of every size. The metro is the ten-county Denver–Aurora metropolitan area, including small towns not listed here.
- Homes. American Community Survey 2023 5-year estimates: housing units (B25001), year built (B25034), and median home value (B25077).
- Groups. Split on the share of homes built since 2000. Under 30% counts as mostly built out.
- County areas. Unincorporated homes are the county total minus its cities and towns, which misstates places that cross county lines.
- Estimated months. When a jurisdiction misses monthly reports, Census estimates them. Those years are noted on the jurisdiction.
- Left out. Federal Heights and Glendale have filed no monthly permit reports in recent years. Census’s annual files show 37 homes permitted between them all decade, all in Federal Heights in 2016. We can’t tell a true zero from a reporting gap.
- The small charts use a ratio scale, so halving and doubling move the line the same distance. Years with almost no permits sit on the bottom edge.
- Revised September 2026. This page now uses Census’s final annual files, which replace its estimates for months a city didn’t report. Some figures moved a lot: Elbert County’s 2024 permits fell from 705 to 382.