The June residential numbers look like a recovery until you open them. Privately owned housing starts hit a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1,427,000, up 19.0% from May’s revised 1,199,000 and 3.5% above a year earlier. The entire gain came from apartments.
Multifamily starts snapped back from a collapse
Starts in buildings with five or more units reached 513,000, a 76.3% jump. That figure needs context: May’s multifamily reading had fallen roughly 41%, to the lowest total housing starts number since May 2020. What June shows is a bounce off a bad month, not a new trend. Multifamily starts are among the noisiest series the Census Bureau publishes, because a handful of large projects breaking ground in a single month moves the seasonally adjusted annual rate by tens of thousands of units.
Single-family went the other way. Starts fell to 895,000, down 0.2% from May’s revised 897,000, a third consecutive monthly decline. Builders have been pointing at the same two constraints all year: prices buyers can’t clear and mortgage rates that haven’t come down enough to fix the payment math.
Permits are the number to watch
Building permits ran at a 1,367,000 rate, 3% below May and 2.3% below June 2025. Permits lead starts, and they’re pointing down while starts spiked. That divergence usually resolves in favor of the permits.
Regionally, starts rose year over year in every major census region except the West, which fell 4.4%. The Northeast led at +4.5%, followed by the South at +1.7% and the Midwest at +1.2%. The West’s weakness tracks what’s happening in the high-cost coastal metros, where the only residential projects reliably breaking ground are subsidized. Projects like Corso in Mountain View, a 120-unit deed-restricted building on donated city land, are what new construction looks like there now.
What it means for the back half of the year
Two consecutive months this volatile make the quarter hard to read. The cleaner signal is the three-month trend in single-family, which is negative, and the permit trend, which is also negative. Apartment developers who were sidelined by 2023 and 2024 financing costs appear to be re-entering selectively, but a single month at 513,000 doesn’t establish that.
For contractors, the practical read is that residential backlog isn’t going to rescue anyone’s 2026. The work is still concentrated in data centers, advanced manufacturing and public infrastructure. Source: U.S. Census Bureau.