Fastest-Rising Building Permit Cities in Canada, Ranked
Ranked by year-over-year change in total building permit value for the latest reporting month, limited to cities with a large enough prior-year base for the percentage to mean something.
This ranking compares each city's total permit value for May 2026 against its own reading for May 2025, using the direct, city-level figures from Statistics Canada Table 34-10-0292-01 that also supply every city page on the permits topic site. The building permit value ranking orders cities by absolute dollar value. This ranking orders cities by the rate of change, so a smaller city with fast-accelerating activity can outrank a much larger city with a bigger but flatter total.
Why a minimum prior-year base matters
A percentage change is only meaningful relative to a large enough starting point. A city that reported $200K in permit value a year ago and reports $2.0M this year has technically posted a 900% increase, but that swing reflects one or two permits clearing at once, not a genuine shift in a city's construction market. To keep this ranking meaningful, it only includes cities whose reading for the comparison month one year earlier was at least $5.0M in total permit value. Cities below that threshold, and cities without a live reading for the same month one year earlier at all, are excluded from this specific ranking, though they may still appear on the permits topic site and the building permit value ranking.
Fastest year-over-year increase, May 2026
| Rank | City | Province | YoY change | Total permit value | Permits |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Peterborough | Ontario | +1653.3% | $268.7M | 82 |
| 2 | Chilliwack | British Columbia | +323.8% | $61.7M | 37 |
| 3 | Kingston | Ontario | +235.8% | $127.6M | 208 |
| 4 | Kamloops | British Columbia | +230.2% | $49.1M | 52 |
| 5 | Thunder Bay | Ontario | +157.1% | $41.5M | 85 |
| 6 | Ottawa | Ontario | +121.2% | $398.6M | 633 |
| 7 | Drummondville | Quebec | +89.4% | $95.9M | 311 |
| 8 | Saguenay | Quebec | +74.0% | $121.1M | 697 |
| 9 | Lethbridge | Alberta | +59.8% | $72.1M | 172 |
| 10 | London | Ontario | +55.3% | $245.3M | 438 |
| 11 | Oshawa | Ontario | +34.2% | $142.0M | 209 |
| 12 | Trois-Rivieres | Quebec | +24.1% | $73.3M | 925 |
| 13 | Regina | Saskatchewan | +19.5% | $59.7M | 237 |
| 14 | Saskatoon | Saskatchewan | +18.0% | $144.2M | 449 |
| 15 | Winnipeg | Manitoba | +5.4% | $229.3M | 766 |
Momentum vs absolute size
A high rank here says a city's permit value grew quickly relative to its own recent history, not that it is a large construction market in absolute terms. Several cities on this list report a fraction of the total dollar value of the cities at the top of the value ranking, but a faster rate of change. Reading the two rankings together, alongside a city's residential and non-residential split on its own topic page, gives a fuller picture than either ranking alone: whether growth is broad-based or driven by one or two large projects, and whether it is residential construction responding to population growth or non-residential construction tied to a single institutional or industrial project.
This ranking updates each time a new Construction Pulse edition is published for a month with a qualifying year-over-year comparison. Every past edition, with its own value and momentum tables for that specific month, remains available in the Construction Pulse archive.
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