Where New York Is Building

Between 1 August 2025 and 31 July 2026 the New York City Department of Buildings issued permits covering 124,311 separate jobs — about 341 a day, every day, for a year. This is where that work happened, and what it was.

The short version: construction in New York is far more concentrated than the city's size suggests, Staten Island is much busier than its raw numbers imply, and the borough that leads every other category of work comes last on solar by a factor of forty-five.

Jobs, not permits — and why the difference matters

Almost every published count of New York construction activity counts permits. That number is inflated, and predictably so: one renovation needs a separate permit for each trade — general construction, plumbing, mechanical, sprinklers — so a single job can pull half a dozen. Counting permits measures paperwork.

Over this window the city issued 169,830 permits against 124,311 distinct job filings. Every figure below counts jobs, by counting distinct job filing numbers, which is the closest this data comes to counting projects.

By borough

Manhattan leads on both measures, which is not a surprise — it holds the densest concentration of large buildings in the country, and large buildings generate work continuously. What is less obvious is the last row. Staten Island has the fewest jobs of any borough and the second-highest rate per thousand homes, ahead of Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx. Measured against what is already standing there, the quietest borough is one of the busiest.

A quarter of the city's work happens in ten neighborhoods

New York has 197 neighborhoods as the Department of City Planning draws them. Ten of them account for 24% of every permitted job in the city.

Midtown-Times Square alone took 7,013 jobs — 5.6% of the entire city, more than the whole of Staten Island. One neighborhood out of a hundred and ninety-seven.

The busiest neighborhoods, against the homes already there

Ranking by raw count only ever produces a list of Manhattan business districts. Dividing by the homes already standing is more informative, and the table below does that for every neighborhood with at least 5,000 homes and 150 jobs — 191 of the 197 qualify.

Read this table with its denominator in mind. Midtown-Times Square's 322 jobs per thousand homes is not a statement about its housing: it is a business district with 21,780 homes and an enormous quantity of commercial floor area, and most of that work is happening in offices, hotels and shops rather than in flats. The measure is jobs against homes, not jobs against buildings, and in the commercial cores it reads high for that reason. Tottenville-Charleston at number 8 is the interesting entry — a low-rise Staten Island neighborhood with no commercial core at all, sitting among the business districts.

The citywide rate across those 191 neighborhoods is 33.2 jobs per 1,000 homes. The quietest, on the same measure, are Allerton in the Bronx (10.3), Glendale in Queens (11.5) and East Flatbush-Remsen Village in Brooklyn (11.7) — roughly a thirtieth of Midtown's rate.

What the work actually is

Two entries in that list are not construction at all. A sidewalk shed and a construction fence are protective structures, and between them they account for 18,360 jobs — more than any trade on the list except general construction and plumbing. Sheds in particular are the visible footprint of the city's facade-inspection law, which requires buildings taller than six storeys to have their exterior walls examined every five years; see Local Law 11. The borough split makes that plain: Manhattan filed 4,429 shed jobs and Staten Island 93, which is very close to a map of where tall buildings are.

The solar map is the opposite of the construction map

Solar is now a top-ten category of permitted work in New York, with 6,378 jobs in the year. And it happens almost entirely outside the borough that dominates everything else.

Queens filed 45 times as many solar jobs as Manhattan. Per thousand homes, Staten Island filed about a hundred times as many. Manhattan — 39% of all construction in the city — accounts for 1% of its solar.

The explanation is not mysterious, and it is worth stating rather than implying: rooftop solar needs a roof, in sunlight, that one owner controls. That describes a one- or two-family house far better than it describes a twenty-storey apartment building with a shared roof, a co-op board, water tanks and bulkheads on it. The solar map is a map of low-rise owner-occupied housing, which is why it inverts the construction map. Staten Island is the clearest case: the borough with the least construction overall and, per home, the most solar in New York.

What these numbers are not

• A permit is not a finished building. It records work the city authorized to begin. Some of it stalls, some is renewed, some was cosmetic to start with. How to read one is in how to read NYC building permits.
• These are not new homes. Job filings cover renovation, systems replacement, protective structures and new construction alike, and the great majority of them are work on buildings that already exist. Nothing here should be read as a count of housing produced.
• Nothing before mid-2020 is in this data. DOB NOW replaced the older Buildings Information System for permitting, and the legacy file stops in June 2020 — see DOB NOW vs BIS. This analysis is of a single recent year and makes no claim about longer trends.
• This is about places, not people. Every figure is a borough, a neighborhood or a category of work. No owner, contractor or applicant is named, ranked or scored anywhere in it.

Method, so you can check it

Everything above comes from two public datasets on NYC Open Data and can be reproduced with the queries below.

• Permits: DOB NOW: Build — Approved Permits (rbx6-tga4). Window: issued_date >= '2025-08-01' AND issued_date < '2026-08-01'. Jobs are count(distinct job_filing_number); permits are count(*). Borough is grouped on upper(borough) — the column carries both MANHATTAN and Manhattan, and grouping on it raw silently splits every borough in two. Neighborhood is the dataset's own nta field, which DOB publishes on each permit.
• Homes: PLUTO (64uk-42ks), sum(unitsres) where unitsres > 0, grouped by bct2020 and aggregated to neighborhoods using the same census-tract lists this site uses everywhere else — so the boundaries here and on the neighborhood pages are identical.
• Thresholds: the per-1,000-homes ranking includes neighborhoods with at least 5,000 homes and at least 150 jobs, which qualifies 191 of 197. Below that a ratio swings on a handful of filings.
• Rounding: borough job counts sum to 124,313 against a citywide distinct count of 124,311 — two filings appear under more than one borough spelling. Nothing has been adjusted to hide it.

The window closes on 31 July 2026 because that is the last complete month in the published data; on the date this was computed the newest permit on file was 3 August 2026. Figures are frozen as of 5 August 2026 and will not move as the city publishes more — the intention is that a number cited from this page is still the number when the link is followed. Where the site's data comes from generally is on data sources, and how records are matched to buildings is on methodology.

Analysis by Check a Building from public NYC Open Data. Free to quote or cite with a link. This is aggregate research about places and categories of work — it is not about any individual, owner or company, and it is not tenant screening. Sources: NYC Department of Buildings — DOB NOW: Build Approved Permits (rbx6-tga4); NYC Department of City Planning — PLUTO (64uk-42ks). Computed 5 August 2026.