Inland Empire housing permits through August trail 2025 pace as apartment approvals fall, Census data show
Riverside County permitted 4,860 housing units in the first eight months of 2026 and San Bernardino County 3,535, both down by about a quarter from the same period last year, according to Census Bureau permit files.
Permits for new housing in Riverside and San Bernardino counties ran behind last year's pace through August, with most of the gap in buildings of five or more units, according to county-level files from the U.S. Census Bureau's Building Permits Survey.
The bureau's year-to-date file for August 2026 shows permits for 4,860 housing units in Riverside County across all building types. The matching file for August 2025 shows 6,477, a difference of about 25%.
In San Bernardino County, the 2026 file shows 3,535 units year to date, compared with 4,858 in the 2025 file, a difference of about 27%.
The totals are sums of the four building-size categories the bureau reports for each county.
Single-family homes
Single-family permits were closer to last year's level.
Riverside County had 4,050 single-family units permitted through August, compared with 4,241 in the 2025 file, a decline of 4.5%. The bureau put the construction value of the 2026 permits at about $1.26 billion.
San Bernardino County had 2,289 single-family units, down from 2,549, a decline of about 10%. The reported value was about $673 million.
Apartments and other multifamily
Buildings with five or more units accounted for most of the year-over-year difference.
Riverside County's year-to-date file shows 45 such buildings containing 738 units. The 2025 file shows 94 buildings with 2,117 units.
San Bernardino County's file shows 57 buildings with 1,113 units, compared with 102 buildings and 2,111 units in the 2025 file.
Smaller multifamily categories were a small share in both counties. Riverside County recorded 14 units in two-unit buildings and 58 units in three- and four-unit buildings through August. San Bernardino County recorded 98 and 35.
August alone
The bureau's separate monthly file shows 393 units permitted in Riverside County in August, of which 316 were single-family homes and 51 were in three buildings of five or more units. The August 2025 monthly file shows 673 units, including 330 single-family homes and 333 units in larger buildings.
San Bernardino County's August total was 242 units, including 203 single-family homes and 29 units in three larger buildings. The August 2025 file shows 443 units, including 234 single-family homes and 183 units in larger buildings.
The figures cited here come from the first set of columns in each file. The files carry a second set of columns labeled "rep," with lower counts for some categories.
Both 2026 files carried a last-modified date of Sept. 24 on the bureau's server.