Treasure Valley Building Permits 2026: Record Dollars, Vanishing Homes

The City of Boise permitted $2,523,546,387 of construction inside its city limits in the first six months of calendar 2026 — up 95.9% from $1,288,169,908 in H1 2025 and the highest first half in at least five years. The five-year series makes the spike unmistakable: $759.5M in H1 2022, $631.9M in 2023, $1.70B in 2024, $1.29B in 2025, then $2.52B in 2026. That figure covers every permit type the city issues — building, electrical, erosion, fire, mechanical, grading and plumbing — and covers Boise city limits only.

Permit counts tell a different story. Boise issued 9,211 permits in H1 2026 against 9,319 a year earlier — down 1.2% while the dollars nearly doubled — which means the money is concentrated in a handful of giant projects. The largest carries one name. Permit BLD25-02789 (Micron ID1 - T102 Trestles) at 8000 S Federal Way was valued at $141,128,507 — more than the entire city's June 2025 permit valuation of $126,918,679. In the June 2026 Development Trends report, 8 of the 10 notable projects over $1,000,000.00 are Micron ID1 campus permits, together $247,507,320 of the month's $311,358,865 total (79.5%). The only non-Micron entries were the River District Parking Garage and Retail ($20,104,187) and the BOI Airport Fuel Farm Transfer Line ($4,841,700).

The Micron fingerprint was visible in month one. Boise's January 2026 Development Trends shows trade and other building permits running 9% below January 2025 while trade/other valuation ran 378% higher — $237,693,443 against $49,694,541.

Everything in this section is measured in permit counts, not valuation dollars — the record above is a dollar figure, and the two series moved in opposite directions.

By the U.S. Census Building Permits Survey, the City of Boise permitted 222 single-family (1-unit) homes in H1 2026, down from 445 in H1 2025 — a 50.1% drop. One caveat travels with that number: Boise reported 5 of its 6 months to the Census Bureau in 2026, so the 222 includes a Census-imputed month; 160 units were actually reported. The city's own reports agree on the direction: single-family permits are averaging 32 per month in calendar 2026 versus 42 per month in 2025, down 23.8%.

Multifamily has all but stopped inside Boise. The city permitted 3 multifamily units in June 2026 — a single triplex — against 207 units in June 2025. On the calendar year, Boise reports multifamily running 65% below 2025; on its fiscal year (October through September), 70% below. June's total new-residential count was 27 units against 235 a year earlier, down 88.5%, with new-residential valuation down 84.3%.

The contractor list shows how small the residential market inside Boise has become. The city's top three new-residential contractors in June 2026 were NHS Community Services LLC (6 permits, $1,134,364), Boise Valley Habitat for Humanity (3 permits, $701,204), and Long River Construction LLC (2 permits, $545,846). The city report lists names, permit counts and dollar figures only — this study characterizes no builder beyond what the page prints.

Kuna — a city with roughly one-tenth of Boise's population (23,937 versus 229,776 in the Census file) — issued 758 single-family permits in H1 2026, the most of any Treasure Valley jurisdiction and up 25.9% year over year. Kuna alone out-permitted Boise and Nampa combined (222 + 483 = 705).

Eagle jumped 74.4% to 471 single-family permits carrying $243.5M of valuation; Garden City went from 8 permits to 97, a 12x leap worth $32.3M. Meridian rose 7.5% to 645 and Nampa rose 2.8% to 483. The declines cluster in Canyon County and Star: Caldwell fell 8.6% in H1 2026 after a 24.6% drop across 2025 — the steepest single-year 2025 decline among the valley's big-volume cities — and Star fell 18.8% after an 18.3% drop in 2025.

The county sums sharpen the picture. Ada County's seven Census-reporting places issued 2,710 single-family permits in H1 2026, up 4.9% — but Boise's share of its own county fell from 17.2% to 8.2% in one year, even though Boise holds roughly 46% of the county's Census-file population. Canyon County's nine reporting places issued 1,489, down 5.5%.

The valley's two-track market fits in one number: average permit valuation per new single-family home in H1 2026 was roughly $517,000 in Eagle against roughly $190,000 in Nampa — 2.7x apart, with Kuna around $213,000, Meridian around $234,000 and Boise around $308,000. These are construction costs declared on permits; Census BPS valuation excludes land, so they are cost proxies rather than sale prices.

Zoom out to the Boise City MSA — Ada, Canyon, Boise, Gem and Owyhee counties — and the metro authorized 4,975 housing units of all structure types in H1 2026, down 4.1% from 5,190 in H1 2025 but up 14.7% from 4,338 in H1 2024. Metro single-family is holding: 4,348 units, up 2.5%. Metro multifamily is what cratered — 627 units against 949, down 33.9%.

For context, the MSA authorized 9,302 units across full-year 2025, up 5.5% from 8,813 in 2024 — and all of that growth was multifamily (1,563 units versus 969), since single-family slipped 1.3% (7,739 versus 7,844). The most recent month cuts against the gloom: June 2026 was the metro's strongest permitting month in 14 months at 955 units, the most since April 2025 (1,045) and up 8.8% from June 2025 (878).

Every figure on this page traces to one of three public series, re-fetched and re-parsed on August 14, 2026: the City of Boise's monthly Building Construction Report and Development Trends PDFs; the U.S. Census Building Permits Survey place-level files (West Region), which cover every reporting Treasure Valley jurisdiction; and the Census BPS metro rollup published through FRED (series BOIS216BPPRIV and BOIS216BP1FH). Meridian and Nampa publish no fetchable monthly permit report of their own — for the suburbs, the Census BPS files are the reliable series, and that is what this study uses.

Scope rules this page never breaks: City-of-Boise figures cover city limits only; Ada and Canyon county totals sum every Census-reporting place (seven in Ada, nine in Canyon); metro figures cover the five-county MSA. Calendar-year and fiscal-year (October–September) figures are labeled each time they appear. Permit counts and valuation dollars are never mixed in a single comparison. The city report's own definition of single family includes duplexes, while Census BPS 1-unit figures exclude them — so the two series are shown side by side rather than merged.

Republishing is welcome. Cite questtracking.com's Treasure Valley Building Permits Study with the updated date above, and name the underlying source for any individual figure — each stat below carries its own. This study updates as new monthly city reports and Census files post.