Permits by year
Toronto building permits by year: what is still open
196,603 building permitsissued between 1999 and 2026 are still open in the City of Toronto’s active permit register. Pick a year to see what survived, how long it has been sitting, and which projects never closed.
Open permits tracked
196,603
Years covered
1999–2026
Year pages
28
Data loaded
Unconfirmed
Why older years show fewer permits
The City of Toronto publishes its active building permits, not a historical archive. A permit appears in that file while it is live and disappears once it closes out. That means the row count for a given year is not how many permits the city issued that year, it is how many of them are still open right now.
The effect is steep. Roughly a third of a year’s surviving permits close with each year that passes, so the curve below slopes down toward the past for a mechanical reason and not because Toronto built less. The earliest record in the file is a single permit from 1979. For scale, the city issues on the order of 30,000 to 40,000 permits annually, well above every historical figure shown here.
Read down the table and you are reading a stalled-project index: the further back a year sits, the more its remaining permits represent work that was approved and never finished. That is what these pages measure. It is not a record of construction history, and the years must not be compared to one another as growth or decline.
Still-open permits by year of issue
| Year issued | Still open | Median value | Total value |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | 17,371 | $100,000 | $9,317,390,604 |
| 2025 | 20,484 | $100,000 | $11,958,397,184 |
| 2024 | 13,882 | $150,000 | $13,098,464,197 |
| 2023 | 12,039 | $100,000 | $7,939,034,578 |
| 2022 | 10,401 | $100,000 | $5,677,741,415 |
| 2021 | 9,112 | $83,165 | $6,189,030,938 |
| 2020 | 7,676 | $80,000 | $5,241,425,038 |
| 2019 | 8,656 | $60,000 | $3,042,398,391 |
| 2018 | 8,264 | $60,000 | $3,641,096,627 |
| 2017 | 8,643 | $100,000 | $3,328,907,415 |
| 2016 | 8,574 | $64,000 | $2,208,871,691 |
| 2015 | 7,070 | $50,000 | $3,544,711,161 |
| 2014 | 6,476 | $50,000 | $2,827,785,089 |
| 2013 | 6,834 | $50,000 | $2,866,592,566 |
| 2012 | 6,098 | $50,000 | $2,033,616,788 |
| 2011 | 5,712 | $50,000 | $2,439,635,582 |
| 2010 | 5,240 | $40,000 | $2,775,910,155 |
| 2009 | 4,346 | $40,000 | $1,981,927,984 |
| 2008 | 4,987 | $50,000 | $1,822,991,191 |
| 2007 | 4,708 | $60,000 | $864,459,816 |
| 2006 | 4,422 | $55,000 | $876,103,520 |
| 2005 | 4,136 | $55,000 | $1,476,563,394 |
| 2004 | 3,342 | $45,000 | $1,284,538,062 |
| 2003 | 3,123 | $40,000 | $1,137,574,238 |
| 2002 | 1,930 | $60,000 | $486,265,382 |
| 2001 | 1,237 | $32,000 | $580,162,593 |
| 2000 | 1,207 | $20,000 | $327,983,092 |
| 1999 | 633 | $10,000 | $84,061,334 |
Years with fewer than 500 surviving permits are omitted: the remaining records are too sparse to describe a year. The oldest permit in the City file dates to 1979.
Frequently asked questions
- How many Toronto building permits are still open from past years?
- PermitIndex tracks 196,603 permits issued between 1999 and 2026 that remain in the City of Toronto's active permit register. That figure counts unclosed permits, not the number of permits Toronto issued in those years.
- Why do older years show so few Toronto permits?
- Because the City publishes its active permit file rather than a historical archive. A permit leaves the file when it closes, so roughly a third of each year's surviving permits drop out with every year that passes. Toronto issues on the order of 30,000 to 40,000 permits a year, far more than any historical year shows here. The declining counts reflect permits closing out, not less construction.
- What does it mean if a permit from years ago is still open?
- It means the permit has not been closed out by the City. Some are long-running projects still under inspection. Others sit at "Permit Issued" or "Work Not Started", meaning the approval was granted and the work never began or was never signed off. Each year page breaks the surviving permits down by status so you can tell those cases apart.
- Can I compare one year to another on this page?
- No. The counts are not comparable across years, because each year has had a different amount of time for its permits to close. A larger recent year and a smaller older year reflect elapsed time, not construction volume. Use the status breakdown within a single year instead.