2025 Census Building Permit Data Released: The Cost of Not Reporting Data

The Vermont Housing Finance Agency (VHFA) has updated the building permits dataset published on HousingData.org to reflect the newest official releases from the U.S. Census Bureau for 2025. The latest data show that 2,294 buildings were permitted statewide. This represents a slight dip in building permits compared to the previous year, which had been steadily increasing since 2019. This decrease coincides with the wind down of federal pandemic-recovery fund investments in affordable housing developed through VHFA and other public agencies.  

The accuracy of building permit data affects federal funding into Vermont through programs such as Medicaid. Underreporting occurs disproportionately in rural areas of Vermont and causes large errors in local level permit counts and the larger decisions they inform.

When a municipality fails to report its building permit volume directly to the Census Bureau, the Census Bureau uses a mathematical "ratio-imputation" formula to estimate the missing data. This formula multiplies a town's old historical baseline by the current growth rates of other, active reporting cities across the broader New England region.

Imputing values for small towns using sparse, outdated data is highly volatile and frequently results in inaccurate local estimates. Approximately 50 Vermont municipalities did not submit a report last year about their building permits, according to analyses by the Vermont Center for Geographic Information Systems. This means that the permit estimates for these towns rely exclusively on the imputation method, subjecting them to error. If a town's last actively reported year happened to be unusually high or low, that single anomaly permanently skews the mathematical baseline used for decades of future government projections.

For example, Newport Town last reported actual data to the Census Bureau in 2002, reporting 41 permitted units. Because Newport stopped reporting after that, the Bureau's automated model began imputing its data based on broader New England housing creation data. These imputed estimates fluctuated wildly, peaking in 2015 with an estimate of 224 permitted units. That is 5.4 times higher than the last reported value and pushes the historical average to 51 units per year, higher than any of the actual data reported for this town. 

While some imputed figures skew artificially high, the inverse is equally damaging. Bristol's historical data shows significant year-to-year fluctuations. From 1996 to 2017, when Bristol was actively reporting, its actual permit volume ranged from 5 to 22 units, maintaining an average of 12 housing units per year. However, after Bristol stopped reporting in 2017, its estimates dropped due to the lack of updated local data, ranging from 7 to 1 unit. The decline in the number of units permitted per year, based on these estimates, reduced Bristol's recorded historical average to just 7 units per year.

In total, a little over half of Vermont's municipalities fully respond to the Census building permit survey, leaving the remaining towns split between partial data and no reporting:

Building permit data directly influences annual population estimates between decennial censuses. These mid-decade population counts dictate the allocation formulas for massive federal funding streams, including Medicaid. According to the report, "The High Cost of a Low Count," published by the Vermont Center for Geographic Information (VCGI), undercounting a single resident costs a Vermont community $2,266 annually in lost federal funding.

Reporting building permits is essential for accurate local estimates. When towns don't report permits, the Census Bureau estimates. When the Bureau guesses low, your community's official population estimate drops, and tax dollars are redirected to other states. Consistently reporting town-level permit data is essential to ensuring data accuracy and securing federal funding.

This post was written by staff from the Vermont Department of Housing and Community Development, the Vermont Center for Geographic Information Systems and the Vermont Housing Finance Agency.