NYC New-Building Filings Are Up 23% Year Over Year, DOB Data Show

New York City’s new-building filings are up sharply on a year-over-year basis, backing up a report that the city’s development pipeline is recovering. But the same city filings show the most recent three months barely moved from where they stood a year ago, meaning the rebound is not a steady climb, it is concentrated in a handful of outsized filing months.

Why it matters

The Real Deal reported on September 21 that New York’s new-development pipeline “could be bouncing back.” We pulled every New Building job filing in the city’s DOB NOW dataset ourselves to test that against the underlying paperwork rather than take the framing on faith. The year-over-year trend confirms it: developers filed more new buildings, for more units, than they did the year before. That is a real signal for anyone tracking construction pricing, land appetite or contractor backlog into 2027. The caveat is in the shape of the growth. A trailing-12-month total can be lifted by a few large months even while the pace at the end of the window has stalled, and that is what the DOB data show here.

The numbers

Filings, verdict up: 1,960 vs 1,597 a year earlier, up 23 percent. Proposed dwelling units, verdict up more: 53,631 vs 31,949, up 68 percent. That gap between the two, filing counts up 23 percent while units are up 68 percent, means the average new-building filing has gotten bigger, not just more common.

Set against that, the trailing three months (June 22 to September 22, 2026) counted 479 new building filings proposing 13,076 units, essentially flat against the same window a year ago: 477 filings and 13,299 units. The 12-month total is being carried by specific months rather than sustained momentum: December 2025 alone filed 203 new buildings for 6,425 units, and March 2026 filed 272 new buildings for 12,019 units, nearly a quarter of the entire year’s unit total in one month. By borough, Brooklyn and Queens filed the most buildings (470 and 619 over the trailing year), while Manhattan and the Bronx filed fewer but far larger ones, Manhattan’s 90 filings proposed 9,443 units, more than double the 3,386 units from 63 filings a year earlier.

What’s next

Watch whether October, historically a filing month, breaks the flat pattern the last quarter set, since a fourth straight flat quarter would undercut the bounce-back read even as the annual comparison stays positive. The single largest filing behind the March 2026 spike, a 1,458-unit Manhattan job filed March 26, is worth tracking through DOB’s approval queue on its own: a project that size moving to permit would do more for 2027 completions than a hundred small filings. For more on what is filing and breaking ground across the five boroughs, see The American Developer’s New York coverage.

Methodology: figures are from the NYC Open Data DOB NOW job filings dataset, filtered to job_type = 'New Building', deduplicated by job number across every filing-status record to avoid counting the same project’s amendments and permit stages more than once, then bucketed by each job’s earliest filing date. Query and dataset.