Burlington publishes one machine-readable record of what it is approving: its building permits. The figures below are computed from that record and refreshed as the city updates it. A permit is a proposal that cleared review, not a finished building, and every section says which year it is describing and links the dataset it is derived from.
2025 is the most recent complete year in the record. 2026 is already at 849 permits with the year still running, so it is shown below but never compared against a full one. Approved homes moved from 108 in 2024 to 323 in 2025, about 3 times as many. Units swing on a handful of apartment applications, so a single year is a decision by a builder and a committee, not a trend.
| Year | Permits | Homes approved | Declared value | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2022part year | 194 | 8 | $17.6M | ||
| 2023 | 1,212 | 97 | $376.6M | ||
| 2024 | 1,430 | 108 | $280.4M | ||
| 2025 | 1,335 | 323 | $377.6M | ||
| 2026part year | 849 | 77 | $276.9M |
Read the part years carefully. The dataset begins on September 6, 2022 and runs to August 25, 2026, so 2022 and 2026 cover only part of a calendar year. The 194 permits shown for 2022 are roughly four months of records. That is not a quiet year, and the jump to the year after it is not a surge in building. The rows are marked rather than dropped, because a reader deserves to see the whole record and be told which part of it is not comparable.
Source: City of Burlington, Building Permits · counts only permits carrying an issue date, so an application still in review is not counted as a decision · declared construction value is the cost written on the application by the applicant: it is not market value, not a sale price, and not money the city spent.
Permits are spread fairly evenly across the six wards. The homes are not. Ward 2 accounts for 180 of the 323 residential units approved in 2025, about 56 per cent of the city's total, on 226 permits. Ward 4 issued the most permits of any ward (312) and approved 35 units: a ward can be busy with renovations and add almost no housing.
| Ward | Permits | Homes approved | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ward 1 | 261 | 29 | ||
| Ward 2 | 226 | 180 | ||
| Ward 3 | 182 | 28 | ||
| Ward 4 | 312 | 35 | ||
| Ward 5 | 177 | 25 | ||
| Ward 6 | 177 | 26 |
Source: City of Burlington, Building Permits · ward as recorded on the permit · 2025 is used because it is the newest complete year; a part year would understate every ward at once.
The city records a work description on each permit. These are the commonest, in the city's own wording. Most of what Burlington approves is people changing the house they already live in.
A backwater valve is a one-way flap on a home's sewer line that stops sewage being pushed back up into a basement when the municipal system is overloaded. Installing one takes a plumbing permit, which is why it appears in this list at all, and it is the only entry here that describes protecting a house rather than changing one.
Source: City of Burlington, Building Permits · work descriptions are the city's own field values, reproduced unedited, abbreviations included.
Burlington is a lower-tier municipality inside Halton Region. Public health, paramedics, housing and social services are run by the Region, not the city, so the figures that carry Hamilton's page have no Burlington equivalent to read: there is no city homelessness count, no city overdose rate and no city-published crime table. Halton Region publishes its health statistics as reports rather than as data, and Halton Regional Police publish releases rather than a dataset.
That is a real gap, and it is stated here rather than filled. Nothing on this page is Hamilton's number relabelled and nothing is estimated. When the Region publishes a series that can be read the same way, it will appear here with its source attached, exactly like everything above. Until then, what Burlington itself publishes is what this page shows.
Every figure above was derived on 2026-08-26 from the city's live permit service and is recomputed each time the dataset is refreshed. Nothing on this page is typed in by hand.