New dwelling statistics

Land & Property Services (LPS) receives information from Building Control in each council in Northern Ireland (NI). This information contains the number of recorded new dwellings (houses and apartments) started and completed.

The published statistics are a count of the number of starts and completions inspections carried out by Building Control officers in each council. Due to government measures to reduce the spread of Covid-19, physical inspections by Building Control offices across Northern Ireland ceased in the second half of March 2020, although some inspections were carried out virtually. All building control offices supplied data for the period Apr - Jun 2020, therefore the number of inspections recorded for Q2 2020 will represent an accurate count, but may be lower than otherwise expected.

Latest statistics

From July to September 2020, 1,655 new dwellings were started and 1,831 new dwellings were completed in Northern Ireland.

The number of new dwellings started and completed, by private owners and housing associations, each quarter from Q1 2005 to Q3 2020 can be viewed in the tables below:

Future updates

New dwelling statistics will be updated quarterly in February, May, August and November.

Figures for October - December 2020 are scheduled to be released on 17 February 2021.

Page last updated: 18 November 2020 

Revisions to published statistics

It may be necessary to revise the quarterly figures if further starts or completions are reported to Council Building Control following the submission of data to LPS. Any revisions to the figures published in the previous quarter will be detailed on the Notes page of the latest tables.

Quality assurance

An assessment of the quality of the administrative data used to produce the Northern Ireland new dwellings statistics can be viewed using the link below:

Related statistics

Contact us

Responsible Statistician: Ciara Cunningham


Related to New dwelling statistics

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Access to information

How to request information from the Department of Finance including Freedom of Information (FOI) and the use of our Publication Scheme.

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