Housing starts and completions

How much housing actually gets built here, year by year. One thing before the numbers: these cover the Barrie census metropolitan area, which reaches beyond the city, because that is the only geography CMHC reports.

Starts and completions

Housing starts and completions, Barrie CMA, by year

Starts Completions

Dwelling units, Barrie CMA, annual sums of CMHC's published monthly figures.

A start and a completion are different moments in a building's life, which is why the same year's two bars need not agree.

Source: Statistics Canada table 34-10-0154-01 — CMHC housing starts, under construction and completions in selected census metropolitan areas, monthly (Barrie CMA rows), Statistics Canada / Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation.

Original document. CMHC reports the Barrie census metropolitan area (CMA), a larger area than the city; this program has no city-level equivalent. The site's annual figures are sums of the twelve published monthly values, and are labelled as such. Retrieved August 9, 2026.

The two series tell one story on a lag: the start surge of 2021–2022 (3,044 starts in 2022, the highest in the series) became the completion peak of 2023–2024, and the start collapse since — 802 in 2025, the lowest full year in the series after 2019's 784 — is the completion shortfall of the next council term. Anyone promising housing outcomes for 2027 and 2028 is largely describing decisions already made.

Building permits — the third moment in a building's life, before either of these — are not yet on this page. The City's open-data map service does carry an "Issued Building Permits 2018 - Present" layer, and it is current — on October 7, 2026 its newest permit was issued October 2 — but it holds only 4,942 records for nine years, far too few for every permit the City issues, so it reads as a snapshot of permits still open rather than a history. Until the City says how closed permits are kept, a yearly series from it would undercount every past year; a dataset that looks complete and is not is worse than none. The 2026 figures are also absent above: the series only carries complete years, and 2026 is not one yet.

Source: Issued Building Permits 2018 - Present (open-data map service layer), City of Barrie.

Original document. Queried October 7, 2026: 4,942 records, status dates from January 9, 2018 to October 2, 2026, statuses "Issued"/"Active". Too few for a complete permit history; how closed permits are kept is unconfirmed. Retrieved October 7, 2026.

Common questions

How much housing is being built in Barrie?

The year-by-year record of housing starts and completions is charted on this page — with one caution stated up front: the figures cover the Barrie census metropolitan area, which reaches beyond the city, because that is the only geography CMHC reports.

Is Barrie meeting its housing targets?

The province's own scorecard is the measure — see the housing issue page for the 23,000-homes pledge and how the annual targets have fared.