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

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 CMA — a larger geography than the city, and there is no city-level equivalent in this program. The annual figures on the site are sums of the twelve published monthly values, stated as such. (RESEARCH.md previously pointed at table 34-10-0126-01 for this; that table is province-level only.) 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 publishes an "Active Permit Applications (2018 to Present)" dataset on its open-data portal, but one listing showed its contents ending in December 2023 — an observation not re-verified as of August 18, 2026 — and the actual refresh cadence has to be confirmed before a permit series can publish; a stale dataset that looks live is worse than none. The 2026 figures are also absent above: the series only carries complete years, and 2026 is not one yet.

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.