Central Texas builders registered $647.7 million of new construction in the 30 days ending August 2 — 190 projects across Travis, Williamson, and Hays counties, totaling roughly 4.3 million square feet. According to ATX Things analysis of official Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation (TDLR) filings, the metro's growth is no longer just an Austin story: a third of the money is now landing in Cedar Park, Georgetown, Leander, and Kyle.
How much did Austin actually build last month?
Between July 3 and August 2, 2026, builders across the Austin metro registered 190 new construction projects with TDLR — the state agency that tracks accessibility compliance on nearly every non-residential building in Texas, making its tabs_projects table the cleanest available record of what's actually breaking ground. Combined, those filings carry an estimated cost of $647,748,971 and 4,338,250 square feet of new or renovated space.
That's down from July's $711 million reading, but the story underneath is the same: this is a rolling 30-day window, not a calendar month, so a handful of late-June/early-July filings roll off each time a new one lands. One large filing — the $80 million "900 West 23rd" tower in West Campus — was registered July 21 and appeared in both July's and this edition's windows; we're flagging it here rather than double-counting it as two separate scoops.
Construction employment in the Austin-Round Rock-Georgetown metro was up 6.6% year-over-year as of June 2026 (98,375 construction jobs), even as the median home list price fell 9.8% YoY to $473,500 — more crews building, not necessarily more expensive homes to show for it yet. (Source: FRED, via Zabalist's economy tracker.)
The 10 biggest projects filed this month
| Rank | Project | City | Cost | Sq Ft | Owner | Design firm |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 900 West 23rd | Austin (West Campus) | $80.0M | 365,000 | 900 West 23rd PO LLC | — |
| 2 | Aluna | Austin (Tandem Blvd) | $75.0M | 7,305 | SWVP Tandem Blvd LLC | Meeks + Partners |
| 3 | Life Time – Cedar Park | Cedar Park | $52.0M | 102,000 | RR Whitestone LP | VCBO |
| 4 | SUS3 SSD Facility | Georgetown | $48.0M | 248,687 | Amazon.com Services LLC | AECOM |
| 5 | UT MER B3 HVAC & Life Safety Systems | Austin | $46.5M | 101,247 | University of Texas at Austin | Kirksey Architecture |
| 6 | 2020 Bond: Substandard Streets, Johnny Morris Rd | Austin | $32.7M | 1,460,567* | City of Austin | CobbFendley & Associates |
| 7 | Texas Children's Hospital Austin – 5th Floor Fit-Out | Austin (Mueller) | $17.9M | 24,543 | Texas Children's Hospital | Stantec Architecture |
| 8 | Burlington – Kyle Park | Kyle | $16.5M | 20,957 | TWV NQ Kyle Land LLC | Architects Orange |
| 9 | Texas Monthly Interior Renovation | Austin | $15.0M | 35,722 | Swankienda Properties LLC | Maybe Sometimes Studio |
| 10 | Mission 42 Ventures | Austin | $14.0M | 25,948 | Schlosser Development | Perkins&Will |
*Item 6 is a City of Austin street-reconstruction bond project, not a building — its 1.46 million square feet of roadway accounts for a third of this month's total square footage. Excluding it, new building space filed this month is closer to 2.88 million square feet.
The #1 project sits blocks from the University of Texas campus, part of the wave of high-rise student housing still reshaping West Campus's skyline (see the crane-filled hero image above — that's the same stretch of downtown/UT skyline this filing sits within). #2, Aluna, is a smaller-footprint but high-cost filing on Tandem Boulevard near the Domain — its $75M valuation against just 7,305 square feet suggests a highly specialized build-out rather than a standard shell.
Where the money's actually going: Austin vs. the suburbs
📋Daily permit data from City of Austin
| City | Projects | Total Cost | Total Sq Ft |
|---|---|---|---|
| Austin | 114 | $431,384,499 | 3,037,458 |
| Cedar Park | 16 | $86,746,615 | 409,090 |
| Georgetown | 9 | $58,221,542 | 451,173 |
| Leander | 12 | $18,335,303 | 70,242 |
| Kyle | 3 | $16,656,028 | 117,694 |
| San Marcos | 5 | $13,249,745 | 28,347 |
| Hutto | 3 | $8,318,150 | 53,495 |
| Round Rock | 4 | $2,471,000 | 11,382 |
| Manor | 2 | $2,410,000 | 16,180 |
| Bee Cave | 3 | $2,364,266 | 59,289 |
| Buda | 3 | $2,275,000 | 14,560 |
| Taylor | 3 | $2,000,000 | 19,287 |
| Pflugerville | 4 | $1,470,000 | 8,506 |
| Dripping Springs | 1 | $500,000 | 4,448 |
| Liberty Hill | 2 | $480,000 | 17,797 |
| Lakeway | 2 | $238,000 | 3,891 |
| Wimberley | 1 | $200,000 | 9,000 |
| Creedmoor | 1 | $200,000 | 4,800 |
| Spicewood | 1 | $116,286 | 495 |
| Del Valle | 1 | $112,537 | 1,116 |
Austin proper still captures the majority — 66.6% of the dollars, on 60% of the project count — but Cedar Park alone registered $86.7 million across 16 projects, more than Georgetown, Leander, and every other suburb combined on a per-project basis. Add Georgetown's Amazon-anchored $58.2 million and Leander's 12 filings, and Williamson County alone accounts for $163.4 million of this month's total, over a quarter of the whole metro.
Who's actually building: the names behind the filings
Four names show up more than once in this window, and each tells a different story about what's driving Central Texas construction right now:
- Oakfield Ranch filed four separate buildings — "Axis 183" A, B, C, and D — at the same 1199 Fire Lane address in Cedar Park in a single week (July 8), totaling $21.76 million in new tilt-wall industrial shell space. That's a full business park landing in one filing batch, not a single building.
- The City of Austin itself is the owner of record on seven separate filings this month — $36.0 million combined — spanning street reconstruction, a Pedestrian Hybrid Beacon safety project on Cameron Road, and other civic infrastructure work.
- Red Design Studios, an office-interiors design firm, is attached to six of this month's filings — five of them tenant finish-outs for newly demised "CIELO Spec Suites" in a single Austin office building, plus an Office Evolution coworking expansion. Landlords are actively re-leasing and rebuilding out spec office suites even as the broader office market stays soft — a signal worth watching alongside next month's numbers.
- Kimley-Horn and Associates, the civil engineering firm, appears on five filings — mostly municipal and institutional site work, reflecting how much of the metro's construction pipeline is quietly civic rather than private.
The $380M filing that TDLR doesn't show yet
Not every major project shows up in the state TDLR data the moment it matters. Cross-referencing the City of Austin's own building-permit records for the same 30-day window surfaced a single filing bigger than anything in the table above: a $380 million building permit issued July 23 for Hays CISD's New High School #4, a 659,000-square-foot campus and stadium complex the district registered with TDLR back in October 2025 under a $396 million voter-approved bond. The city permit — covering the main academic building, a riser room, and stadium seating — is only now catching up to that money.
Before trusting any single permit valuation, we deduplicated the underlying city permit data — Austin's permit system stamps a project's full valuation on every phase/sub-permit it issues. The Hays CISD filing alone came through as three separate $380,000,000 permit rows (one per construction phase); counted naively, that's $1.14 billion for one project. We collapsed permits sharing the same valuation, contractor, and street number to one row per project before drawing any conclusion. Applied metro-wide to every permit ≥$100,000 filed this window, that same dedup method cut a raw $1.18 billion across 39 permit rows down to $421.4 million across 15 real projects — a reminder that raw permit totals should never be taken at face value.
What locals should know
- The headline TDLR number ($647.7M / 190 projects) is the cleanest available read — TDLR requires one registration per project, so unlike city permits it doesn't need the same phase-by-phase deduplication.
- A third of this month's total square footage is a street, not a building — the $32.7M Johnny Morris Road reconstruction bond project alone accounts for 1.46 million of the 4.34 million square feet reported.
- Suburban Williamson County is quietly outbuilding most of Travis County's smaller cities — Cedar Park and Georgetown combined ($145M) now rival entire quarters of prior Austin-only reporting.
- Full underlying data — every permit, every project, every filing — is public and searchable at <a href="https://zabalist.com/projects">zabalist.com/projects</a> and <a href="https://zabalist.com/permits">zabalist.com/permits</a>.
Method & sources
Primary source: Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation (TDLR) TABS project registrations, registered_date between 2026-07-03 and 2026-08-02, filtered to Travis, Williamson, and Hays counties and their incorporated cities (Austin, Cedar Park, Georgetown, Leander, Round Rock, Kyle, San Marcos, Hutto, Manor, Bee Cave, Buda, Taylor, Pflugerville, Dripping Springs, Liberty Hill, Lakeway, Wimberley, Creedmoor, Spicewood, Del Valle). 190 projects, one row per project (TDLR's own registration model, not summed from sub-permits). Secondary source: City of Austin building permits, issue_date in the same window, valuation ≥ $100,000, deduplicated by collapsing rows sharing identical valuation + contractor + street number (Austin's permit system stamps the full project valuation on every phase/sub-permit). Note on the window: this is a trailing 30-day read as of publish date, not a calendar month — projects near the boundary can appear in two consecutive editions; we flag repeats rather than re-report them as new. Map coordinates geocoded via the U.S. Census Bureau's public geocoder from each project's registered address. Economy context: FRED series via Zabalist's msa_economic_data, last updated 2026-07-27 (June 2026 observation).
Related: last month's <a href="https://austintexasthings.com/article/austin-development-report-july-2026">Austin Development Report (July 2026)</a> · <a href="https://austintexasthings.com/article/inside-the-junction-entertainment-district-the-insider-guide-to-georgetowns-massive-new-dining-entertainment-hub-arriving-in-2026">The Junction Entertainment District, Georgetown</a> · <a href="https://austintexasthings.com/article/inside-austins-2026-retail-boom-the-insider-guide-to-the-citys-new-wave-of-grocery-fashion-and-suburban-shopping-destinations">Inside Austin's 2026 Retail Boom</a> · explore the sector-level data yourself at <a href="https://zabalist.com/projects/multifamily">zabalist.com/projects/multifamily</a>.
FAQ
How much construction was permitted in Austin this month? Central Texas builders registered $647.7 million in new construction across 190 TDLR filings in the 30 days ending August 2, 2026 — about 4.3 million square feet across Travis, Williamson, and Hays counties.
What's the biggest construction project in Austin right now? By TDLR filing, it's the $80 million "900 West 23rd" tower in West Campus. By raw city permit valuation, a $380 million Hays CISD high school and stadium complex is larger, though that project was originally registered with the state back in October 2025.
Is Austin's suburbs building more than the city itself? Not yet in dollar terms — Austin still captures 66.6% of this window's construction spending — but Williamson County (Cedar Park, Georgetown, Leander, Round Rock, Hutto, Taylor) alone accounts for over a quarter of the metro total, and Cedar Park's per-project average now outpaces most of Travis County's smaller cities.
Where can I look up a specific building permit or developer myself? Zabalist, ATX Things' sister data platform, hosts the full searchable database at <a href="https://zabalist.com/permits">zabalist.com/permits</a>, <a href="https://zabalist.com/projects">zabalist.com/projects</a>, and a searchable <a href="https://zabalist.com/directory/developers">developer directory</a>.
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