Austin's metro area registered $1.64 billion in new construction across 237 projects and roughly 5.4 million square feet of buildings with the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation (TDLR) between September 3 and October 2, 2026. According to ATX Things analysis of state and city filings, Austin, Texas still has the most projects — but the two biggest checks went to a data center in Hutto and a TxDOT rebuild of I-35, not to a downtown tower.
How much did Austin's metro area register in new construction this month?
TDLR project registrations dated September 3 through October 2, 2026 (the latest registration in the data is October 1) show 237 projects worth $1,639,291,950 across Travis, Williamson, and Hays counties. Of those, 81 are ground-up new construction, 150 are renovations or alterations, and 6 are additions to existing buildings.
Two filings dominate. A $550 million data-center building in Hutto is 34% of the entire total on its own. A $407.8 million TxDOT reconstruction of I-35 through North-Central Austin is another 25%. Set the I-35 highway project aside — it is public road work, not a building — and the metro total is $1.23 billion. We show both numbers so you can pick the definition you trust.
Method note (read this before the numbers): TDLR's estimated_cost is filed once per registered project, which makes it the cleanest spine for a metro total. The 5.4 million square feet figure excludes three entries whose filed square footage is not building floor area: the TxDOT I-35 filing (479,833 sq ft listed for a highway), a Pflugerville ISD tennis-court project listing 788,843 sq ft on a $500,000 budget, and an "Airco Phase III" filing in Round Rock listing 500,000 sq ft on $3 million. Their dollar values are kept in every cost total. Three filings carry a city label that disagrees with their address or owner — "Austin Avenue Pedestrian Bridges" (filed by the City of Georgetown), an Alterra Parkway project labeled "Trent" (the Domain, ZIP 78758), and an Industrial Blvd project labeled "Travis" (ZIP 78745) — and we placed them in Georgetown, Austin, and Austin respectively.
The 10 biggest projects registered this month
| # | Project | City | Est. Cost | Sq. Ft. | Owner | Design firm |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Skybox Hutto 4 – Core/Shell (data center) | Hutto | $550,000,000 | 846,300 | Hutto Data Center Campus, LLC | Corgan Associates Inc. |
| 2 | IH 35 reconstruction, US 290 E to MLK Blvd | Austin | $407,791,049 | n/a (highway) | TxDOT Austin District | Volkert Inc. |
| 3 | Leander High School Modernization, Phase 2A | Leander | $68,000,000 | 128,506 | Leander ISD | Pfluger Architects |
| 4 | H-E-B New Store – Buda | Buda | $61,249,595 | 132,563 | H-E-B LP | not listed |
| 5 | Hayden Grove Northline | Leander | $50,000,000 | 324,500 | Northline Leander Development Co., LP | InSite Architects and Planners |
| 6 | 901 E 5th – Levels 1–4 Refresh | Austin | $39,000,000 | 29,460 | Plaza Saltillo TOD, LP | Interior Architects |
| 7 | Kia of Central Austin | Austin | $36,000,000 | 206,601 | CILP Austin II LLC | MBL Architecture |
| 8 | Lehman Road Pump Station Improvements | Kyle | $24,000,000 | 13,788 | City of Kyle | not listed |
| 9 | Headwaters East Commercial | Dripping Springs | $20,000,000 | 300,000 | Oryx Land Holding LLC | LA Architects, LLC |
| 10 | Signature Aviation Terminal Project for NetJets | Austin | $19,500,000 | 8,000 | Signature Flight Support, LLC | HDg Architecture |
Map: markers placed from the filings' recorded coordinates, checked against Google geocoding of each address. Base map © Google.
What is being built in Hutto — and why did it outspend Austin?
The Hutto filing, registered September 30, describes a one-story data center of about 844,300 square feet with a roughly 20,000-square-foot attached office, scheduled to start January 20, 2027 and finish October 30, 2028. The project name, "Skybox Hutto 4," suggests it is another building on Skybox Datacenters' Hutto campus, which the company lists as PowerCampus Austin: 600 MW on 160 acres. TDLR's record names the owner as Hutto Data Center Campus, LLC; it does not name the end tenant.
Add Hutto's other eight filings and the city registered $570.6 million this month. Austin proper registered $675.6 million across 120 projects — but $407.8 million of that is the TxDOT highway. Without it, Austin's 119 projects total $267.8 million, and Hutto's nine projects registered about 2.1 times as much. For scale: 846,300 square feet is roughly 15 football fields of floor area under one roof. Track the sector live on Zabalist's data-center projects page.
Where the money is landing, by city
| City | Projects | Total Valuation | Sq. Ft. (buildings) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Austin | 120 | $675,582,175 | 2,178,334 |
| Hutto | 9 | $570,599,439 | 1,156,802 |
| Leander | 23 | $135,922,630 | 552,955 |
| Buda | 2 | $61,649,595 | 133,413 |
| Georgetown | 15 | $44,757,220 | 114,111 |
| Kyle | 7 | $33,172,579 | 50,079 |
| Round Rock | 17 | $25,334,180 | 273,118 |
| Dripping Springs | 4 | $24,275,000 | 320,393 |
| Taylor | 4 | $20,615,000 | 60,275 |
| Liberty Hill | 6 | $15,207,000 | 209,421 |
| Cedar Park | 9 | $15,048,536 | 184,570 |
| San Marcos | 3 | $6,350,000 | 23,586 |
| Manor | 3 | $3,300,000 | 13,138 |
| Pflugerville | 7 | $2,692,582 | 28,267 |
| Manchaca | 2 | $1,600,000 | 5,934 |
| Del Valle | 1 | $1,000,000 | 49,049 |
| Lago Vista | 1 | $876,014 | 5,980 |
| Jarrell | 1 | $850,000 | 6,445 |
| Cedar Creek | 1 | $200,000 | 7,100 |
| Wimberley | 1 | $140,000 | 2,000 |
| West Lake Hills | 1 | $120,000 | 1,350 |
Leander is the quiet runner-up: 23 projects and $135.9 million, led by Leander ISD's $68 million high-school modernization and the $50 million, 324,500-square-foot Hayden Grove Northline filing. Georgetown, which led the suburbs last month, drops to $44.8 million. For the longer Georgetown story, see our piece on The Junction entertainment district.
Who's actually building right now?
A few names show up more than once, which is the clearest signal of who is actively expanding:
| Owner / design firm | Filings | Combined value | What was filed |
|---|---|---|---|
| H-E-B | 3 | $61,958,595 | The $61.2 million Buda store, plus curbside remodels in Austin ($190,000) and Hutto ($519,000) |
| Costco Wholesale | 4 | $695,000 | Fuel-facility generator additions in Pflugerville, Georgetown, Cedar Park, and Kyle |
| S. Tipton Studio (design firm) | 10 | $7,177,122 | Tenant buildouts, mostly Austin office suites |
| Interior Architects (design firm) | 3 | $39,460,000 | Led by the $39 million refresh of 901 E 5th near Plaza Saltillo |
Retail is quietly the steadiest builder: beyond H-E-B's Buda store, Walmart filed a $12.2 million new store in Liberty Hill and Kia of Central Austin filed a 206,601-square-foot, $36 million dealership near I-35 and Chevy Chase Drive. Our 2026 retail boom guide covers the wider wave.
The NetJets filing is not new to this desk — we covered the same terminal when it first surfaced in our airport terminal story. TDLR now lists it as a $19.5 million, 8,000-square-foot project from Signature Flight Support.
What did the city's own permit data show?
Austin's permit system stamps a project's full valuation on every sub-permit tied to it. Summing the raw feed without deduplicating inflates the total several times over. A related caution: the permit feed's sync status was flagged "error" on October 1, and the newest permit issue date in our data is September 29, so this cross-check may be missing the last few days of the window.
City of Austin building permits issued September 3–29, 2026 with a stated valuation of $500,000 or more returned 59 rows totaling $129,376,228 raw. Collapsing rows that share the same valuation, contractor, and street number leaves 10 distinct projects worth $45,929,614 — about 65% lower.
| Address | Valuation | Contractor | Scope |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1103 W 24th St | $17,662,614 | OGH Development | New shell of a 7-story multifamily building |
| 6620 Ed Bluestein Blvd | $10,067,000 | DMJ Construction Services LLC | New multifamily, 3 stories of residences over 2 stories of parking |
| 4611 Tilley St | $9,000,000 | Zapalac/Reed Construction Company | Two-story community arts educational building |
| 5217 Winnebago Ln, Bldg 2 | $3,000,000 | TG Edwards Construction Inc. | New 4-story R&D office |
| 620 W Slaughter Ln | $650,000 | Wurzel Builders, Ltd. | New 6,261 sq ft convenience store |
Of the other five distinct projects, three carry round $1,000,000 valuations on structured parking, a detached garage, and a carport, one lists $2.05 million for a 240-square-foot dumpster enclosure, and one is a $500,000 change-of-use addition at 1500 San Jacinto Blvd. The round and implausible figures look like filing conventions rather than real costs, so we left them out of the table. The West Campus filing at 1103 W 24th St is the one to watch alongside our coverage of West Campus tower filings.
What locals should know
Registration is the start of the paper trail. The Hutto data center's filing lists a January 2027 start and an October 2028 finish; the I-35 filing lists a February 2027 start and a February 2032 completion. Cranes follow filings by months, not days.
You can search every project, permit, and developer yourself: Zabalist's project database, its permit tracker, and its developer directory are the public home of this data. The multifamily sector is at zabalist.com/projects/multifamily. For the broader backdrop, see our Austin economy tracker.
Method & sources
Primary spine: TDLR TABS project registrations (registered_date September 3 – October 2, 2026; latest registration October 1), Travis, Williamson, and Hays counties, 237 projects, no records excluded from cost totals. Secondary: City of Austin building permits issued September 3–29, 2026 with valuation of $500,000 or more, deduplicated on valuation + contractor + street number. Both datasets are tracked by ATX Things' sister platform Zabalist. Project details for the Hutto and I-35 filings come from the TDLR records; Skybox's campus size is from Skybox Datacenters; the I-35 filing matches the University segment of TxDOT's I-35 Capital Express Central project. Previous editions: September 2026, August 2026, and July 2026. This window starts the day after September's ended.
FAQ
How much new construction did Austin's metro area register in the last 30 days? TDLR registrations dated September 3 – October 2, 2026 total $1.64 billion across 237 projects in Travis, Williamson, and Hays counties, about 5.4 million square feet of buildings. Excluding the $407.8 million TxDOT I-35 reconstruction, the total is $1.23 billion.
What is the biggest project filed this month? A $550 million, roughly 846,300-square-foot data-center building in Hutto, registered September 30, 2026 under the name Skybox Hutto 4.
Did Hutto really outspend Austin? Yes, once the TxDOT I-35 highway project is set aside: Hutto's nine projects total $570.6 million versus $267.8 million for Austin's other 119 projects. Including the highway, Austin leads at $675.6 million.
Why do city permit totals and TDLR totals look so different? Austin's permit system stamps a project's full valuation on every sub-permit, so raw sums inflate; deduplicated, this month's city permits fall from $129.4 million to $45.9 million. TDLR registers each project once.
Where can I look up a specific project or developer? Zabalist's project database and developer directory are the public home of the same data.
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