Latest data August 2026 Source ABS Building Approvals Checked 21 October 2026

1,956

Dwellings approved across the Mid North Coast in the latest twelve months

+21.5%

Change on the twelve months before

+7.3%

New South Wales over the same period

+1.3%

New house building jobs, the steadier measure. New South Wales: +13.0%

Approvals by month

Dwellings approved each month across the six council areas combined. In a regional market a single large approval can move a month sharply, so read the trend rather than the spike.

HousesTownhouses, duplexes, units and other residential

Houses against everything else

Latest twelve months (Sept 2025 to Aug 2026) against the twelve months before, six council areas combined.

Mid North Coast	Prior 12 months	Latest 12 months	Change
Houses	1,140	1,471	+29.0%
Other residential	470	485	+3.2%
All dwellings	1,610	1,956	+21.5%

Council by council

All dwellings approved, latest twelve months against the twelve months before. These are whole council areas, not towns. MidCoast takes in Taree, Forster-Tuncurry, Gloucester, Old Bar, Hallidays Point and Tea Gardens, and is the most populous of the six, so its totals sit alongside Port Macquarie-Hastings and above Coffs Harbour. The last column adjusts for population.

Council area	Population	Prior 12 months	Latest 12 months	Change	Houses	Other	Per 1,000 residents
MidCoast	99,448	427	751	+75.9%	680	71	7.6
Port Macquarie-Hastings	92,432	577	551	−4.5%	360	191	6.0
Kempsey	31,950	126	144	+14.3%	83	61	4.5
Nambucca Valley	21,237	116	109	−6.0%	101	8	5.1
Bellingen	13,348	43	41	−4.7%	37	4	3.1
Coffs Harbour	82,109	321	360	+12.1%	210	150	4.4
Mid North Coast	340,524	1,610	1,956	+21.5%	1,471	485	5.7
New South Wales		49,824	53,443	+7.3%	25,614	27,829

House building jobs

Dwelling counts can be moved by one large project. The number of new house building jobs is steadier, because a village or estate approved in one go counts as a single job however many homes it holds. It is the closer measure of how many individual homes local builders are being asked to build. Latest twelve months against the twelve months before.

New house building jobs	Prior 12 months	Latest 12 months	Change
MidCoast	275	273	−0.7%
Port Macquarie-Hastings	328	296	−9.8%
Kempsey	65	73	+12.3%
Nambucca Valley	61	100	+63.9%
Bellingen	38	31	−18.4%
Coffs Harbour	190	196	+3.2%
Mid North Coast	957	969	+1.3%
New South Wales	20,081	22,695	+13.0%

Large single approvals

Months where a council's approved houses outnumbered its house building jobs by 25 or more. Each holds at least one large project lodged as a single job, such as a lifestyle or retirement village or a staged estate. They are genuine approvals, and they explain most of the spikes in the chart above.

Month	Council area	Houses approved	House building jobs
July 2026	MidCoast	261	34
February 2026	MidCoast	157	20
December 2025	MidCoast	51	25
July 2025	Nambucca Valley	43	3
July 2024	MidCoast	87	38
July 2024	Coffs Harbour	59	13

By financial year

The Accord is measured in financial years. The current year is shown to date. 3,976 dwellings have been approved across the six council areas since the Accord began in July 2024.

Financial year	Mid North Coast	Houses	Other	New South Wales
2024–25	1,721	1,212	509	49,488
2025–26	1,663	1,275	388	52,410
2026–27 (2 months)	592	435	157	9,244

What the tracker is for

The NSW Government has set five-year housing completion targets for 43 councils. Every other council, including all six on this page, sits inside a single collective target of 55,000 homes for regional NSW. A shared target means no regional council is measured on its own. We built this tracker so that the Mid North Coast can be.

Our reading of the first two years is in Two Years Into the Housing Accord, the Mid North Coast Is Approving Fewer Homes, and the argument behind it is in The Constraint on Regional NSW Housing Isn't Demand. The short version is that the number of individual house jobs taken on by local builders has been falling while the state's has been rising, that a few large projects can hide that in the dwelling totals, and that the housing the region is shortest of is the medium density that few regional builders are set up to deliver.

Method

Figures are the number of dwelling units approved, all sectors, total work (new dwellings plus those created through alterations and conversions), from the Australian Bureau of Statistics series Building Approvals, Australia, Local Government Area data, retrieved through the ABS Data API. House building jobs are new house jobs valued at $50,000 or more. Population is the ABS estimated resident population at 30 June 2025. "Other residential" is total residential less houses. The Mid North Coast is taken as the MidCoast, Port Macquarie-Hastings, Kempsey, Nambucca Valley, Bellingen and Coffs Harbour council areas. The ABS publishes MidCoast as Mid-Coast.

Approvals are not completions. They are the earliest reliable signal of what will be built, and the only one published monthly at council level. The ABS revises recent months, so figures on this page can change after first release. The page checks the ABS daily and needs no manual updating. Housing targets are from the NSW Department of Planning, Housing and Infrastructure, Housing targets.

Using these figures

Journalists, councils and researchers are welcome to use this page with attribution. Source data is published by the ABS under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence.

CALDON™ Group, Mid North Coast Housing Tracker, data to August 2026. https://caldon.com.au/mid-north-coast-housing-tracker

For comment or the underlying extract, contact media@caldon.com.au.