The National Housing Accord asks New South Wales to complete 377,000 new homes in the five years to June 2029. Two of those five years are now behind us. In April we argued that the constraint on regional housing is delivery capacity, not demand. This piece puts numbers beside that argument for the region we build in.
We looked at Australian Bureau of Statistics building approvals for the two largest council areas on the Mid North Coast, MidCoast and Port Macquarie-Hastings, for the first two financial years of the Accord, and compared them with the state.
The numbers
Dwellings approved, all residential building, by financial year.
| 2024–25 | 2025–26 | Change | |
|---|---|---|---|
| MidCoast | 512 | 503 | −1.8% |
| Port Macquarie-Hastings | 599 | 501 | −16.4% |
| Two councils combined | 1,111 | 1,004 | −9.6% |
| New South Wales | 49,488 | 52,411 | +5.9% |
The state moved forward. The Mid North Coast moved back. Across the two council areas, approvals fell by about one home in ten while New South Wales as a whole rose by about six per cent.
Houses looked steady. They were not.
The more useful finding sits one level down. Split the same approvals into detached houses and everything else, meaning townhouses, duplexes, units and other attached dwellings.
| Two councils combined | 2024–25 | 2025–26 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Houses approved | 790 | 789 | Flat |
| Other residential approved | 321 | 215 | −33.0% |
On a count of dwellings, detached houses did not move. 790 one year, 789 the next. In MidCoast they appeared to rise, from 381 to 439, while Port Macquarie-Hastings eased from 409 to 350. Medium density fell by a third, and in MidCoast it halved, from 131 to 64.
But a dwelling count can be carried by a single large project. A lifestyle village or staged estate approved in one go can add a hundred or more houses to a council’s figures in a month. In February 2026, MidCoast recorded 157 houses from just 20 building jobs. So we also counted the jobs themselves. A new house building job is one approval to build, however many homes it holds, which makes it the closer measure of how many individual homes local builders are being asked to build.
| New house building jobs | 2024–25 | 2025–26 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| MidCoast | 308 | 263 | −14.6% |
| Port Macquarie-Hastings | 327 | 292 | −10.7% |
| Two councils combined | 635 | 555 | −12.6% |
| New South Wales | 20,048 | 22,211 | +10.8% |
That changes the picture. The number of individual house jobs across the two councils fell by about one in eight, while across New South Wales it rose by about one in nine. The steady house count was a small number of large projects standing in for a few dozen ordinary homes that were not approved.
What we think this shows
Approvals are not completions, and two councils are not a region. With those cautions stated, the pattern is consistent with what Wattle Court Mid-Coast, the Group’s residential builder, sees on the ground across Taree, Port Macquarie, Forster, Wauchope and Gloucester.
The everyday house pipeline is shrinking while the state’s grows. Detached homes on the Mid North Coast, whether new home builds, custom homes on difficult rural and coastal blocks, or knock down rebuilds in established streets, are delivered one at a time by small local builders. Eighty fewer of those jobs in a year is a meaningful loss in a region this size. Approval figures alone cannot say how much of that is households unable to proceed and how much is builders unable to take the work. In April we argued that capacity is the binding constraint in regional NSW. These figures are consistent with that reading. They do not prove it.
Large projects are doing more of the lifting. Villages and staged estates are real housing and the region needs them. But they arrive in lumps, they serve a narrower group of buyers, and they can make a council’s totals look healthier than the market for an ordinary family home actually is.
Medium density is where regional delivery is weakest. Townhouses and small apartment buildings need a different kind of builder, a different kind of finance and a larger balance sheet than a single house does. Those businesses are scarce in the regions. When costs rise or pre-sales slow, these are the projects that stop first. A one-third fall in a single year suggests that is what happened.
This is the diverse, well-located housing that policy is asking for. The housing that planning reform is designed to encourage in regional centres is precisely the category that went backwards.
One target, no scorecard
There is also a measurement problem. The NSW Government has set five-year completion targets for 43 councils across Greater Sydney, the Illawarra-Shoalhaven, the Central Coast, the Lower Hunter and Greater Newcastle. Every other council in the state, including MidCoast and Port Macquarie-Hastings, sits inside a single collective target of 55,000 homes for regional NSW.
A shared target has a practical consequence. No regional council has a number of its own to be measured against, so nobody can say whether the Mid North Coast is ahead or behind. The figures above are our attempt at the scorecard that does not otherwise exist.
For context, the state’s own housing supply dashboard reported 77,999 homes completed across New South Wales since 1 July 2024 when we accessed it in September 2026. That is roughly a fifth of the 377,000 target with two fifths of the time gone. Meeting the Accord requires about 75,400 completions a year. Last financial year New South Wales approved 52,411.
A note on July
The first month of the new financial year shows MidCoast approving 281 dwellings in July 2026 alone, 261 of them houses. That is more than half a normal year in a single month, and it came from just 34 house building jobs, which means one very large project accounts for most of it. It is a genuine approval, the ABS revises recent months, and a month is not a trend. It is also the reason we now track building jobs alongside dwellings. We will watch whether it becomes homes.
What would move the number
If the constraint is capacity, the responses that matter are the ones that add capacity.
- Keep the builders the region already has. Every insolvency removes delivery capacity that took a decade to form. An established local builder with a body of completed homes, a stable team and long trade relationships is the scarcest asset in regional housing, and the hardest to replace.
- Grow regional medium-density capability. The gap in the data is a gap in the industry. Procurement, finance and planning settings that help established regional house builders step up to townhouse and small multi-dwelling projects would address the category that is actually falling. So would making detached delivery more repeatable, through proven home designs and house and land packages that shorten the path from approval to slab.
- Give regional councils their own numbers. A target nobody owns is a target nobody is accountable for. Publishing council-level progress for regional NSW would cost little and clarify a great deal.
For households, the practical reading is simple. Builder capacity on the Mid North Coast is finite, and lead times reflect it. Anyone planning to build in the next two years is better served by starting the conversation early, whether by walking through the Taree display home or talking to a local builder about their block.
The figures are now kept current, month by month and for all six Mid North Coast councils, in the Mid North Coast Housing Tracker, which updates automatically from the ABS. Further analysis will be published through the Newsroom.
Sources and method
Approval figures are from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, Building Approvals, Australia, Local Government Area series, extracted through the ABS Data API in September 2026. Dwelling figures count the number of dwelling units approved, all sectors, total work, summed across the twelve months of each financial year. Building job figures count new house jobs valued at $50,000 or more, all sectors. “Other residential” is total residential less houses. The ABS publishes the council area as Mid-Coast. Recent months are subject to revision.
Targets are from the NSW Department of Planning, Housing and Infrastructure, Housing targets and its frequently asked questions. Statewide completions are from the department’s housing supply data.
Journalists and researchers are welcome to use these figures with attribution to CALDON™ Group. For the underlying extract, or for comment, contact media@caldon.com.au.