August 2026: total approvals fell 6.1% to 16,953 in seasonally adjusted terms.
In the raw original terms, 16,968 against a revised 19,277 in July — down 12%.
🏠And here is what the headline hides. Whilst house approvals are mostly holding up, the entire fall is units – down 21.2% seasonally adjusted and 24% in original terms.
Units remain far harder to stack up across the country, and especially against a backdrop of established house prices dropping at a rate not seen since the early 1980s (Cotality Australia).
Calendar 2026 is running at 17,282 approvals a month, an annualised 207,000, the strongest year for #dwellingapprovals since 2021. But still 18% below the 21,053 a month the #housingaccord requires.
Even a five–year high is nowhere near enough.
26 months into the Accord, the metric that counts is homes built — which means the relevant approvals period began 1 July 2023. Thirty-eight months in, 594,031 dwellings have been approved, against the 800,000 required.
🧮That is a shortfall of almost 206,000 dwellings.
On the aggressive 95% Approval:Completion Ratio, the remaining 22 months need 30,415 approvals every month. That is 75% above the past year’s average of 17,349.
In December 2025 I put the catch-up needed at 64%. Thing are going the wrong way.
In July 2025 I said it was hard to see a path far beyond 850,000 dwelling completions. By December 2025, improving trends had me revising that to closer (but still below) 900,000.
Those gains are now being handed back.
📉With construction costs still climbing and the cash rate just lifted to 4.60% – a 15–year high – expect approvals and commencements to fall through the balance of this year and well into the first half of 2027. Just exceeding 850,000 is back to the best case scenario.
🤔Put simply: Supply does not respond to a #housingtarget. It responds to settings and interventions that improve #feasibility.
Yet, at every turn, we have governments making decisions that only seem to make it harder and more expensive, not easier, to deliver new homes.
Fewer homes will mean fewer jobs, weaker economies, and, critically, a generation priced out of home ownership by poor decisions that no one will own.