Twelve thousand, four hundred and seventy-three building permits got filed across the five boroughs in the past 30 days, and the overwhelming majority of them have nothing to do with a new building going up.

Break the filings down by type and alterations run the table. There were 9,225 straight Alterations, another 986 Alteration COs — a certificate-of-occupancy change bundled into the job — and 367 more filed as ALT-CO, meaning new work built around existing structural elements left standing. Add those three buckets together and you get 10,578 filings. That's 85% of everything filed this month. New construction, the ground-up kind, accounts for just 1,426 permits — about 11%.

“New York is spending to keep its buildings running more than it's spending to replace them.”

It's not only volume, either. Look at the ten biggest-dollar permits filed this month and seven of them are alterations, not new buildings — a $200 million Bronx job, an $86 million CUNY renovation on Chambers Street in Manhattan, an $82 million Broadway alteration-CO, and eight-figure alteration work on Broad Street, First Avenue, Gouverneur Lane, and Water Street. Only three of the top ten — a tower on West 36th Street, a school building in Queens, and a project on Westchester Avenue in the Bronx — are ground-up new construction.

For a GC or a sub deciding what to chase, that's the read on where the actual dollars are moving: gut renovations, facade work, MEP upgrades, and interior fit-outs inside buildings that already exist, not steel going up on empty lots. New York's building stock is old and getting older, and the permit data says the city is spending to keep it running more than it's spending to replace it.

If your crew is built for ground-up work, the market's thinner than it looks right now — barely one filing in nine this month. If you're set up for alteration work — abatement, facade, interior demo, systems upgrades — this is your lane, and it's wide open.

This comes from DOB permit filings tracked across the five boroughs over the trailing 30 days — a snapshot of the pipeline, not a full audit of every job underway.