Survey of Housing Starts, Sales, and Completions (SOC)

The U.S. Census Bureau plans to request a three-year extension of the current Office of Management and Budget (OMB) clearance of the Survey of Housing Starts, Sales and Completions, also known as the Survey of Construction (SOC). The SOC collects monthly data on new residential construction from a sample of owners or builders. The Census Bureau uses the Computer-Assisted Personal Interviewing (CAPI) electronic questionnaires SOC-QI/SF.1 and SOC-QI/MF.1 to collect data on start and completion dates of construction, physical characteristics of the structure (floor area, number of bathrooms, type of heating system, etc), and if applicable, date of sale, sales price, and type of financing. The SOC provides widely used measures of construction activity, including the economic indicators Housing Starts and Housing Completions, which are from the New Residential Construction series, and New Residential Sales. The current clearance for this survey is scheduled to expire on March 31, 2027. We sample approximately 1,613 new buildings each month (approximately 19,353 per year). We inquire about the progress of each building multiple times until it is completed (and a sales contract is signed, if it is a single-family house that is built for sale). For single-family buildings, we conduct an average of 9.6 interviews and for multifamily buildings, we conduct an average of 8.5 interviews. The total number of interviews conducted from 2023 through 2025 was averaged and for single-family buildings is approximately 120,312 and for multifamily buildings is about 57,390. Each interview takes 5 minutes on average. Therefore, the total annual burden is 14,809 hours. Compared to the period 2020-2022, sampled construction projects are taking longer to start, complete, and sell. Since projects are interviewed until the project is completed or sold for the single-family for sale category, this is leaving projects in sample for longer resulting in a higher average interview amount for 2023-2025. While the amount of sampled projects has decreased, the average interviews per case increasing results in a modest increase in total annual burden for this collection.