How unevenly new home approvals fall across the counties of the Upstate
the Upstate · Data as of
· ALEX Intelligence
2.04xRatio of Highest to Lowest County Permit Rate per 1,000 Residents (2025) — Laurens County against Anderson County
#
County
One-unit homes permitted per 1,000 residents
1
Laurens County
12.6
2
Spartanburg County
11.5
3
Oconee County
9.1
4
Greenville County
7.7
5
Pickens County
6.9
6
Anderson County
6.2
Methodology
Source:
U.S. Census Bureau, Building Permits Survey, county annual totals, 2025; population from U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey 5-year estimates, 2024
Measure
One-unit homes permitted per 1,000 residents, ranked highest first across Anderson, Greenville, Laurens, Oconee, Pickens, Spartanburg, SC
(6 ranked in total).
How the headline figure is computed
Laurens County against Anderson County, the highest and lowest of the 6 units compared. Every unit is named individually in the table below and each figure is that unit's own; none of them is a figure for the market as a whole. The median across the 6 is 9.1.
Universe
The counties this market is made of, each carrying its own one-unit permit total for 2025 expressed per 1,000 residents so that counties of very different size can be set beside one another at all. Counties below 5,000 residents, and any the American Community Survey gives no population for, are excluded rather than normalised on a guess. A county absent from the Census permit file is dropped rather than counted as zero: the survey reports a genuine zero for a county with no activity, so an absent county is one the file does not cover, and those are different facts. 98% of the units counted here came from permit offices that reported rather than from imputation.
Every figure on this page is computed directly from the dataset named above
by ALEX Intelligence. No figure on this page was written by hand or by a
language model. The query is stated so that anyone can re-run it and obtain
the same table.