Austin, TX: A Top Local Market to Watch in 2027
With multi-family building permits down approximately -52.6% YOY and single-family permits over the past year barely budging, the Austin–Round Rock–San Marcos, TX MSA may not be seeing as much residential construction as it did back in its 2021-2022 go-go years, but the metro still attracted more new residents than all but the Dallas, Houston, Atlanta and Phoenix metropolitan areas. Last year, 102 new residential were moving into the Austin metro each day, and from 2020 to 2025 the city’s population grew by 320,773 residents.
Austin’s business mix has become more commercial and industrial over the past few years, and that powered this metro to $1.6 billion in estimated electrical sales potential in 2Q 2026, a +4.1% year-over-year increase. Some large projects have provided a big chunk of the market’s sales potential. Samsung’s semiconductor complex in Taylor, TX, was originally sized at $17 billion in total contract value, but as that project has progressed there are reports that additional expansion has blown past that estimate. The $1.6-billion expansion of the Austin Convention Center now underway is expected to double the size of the facility by its expected 2029 completion date, and the Austin-Bergstrom airport is in the middle of a $5-billion modernization project. Other large projects include the $500-million Otsuka ICU Medical manufacturing expansion and the Cedar Creek multi-building data center campus, where a $440-millionCoreWeave facility is nearing completion and a total of $1.4-billion in data center construction is anticipated.
ESTIMATED ELECTRICIAL SALES POTENTIAL
2Q 2026 Total Sales Estimate: $1,606.5 million
2026 Electrical Contractor Est. ($ Millions): $1,052.4 million
2026 Estimated Industrial Sales: $232.8 million
POPULATION GROWTH
2025 Population Estimate: 2,620,945
2020-2025 Population # Change: 320,773
2020-2025 Population % Change: 13.9%
New Residents per day: 102
BUILDING PERMITS
June 2026 - Single-family (SF) permits: 8,188 permits
# Change SF YOY: (183) permits
% Change SF YOY: -2.2%
June 2026 -Multi-family (MF) permits: 2,041 permits
# Change MF YOY: (2,172) permits
% Change MF YOY: -51.6%
Electrical Wholesaling's Top 10 Local Markets to Watch gives you a taste of the mountain of electrical market sales estimates and other local market data available at Electrical Marketing newsletter for just $99 per year. This data includes:
- Local market sales estimates, building permits and population data for more than 300 other Metropolitan Statistical areas
- The Electrical Price Index (EPI) - A monthly compilation of pricing trends for more than 20 key electrical product groups
- Annual product sales estimates from 16 key electrical products
Sources of market data: Local market data collected by Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) and county. Sales estimates developed with sales-per-employee multipliers from Electrical Wholesaling’s Market Planning Guide ($83572 per electrical contractor employee and $2,7289 per industrial employee) and employment data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Building permit and population data downloaded from U.S. Census Bureau website.
About the Author
Jim Lucy
Editor-in-Chief
Over the past 40-plus years, hundreds of Jim’s articles have been published in Electrical Wholesaling and Electrical Marketing newsletter on topics such as the impact of new competitors on the electrical market’s channels of distribution, energy-efficient lighting and renewables, and local market economics. In addition to his published work, Jim regularly gives presentations on these topics to C-suite executives, industry groups and investment analysts.
He recently launched a new subscription-based data product for Electrical Marketing that offers electrical sales potential estimates and related market data for more than 300 metropolitan areas, and in 1999 he published his first book, “The Electrical Marketer’s Survival Guide” for electrical industry executives looking for an overview of key market trends.
While managing Electrical Wholesaling’s editorial operations, Jim and the publication’s staff won several Jesse H. Neal awards for editorial excellence, the highest honor in the business press, and numerous national and regional awards from the American Society of Business Press Editors. He has a master’s degree in Communications and a bachelor’s degree in Journalism from Glassboro State College, Glassboro, N.J. (now Rowan University).