It also has an underrated flip side. Building permits are public records, so the supply side of Provo housing is measured better than in most states — monthly, city by city, back to 1959, with no confidentiality suppression at all. The data is not missing. It is lopsided.
Supply and construction · monthly · free to the public
Building Permits Survey
U.S. Census Bureau
Measures: Housing units authorized by building permit, split by structure type, going back to 1959.
Often mistaken for: Houses built. A permit is an authorization, not a completion, and a share of permitted units are never built or are built much later.
Cannot see: Says nothing about price, absorption, or whether anyone bought the finished unit. Counts units, not households.
Geography: Permit-issuing place, county, metro and state. Provo, Orem, Lehi and every other Utah city that issues its own permits appear individually.
When it lands: Preliminary national and regional figures land on the 12th working day of each month. The revised release on the 17th working day is the one that carries state, metro, county and individual-city numbers. Final annual estimates are published in early May; the 2025 annual data came out on 14 May 2026.
How far behind: About six weeks behind the permit month for the revised release; roughly four months behind the calendar year for the annual benchmark.
Because permits are public records, the Census Bureau can publish city-level detail with no confidentiality suppression at all. This is the sharpest local housing data Utah has, and it is free.
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Supply and construction · quarterly · free to the public
Ivory-Boyer Construction Database and quarterly Construction Report
Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute with the Ivory-Boyer Real Estate Center, University of Utah
Measures: Building permit activity across Utah, residential and non-residential, assembled from Utah permit offices and held as monthly records by locality.
Often mistaken for: A duplicate of the federal permit count. It is assembled independently and is the more usable of the two for small Utah cities and for long local time series.
Cannot see: Shares the federal survey's core limit: authorization is not construction.
Geography: Utah cities, counties and the state.
When it lands: A narrative report each quarter, over a public-use database of monthly permit records that runs from 1994 to the present.
How far behind: Follows the quarter it describes.
Forty years of Provo permit history in one place, with an analyst's read on top of it. If you want to know whether Provo is actually building, this is the file to open.
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Supply and construction · continuous · free to the public
Provo City planning and permit records
Provo City
Measures: The individual applications, approvals, denials and conditions behind the permit counts everyone else aggregates.
Often mistaken for: A market report. It is a record of decisions, one project at a time.
Cannot see: Provo only. A regional question needs the county or metro sources instead.
Geography: Provo city only.
When it lands: Rolling, as applications are filed and decided.
How far behind: Current.
Every aggregate number above starts here. When a headline count moves, this is where you find out which project moved it.
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Prices and values · quarterly · free to the public
House Price Index
Federal Housing Finance Agency
Measures: The rate of change in single-family house prices, built by comparing repeat transactions on the same properties. Published as an index, not as a dollar amount.
Often mistaken for: The price of a house in Provo. It cannot tell you that and does not try to. It tells you which direction prices moved and by how much.
Cannot see: The headline purchase-only index sees only mortgages bought or guaranteed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, so cash purchases and loans above the conforming limit are invisible to it. The all-transactions variant widens the net by folding in appraisals from refinances, which is a different quantity again.
Geography: Provo-Orem-Lehi, UT metropolitan area (CBSA 39340), plus state, county and ZIP series.
When it lands: A quarterly report roughly two months after the quarter closes, alongside monthly national figures.
How far behind: Two to three months behind the quarter it covers.
It is the closest thing to an official measure of what Provo-area house prices are doing, and it works precisely because it sidesteps the non-disclosure problem: it needs pairs of transactions on the same house, not a public record of what each one cost.
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Rents · annual · free to the public
Fair Market Rents
U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development
Measures: A 40th-percentile gross rent, meaning rent plus tenant-paid utilities, used to set payment standards for housing vouchers.
Often mistaken for: The average rent in Provo. This is the single most misread housing number in the area.
Cannot see: It is a program parameter, not a market observation. It is set at the 40th percentile on purpose, it includes utilities that most listing prices exclude, and it covers the whole two-county metro rather than the neighborhood you are looking in.
Geography: Provo-Orem-Lehi, UT metropolitan area, by bedroom count.
When it lands: Published in late summer and effective on 1 October, the start of the federal fiscal year. Statute requires HUD to set them at least annually with that effective date.
How far behind: Built on survey responses roughly two years old, then trended forward with rent and utility inflation.
It is a real government rent figure for this area, published on a fixed schedule, and it is genuinely useful once you know what it is measuring. Cited as if it were a market median, it misleads in two directions at once.
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The existing housing stock · annual · free to the public
American Community Survey
U.S. Census Bureau
Measures: Owner-estimated home value, gross rent paid, tenure, cost burden, year built, vacancy and household composition.
Often mistaken for: Sale prices. The value figure is what owners estimate their own home is worth when a survey asks them, not what anything changed hands for.
Cannot see: Every estimate carries a margin of error, and for a place the size of Provo those margins are wide enough to swallow a year of change. Comparing two adjacent years without checking the margins is the classic misuse.
Geography: Provo, Orem and Lehi individually in the one-year data; every tract and block group in the five-year data.
When it lands: One-year estimates each September for places above 65,000 people. The five-year estimates, which cover everywhere, follow in the winter; the 2020-2024 file was published on 29 January 2026.
How far behind: One-year data describes the calendar year that ended nine months earlier. Five-year data is an average across five years, so its midpoint is roughly three years back.
It is the only source that describes what Provo households actually pay and how much of their income goes to housing, which is a different and often more useful question than what houses cost.
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The existing housing stock · annual · free to the public
Housing Unit Inventory
Utah Geospatial Resource Center with the Wasatch Front Regional Council and Mountainland Association of Governments
Measures: Standardized counts of housing units by type, year built, building size, lot size and associated common area, derived from county assessor parcel records under Utah Code 63A-16-506.
Often mistaken for: A live inventory. The gap between the release date and the data date is more than a year.
Cannot see: Its own stewards describe it as a best-effort product of a resource-limited analysis and ask users to do their own quality assessment. Apartment unit counts in particular are estimated rather than counted.
Geography: Parcel level across Utah's most urban counties, including Utah County, rolled up to city.
When it lands: The county tax roll is frozen at midnight on 1 January, finalized in late May, and the derived inventory is published later that year.
How far behind: Long, and easy to miss. The update published in January 2026 carried data current to December 2024.
It answers what is actually built in Provo today, by type and vintage, which no price source can. It is the supply-side counterpart to the permit data: permits tell you what is coming, this tells you what is here.
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The existing housing stock · annual · free to the public
Utah County Assessor and Recorder records
Utah County
Measures: Assessed value for tax purposes, parcel characteristics, ownership, and the recorded documents that transferred the property.
Often mistaken for: A sale price history. This is the heart of the whole problem: you can see that a transfer happened and read the deed, and the deed generally will not state what was paid.
Cannot see: Assessed value is an estimate produced for taxation on a fixed lien date. It is a different quantity from a sale price and moves on a different schedule.
Geography: Every parcel in Utah County.
When it lands: Valuations are set annually against a 1 January lien date, with notices going out in the summer.
How far behind: The valuation year, not today.
It is the authoritative record of the property itself, and it is the upstream source for the Housing Unit Inventory. It is also the place most people go looking for a sale price and leave empty-handed.
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Analysis and aggregators · annual · free to the public
State of the State's Housing Market
Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute, University of Utah
Measures: A county-level synthesis of prices, rents, vacancy, construction, and affordability multiples, with the underlying sources named.
Often mistaken for: A primary source. It is an analysis, and it says so; its price and sales figures come from the local listing service.
Cannot see: Annual cadence means it cannot speak to the current quarter, and county-level figures blend Provo with towns that behave nothing like it.
Geography: Utah and selected counties, including Utah County.
When it lands: An annual report, recent editions published mid-year.
How far behind: Covers the prior calendar year with commentary running to the report date.
It is the most careful independent read on Utah housing published anywhere, and it shows its work. When two figures disagree, this is often the document that explains why.
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Prices and values · continuous · not fully public
UtahRealEstate.com, the Wasatch Front Regional MLS
Wasatch Front Regional Multiple Listing Service
Measures: Listings, closings, list and sale prices, days on market and inventory for property that went through the listing service.
Often mistaken for: A complete record of Utah County sales. It is a record of one channel, and it is the closest thing this state has to one.
Cannot see: For-sale-by-owner transactions and a large share of new construction never enter the listing service at all. It also has an obvious structural feature: because so many published local figures trace back here, sources that appear to agree independently are often quoting the same underlying data.
Geography: Most of Utah, including all of Utah County.
When it lands: Continuous for subscribers. Summary statistics reach the public through member reports and through the analysts who license the data.
How far behind: Current for listings; closed-sale statistics settle over the following weeks.
In a state with no public sale prices, the listing service is the de facto price record. Knowing that is what lets you read four agreeing sources as one source with four faces.
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Prices and values · monthly · free to the public
Zillow Research housing data
Zillow
Measures: The Home Value Index estimates a typical home value for homes between the 35th and 65th percentile of the local stock. The Observed Rent Index does the equivalent for asking rents, weighted to the rental stock.
Often mistaken for: A median sale price. Zillow's own user guide is explicit that the index figure should be described as a typical home value and is not a median home value.
Cannot see: It is model output, not a transaction record, and it is restated: Zillow has documented revisions to published values reaching back as far as three years from the original reporting date. A figure quoted from it today may not match the same series next year.
Geography: Neighborhood, ZIP code, city, county and metro. Provo city is published.
When it lands: Published within weeks of each month closing.
How far behind: Roughly a month.
It is free, it is monthly, it goes down to Provo city and below, and it is where most quoted Provo housing numbers originate. Those are real advantages and they are separate from the question of whether it measures what people think it measures.
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Prices and values · monthly · free to the public
Redfin Data Center
Redfin
Measures: Medians and counts computed from listing service activity: sale price, list price, days on market, inventory, sale-to-list ratio.
Often mistaken for: A stable series. A monthly median from a market the size of Provo rests on a small number of closings, and which homes happened to close that month moves it more than the market does.
Cannot see: Coverage depends on listing service participation, which varies by market, and the sample problem above is severe at city level.
Geography: Metro, county, city and neighborhood where listing service coverage allows.
When it lands: Monthly downloads with weekly national updates.
How far behind: Roughly a month.
It publishes the underlying counts alongside the medians, which is exactly what you need to judge whether a monthly swing means anything.
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Analysis and aggregators · continuous · free to the public
FRED
Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis
Measures: Nothing of its own. It republishes and charts series produced elsewhere, with the producer and the vintage attached to each one.
Often mistaken for: A source. It is a library, and its value is that it never pretends otherwise: every series carries its origin, its units and its release history.
Cannot see: A series pulled from here inherits every limitation of the source underneath it, and the friendly chart makes that easy to forget.
Geography: Whatever the underlying series covers, which for Provo usually means the metro area.
When it lands: Mirrors each source's own schedule.
How far behind: Inherited from the source.
It is the fastest way to see a Provo-area series over time without downloading anything, and its citation block tells you exactly which quantity you are looking at.
Go to the source · Where we use it →
Nothing matches that combination. Widen a filter — there are only 13 publishers on this list, and several of them cover just one corner.
Nothing on this page is a live feed, and that is deliberate — a figure typed into a template goes stale the day after it publishes. What is durable is when each source moves, so you know whether the number in front of you is the newest one available or four months behind a release you have not checked.
Every number in Provo housing has two problems at once: it is contested at the moment it is published, and it is stale shortly afterward. Printing one here would mean picking a winner among sources that measure different quantities, and then watching that pick rot. So this page carries the machinery instead — who measures what, how, and when — and sends you to the publisher for today's value. That is also why you will not find a median home price anywhere on this site: buying a home in Provo explains the ordering that is durable, and our market read works through the competing figures where they matter.
13 publishers across 5 kinds of measurement. This page deliberately prints no home price, no rent figure and no index value — all three are contested, all three go stale, and all three are one click away at the publisher. Nothing here is financial advice; a real purchase deserves a local agent and lender.