Annual edition

The California ADU annual report — the 2025 reporting year

Name: California accessory dwelling unit production, reporting years 2018–2025
Creator: HyreADU Research Desk
Published: 2026-09-05
License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

One permanent URL, republished each spring when HCD releases the Annual Progress Report. This edition covers reporting year 2025, retrieved 5 September 2026.

Updated September 2026 · Data as of HCD Housing Element Annual Progress Report Table A2 (922,102 rows, 281,321 ADU rows) and the 6th Cycle RHNA Progress Report, retrieved from data.ca.gov 2026-09-05; HCD publisher timestamp 2026-09-04T15:44:00Z. Census Building Permits Survey annual 2025 release, 14 May 2026.

Written by HyreADU Research Desk Primary-source research and data analysis

Audited by HyreADU Research Desk Source-attribution and edition-currency audit

26.1% of California housing units permitted in 2025 were ADUs 32,126 ADU permits of 120,455 units of all types, HCD APR Table A2, HYRE event-deduplicated counts, retrieved 2026-09-05. Was 9.1% in 2018.

22,630 ADU completions reported for 2025 Against 32,126 permits in the same year — a same-year ratio of 70.4%, the highest in the series. A same-year ratio is not a completion rate.

57.3% cumulative ADU completions against permits since 2018 102,356 completions against 178,495 permits, 2018–2025. The gap is real building, reporting lag and abandonment together, and this figure separates none of them.

The year in one paragraph

The accessory dwelling unit is now roughly a quarter of California’s housing permitting, and it got there as much by everything else falling as by ADUs rising. On HCD’s Housing Element Annual Progress Report data, California jurisdictions reported 32,126 ADU permits and 22,630 ADU completions in 2025.

ADUs were 26.1% of all housing units permitted in the state, against 9.1% in 2018. ADU permitting has essentially plateaued. 29,309 in 2023, 31,515 in 2024, 32,126 in 2025 — growth of 1.9% in the last year, after doubling between 2020 and 2022.

What moved was the denominator. All-types housing permitting reported to HCD fell from 139,691 units in 2022 to 120,455 in 2025. Single-family detached permitting fell from 39,914 to 35,424 over the same period.

The ADU share is a ratio, and the ratio rose mostly because the bottom of it shrank. The completion gap narrowed again, and it is still the biggest number on this page. Cumulatively since 2018, California has reported 178,495 ADU permits and 102,356 completions — 57.3%.

Within 2025 alone the ratio of completions to permits reached 70.4%, its highest in the series, up from 26.4% in 2018. We take that gap apart properly on its own page, with cohorts and follow-up years, because a same-year ratio is not a completion rate.

And the statute moved again. Four ADU bills were chaptered on 10 October 2025, one of which renumbered the chapter for the second time in under two years.

Anything published before 1 January 2026 that cites Government Code §§ 66324, 66327 or 66332 is now citing repealed section numbers; anything citing § 65852.2 has been wrong since 25 March 2024. What we could not do for this edition: reach hcd.ca.gov.

It returned HTTP 403 on every attempt on 2026-09-05, retried. So no HCD-hosted document was opened for this edition, and every HCD figure here comes from the department’s data as published on data.ca.gov, which was reachable. We name the source we actually read, every time.

About this edition

One URL, republished on HCD’s calendar rather than ours
This page lives at a permanent address with no year in it, and is rewritten each spring when HCD releases the Annual Progress Report data.
That is deliberate: an annual report published on the source’s schedule stays useful, and a year-less URL accumulates links instead of rotting every twelve months.
This edition covers reporting year 2025 and was compiled on 5 September 2026.
hcd.ca.gov was unreachable, and no HCD document was opened
Every attempt to reach hcd.ca.gov on 2026-09-05 returned HTTP 403, including a deliberate retry. Consequently this edition cites no HCD-hosted PDF, memorandum or review letter.
What it does cite is HCD’s data, published on the California open data portal at data.ca.gov, which was reachable and which carries the department’s own timestamp of 2026-09-04T15:44:00Z. We do not cite documents we could not open.
The Annual Progress Report is self-reported by jurisdictions
Every figure here originates with a jurisdiction filling in a form. Quality varies: 4 jurisdictions report substantial ADU permits and literally zero ADU completions across multiple years, which is a reporting artefact rather than a fact about buildings, and we exclude them from ratio work and say so.
A further 15 report zero completions below our exclusion threshold. HCD itself states that prior-year data are not complete until 30 June; this extract was taken after that date.
Permits are events, and we deduplicate them
A naive year-by-year sum of Table A2 double-counts a permit reported in more than one reporting year: 35,237 permit units statewide, 16.5% of the naive total.
Our counts are on unique (jurisdiction, project identifier, permit issue date) events. That is why our statewide permit figure is lower than a straight sum of HCD’s annual rows, and it is the right number.
A same-year ratio is not a completion rate
Dividing this year’s completions by this year’s permits compares two different cohorts of buildings. It is a useful pulse and it is not a completion rate. The cohort work — following each permit year forward — lives on the permits-versus-completions study, and this page links rather than restating it.
Table A2 has no junior-ADU category
Junior accessory dwelling units appear in this data only where a jurisdiction chose to code them as ADUs. So nothing on this page separates ADUs from JADUs, and any statewide JADU figure would be manufactured. We do not publish one.

The defining fact of this year

California housing units permitted per year, with ADUs shown separately and the ADU share drawn on. HCD Housing Element Annual Progress Report, all unit categories, HYRE event-deduplicated counts, retrieved 2026-09-05.

Fact. ADUs were 26.1% of the housing units California jurisdictions reported permitting in 2025, and 26.5% in 2024 — the highest in the series. In 2018 they were 9.1%.

Fact. ADU permitting itself has flattened. 21,163 in 2021, 26,224 in 2022, 29,309 in 2023, 31,515 in 2024 and 32,126 in 2025. The last two years together add 9.6%.

Fact. All-types permitting reported to HCD fell from 139,691 units in 2022 to 116,930 in 2024 — a fall of 16.3% — before recovering slightly to 120,455 in 2025. Single-family detached permitting fell from 39,914 to 35,424.

HYRE analysis. Put those together and the headline statistic is arithmetically true and rhetorically dangerous. “ADUs are a quarter of California’s new housing” is correct.

It does not mean ADU production is surging; on this data it stopped surging around 2022.

It means the ADU has held its ground through a period in which conventional housing permitting fell hard, and a stable numerator over a shrinking denominator produces a rising share.

What that implies for policy reading, offered as analysis and not as a finding. If the ADU share is being driven by weakness in the rest of the market, then it is not a measure of how well ADU policy is working, and using it as one will produce the wrong conclusion in both directions — over-optimistic now, and unpleasantly surprising if conventional permitting recovers.

The eight-year production series

Every year HCD has published under the current reporting regime. Permits and completions are HYRE event-deduplicated counts from Table A2; the all-types column is the same file across every unit category.

Reporting year	ADU permits	ADU completions	Completions ÷ permits, same year	All housing units permitted	ADU share of all permits
2018	12,050	3,186	26.4%	131,279	9.1%
2019	12,992	5,957	45.9%	124,730	10.3%
2020	13,116	8,065	61.5%	115,356	11.2%
2021	21,163	10,147	47.9%	137,202	15.2%
2022	26,224	14,043	53.6%	139,691	18.5%
2023	29,309	17,676	60.3%	137,292	21.1%
2024	31,515	20,652	65.5%	116,930	26.5%
2025	32,126	22,630	70.4%	120,455	26.1%
2018–2025 total	178,495	102,356	57.3% cumulative	—	—

HCD Housing Element Annual Progress Report Table A2, retrieved from data.ca.gov 2026-09-05. Permits counted on unique (jurisdiction, project identifier, permit issue date) events and assigned to the calendar year of that date. The same-year ratio column is a pulse, not a completion rate.

Excluding the 4 jurisdictions whose ADU completion reporting is unusable moves the cumulative ratio from 57.3% to 57.7% — a difference of well under a percentage point. We publish both so that nobody has to take the exclusion on trust.

Cross-check: HCD against the Census Building Permits Survey

Two independent counts of California housing permits. They should not agree exactly, and the way they disagree is informative.

Year	HCD, all units	Census BPS, all units	HCD ÷ BPS	HCD single-family + ADU	Census BPS 1-unit	Difference
2018	131,279	113,502	1.16×	57,906	58,831	-925
2019	124,730	110,197	1.13×	56,317	58,575	-2,258
2020	115,356	106,075	1.09×	53,809	59,043	-5,234
2021	137,202	119,436	1.15×	71,826	65,890	+5,936
2022	139,691	120,780	1.16×	65,740	63,628	+2,112
2023	137,292	111,760	1.23×	68,386	58,534	+9,852
2024	116,930	101,545	1.15×	65,985	61,143	+4,842
2025	120,455	103,856	1.16×	66,884	57,739	+9,145

Census figures: U.S. Census Bureau, Building Permits Survey, Annual History by State and Territory, annual 2025 release (14 May 2026). California column, units (not buildings). HCD figures: HYRE event-deduplicated counts from APR Table A2. Both retrieved 2026-09-05.

The Census has no ADU category, and that is the point of this table. The survey’s own limitation, as we record it: “BPS has no ADU category. Detached ADUs may be counted as 1-unit new residential construction; garage conversions and many internal ADUs may not be counted as new units at all. This is a cross-check of statewide housing-permit levels, not a validation of the ADU count.” HCD runs consistently 15% above the Census on all units, and the HCD single-family-plus-ADU column tracks the Census 1-unit column within a few thousand units in most years — consistent with detached ADUs being picked up by the Census as 1-unit construction while conversions and internal units are not counted as new units at all.

This is a cross-check on statewide levels, not a validation of the ADU count. Nothing here proves the ADU figure; it establishes that the two files describe the same market.

The completion gap, summarized

The single most important thing to understand about ADU statistics is that a permit is not a home. Cumulatively since 2018, California has reported 178,495 ADU permits and 102,356 completions.

Following cohorts rather than years gives the honest version. Of the 12,074 ADU units permitted in 2018, with seven years of follow-up, 47.1% have a matching completion in the file.

The 2022 cohort, with three years of follow-up, is at 62.4%. Among projects that do complete, the median lag is 1 year and 93.9% finish within two.

Unmatched is not the same as unbuilt. 46,944 permitted units from 2018–2023 — 40.9% of that period’s permits — have no matching completion in the file.

That set includes projects still under construction, projects abandoned, projects finished without a reported certificate, and projects whose identifier changed between the permit row and the completion row. HCD’s data cannot separate those and neither can we.

The direction of travel is good. The same-year completions-to-permits ratio has risen from 26.4% in 2018 to 70.4% in 2025, which is what you would expect as a young pipeline matures and as reporting practice improves. The full cohort analysis is on its own page and this edition deliberately does not restate it.

The twenty largest ADU-permitting jurisdictions

Cumulative 2018–2025, from the same file. The ratio column is cumulative completions over cumulative permits and carries all the caveats above — it is not a completion rate and jurisdictions differ in reporting practice as much as in building.

Jurisdiction	County	ADU permits 2018–2025	ADU completions 2018–2025	Cumulative ratio
Los Angeles	Los Angeles	49,556	29,529	59.6%
San Diego	San Diego	9,153	2,667	29.1%
Unincorporated Los Angeles County	Los Angeles	5,657	2,903	51.3%
Long Beach	Los Angeles	3,493	2,745	78.6%
San José	Santa Clara	3,337	2,104	63.1%
Santa Maria	Santa Barbara	2,554	1,677	65.7%
Garden Grove	Orange	2,477	1,525	61.6%
San Francisco	San Francisco	2,353	1,673	71.1%
Unincorporated San Diego County	San Diego	2,274	1,502	66.1%
Oakland	Alameda	1,891	1,221	64.6%
Glendale	Los Angeles	1,777	1,309	73.7%
Burbank	Los Angeles	1,762	943	53.5%
Sacramento	Sacramento	1,631	1,032	63.3%
Anaheim	Orange	1,292	802	62.1%
Riverside	Riverside	1,185	737	62.2%
Unincorporated Santa Barbara County	Santa Barbara	1,144	307	26.8%
Santa Ana	Orange	1,120	704	62.9%
Chula Vista	San Diego	1,109	551	49.7%
Westminster	Orange	1,037	767	74.0%
Pasadena	Los Angeles	1,037	418	40.3%

HCD APR Table A2, HYRE event-deduplicated counts, retrieved 2026-09-05. Jurisdictions whose completion reporting is unusable are excluded from this table by rule and named in the note below.

Excluded and named. Huntington Beach (495 ADU permits, zero ADU completions across 7 reporting years); Saratoga (467 ADU permits, zero ADU completions across 8 reporting years); West Sacramento (65 ADU permits, zero ADU completions across 6 reporting years); Arvin (42 ADU permits, zero ADU completions across 4 reporting years).

These are excluded from ratio work under a published rule — at least 40 ADU permits across at least three years with zero ADU completions — because a jurisdiction that never fills in the completion field produces a zero that is about the form, not about the buildings.

Naming them is the point: an exclusion nobody can check is not a method.

What changed in the law this year

The ADU chapter has now been renumbered twice in under two years. This is the trail, from the bill records themselves.

25 March 2024
SB 477 recodifies the whole subject
Stats. 2024, Ch. 7. An urgency statute. Repealed Government Code §§ 65852.150, 65852.2, 65852.22, 65852.23 and 65852.26 and created Chapter 13, §§ 66310–66342. Every source still citing § 65852.2 has been citing a repealed section since this date.
10 October 2025
Four ADU bills chaptered on one day
AB 462 (Ch. 491), AB 1154 (Carrillo, Ch. 507), SB 9 (Arreguín, Ch. 510 — not the 2021 lot-split SB 9) and SB 543 (McNerney, Ch. 520). Each confirmed individually against its own bill record on leginfo.
1 January 2026
SB 543 renumbers the chapter a second time
Amended and renumbered § 66324 to § 66311.5 (fees), § 66327 to § 66313.5, and § 66332 to § 66311.7 (unpermitted units), and added §§ 66333.5, 66335.5 and 66339.5. A source citing § 66324, § 66327 or § 66332 is one recodification stale; a source citing § 65852.2 is two.
1 January 2026
AB 1154 narrows the junior-ADU owner-occupancy rule
Owner-occupancy is required for a JADU only where it “has shared sanitation facilities with the existing structure”, with an exception where the owner is a governmental agency, land trust or housing organization. Covered in full on the owner-occupancy study.
1 January 2026
SB 9 (Arreguín) adds an automatic voiding trigger
Amends § 66326 so that a jurisdiction failing to submit an ordinance to HCD within 60 days of adoption, or to respond to HCD findings within 30 days, renders the ordinance null and void. The enforcement architecture this creates is the subject of a separate study.

Every entry here was confirmed against the chaptered bill record on leginfo.legislature.ca.gov on 2026-09-05. No entry rests on a secondary source.

The rest of the year, in the studies that cover it

The HyreADU annual-report edition consolidates and links. Each study below answers a question this page deliberately does not restate.

57.3% Production Permits against completions The cohort analysis behind the completion gap, with follow-up years and the unmatched set decomposed as far as the data allows. Read the study 52.1% Production Production against housing need The RHNA join. In Long Beach, ADUs are more than half of everything permitted in the cycle so far. Read the study 1,142 Geography Where ADUs are actually built Los Angeles at tract level, with the geocoding match rates published and Terner credited for the equity finding. Read the study 1,200 sq ft Design How big the ADUs actually are A bimodal distribution piled against two numbers in the Government Code. Read the study 49.1% Type Garage conversions Nearly half of Los Angeles ADU permits describe converting an existing garage. Read the study A range Cost What an ADU costs Four numbers people confuse, kept apart, with the indexation chain shown in full. Read the study By city Process How long the permit takes The approval clock, measured per jurisdiction from municipal extracts. Read the study Prohibited Law Owner-occupancy rules The provision that decides whether an ADU can be an investment, and the two renumberings that broke every citation. Read the study

What Terner established this cycle, credited to Terner

The Terner Center for Housing Innovation and the Center for Community Innovation are the academic authority on the ADU questions this desk does not answer itself. We cite them; we do not restate them as ours.

260 days average planning application to building permit inside the Coastal Zone in Los Angeles County, 2018–2022 Terner Center, “ADUs in the Coastal Zone”

147 days the same measure outside the Coastal Zone in Los Angeles County Terner Center, “ADUs in the Coastal Zone”

233 vs 101 the same comparison in Orange County, inside against outside Terner Center. In San Diego County Terner found no statistically significant difference.

How our work differs from theirs, in Terner’s terms and ours: Terner measures the application-to-permit clock. This study measures the permit-to-occupancy clock. They are consecutive segments of the same pipeline, not competing estimates of the same number.

On equity, the finding that permitted ADUs skew toward higher-resource neighborhoods and toward White, high-income and highly educated homeowners is Terner’s and the Center for Community Innovation’s, published in ADUs for All (August 2022), and is credited to them wherever it appears on this site.

Method

Two state files, one federal file, and the bill records. No secondary sources for any number.

1
Download Table A2 whole
HCD Housing Element Annual Progress Report data by jurisdiction and year, from data.ca.gov: 922,102 rows across reporting years 2018 to 2025, of which 281,321 carry UNIT_CAT = 'ADU', covering 511 jurisdictions that reported at least one ADU permit. Retrieved 2026-09-05; publisher timestamp 2026-09-04T15:44:00Z.
2
Count permits as events, not as rows
A permit is a unique (jurisdiction, project identifier, building-permit issue date) event, assigned to the calendar year of the issue date. 169,249 unique permit events and 98,500 unique completion events. The naive year-by-year sum would report 213,732 permit units instead of 178,495; the difference, 35,237 units, is double counting.
3
Handle the missing identifiers honestly
15,082 ADU rows — 5.4% — carry no project identifier and therefore cannot be deduplicated or cohort-matched. They are counted in permit totals and cannot be followed to completion, which is one of the reasons the unmatched set is as large as it is.
4
Exclude unusable jurisdictions by a published rule, and name them
A jurisdiction is excluded from ratio work if it reports at least 40 ADU permits across at least three years with zero ADU completions in every year. That catches 4: Huntington Beach, Saratoga, West Sacramento, Arvin. Excluding them moves the cumulative ratio by less than a percentage point, and both figures are published.
5
Cross-check against a federal file
The Census Bureau’s Building Permits Survey, annual history by state, California column, units. U.S. Census Bureau, Building Permits Survey, Annual History by State and Territory, annual 2025 release (14 May 2026). California column, units (not buildings).
It has no ADU category, so it cannot validate the ADU count; it establishes that HCD’s all-units series and the federal series describe the same market, and it is presented as exactly that.
6
Confirm every statutory claim on the bill record
Each of the four bills chaptered on 10 October 2025, and SB 477 before them, was confirmed individually against its own record on leginfo.legislature.ca.gov. No statutory statement on this page rests on a law-firm summary or on secondary commentary.

What we could not verify for this edition

hcd.ca.gov. HTTP 403 on every attempt on 2026-09-05, including a deliberate retry. That put the department’s ADU Handbook page, its technical-assistance memoranda and its ordinance-review correspondence out of reach for this edition. We cite none of them here.

The most recent Handbook edition this desk has read in full is the January 2025 edition, text-extracted from a legislature-hosted copy — and that edition predates all four October 2025 bills, so its section numbers are superseded.

Any 2026 Handbook edition. We do not know whether one exists. We are not going to assert either way, and we will not cite an edition we have not opened.

Junior ADUs, separately. Table A2 has no JADU category. Any statewide JADU count would be manufactured and none appears on this page.

Affordability. The ADU rows carry no income-band field, so nothing here says what any of these units rent for. Our rental-income study approaches that from the HUD side instead.

Questions

How many ADUs were permitted in California in 2025?

32,126, on HCD Housing Element Annual Progress Report data as retrieved on 2026-09-05, counted on unique permit events rather than on raw rows. 22,630 ADU completions were reported in the same year. Both figures are self-reported by jurisdictions to HCD, and HCD states that prior-year data are not complete until 30 June.

What share of California’s new housing is ADUs?

26.1% of housing units permitted in 2025, and 26.5% in 2024, against 9.1% in 2018. Read that share carefully: ADU permitting has been close to flat since 2022 while total permitting fell from 139,691 units to 120,455. The share rose mostly because the denominator shrank.

Is ADU production still growing?

Barely. 29,309 permits in 2023, 31,515 in 2024 and 32,126 in 2025 — 1.9% in the last year. The doubling happened between 2020 and 2022. Completions, by contrast, are still climbing sharply, from 14,043 in 2022 to 22,630 in 2025, which is what a maturing pipeline looks like.

How many permitted ADUs actually get built?

Cumulatively since 2018, 102,356 completions against 178,495 permits — 57.3%. On a cohort basis, the 2018 permit year with seven years of follow-up is at 47.1% observed completion, and the 2022 cohort with three years is at 62.4%. Unmatched permits include projects still building, projects abandoned and projects finished without a reported certificate, and the data cannot separate them. The full analysis is on its own page.

Why is your permit total lower than the one I get by adding up HCD’s annual numbers?

Because we deduplicate. A permit reported in more than one reporting year appears more than once in a naive sum. Statewide, that is 35,237 permit units over 2018–2025, or 16.5% of the naive total: 213,732 naive against 178,495 on unique events. We count events.

Does this include junior ADUs?

Only accidentally. HCD’s Table A2 has no junior-ADU unit category, so JADUs are in this data if and only if a jurisdiction coded them as ADUs. Nothing on this page separates the two, and we do not publish a statewide JADU count, because there is no way to compute one from this file.

When is this page updated?

Each spring, when HCD releases the Annual Progress Report data — not on our own calendar. The URL has no year in it and does not change between editions, so links to it keep working. This edition covers reporting year 2025 and was compiled on 5 September 2026, after the 30 June date HCD gives for prior-year data being complete.

Which Government Code sections should I be citing now?

Chapter 13 of Division 1, Title 7 — sections 66310 to 66342, as amended by the four bills chaptered on 10 October 2025 and operative 1 January 2026. Specifically: fees at § 66311.5 (renumbered from 66324), unpermitted units at § 66311.7 (from 66332), definitions at § 66313, standards at § 66314, no-additional-standards at § 66315, ordinance voiding at § 66316, size standards at § 66321, ministerial approval at § 66323 and HCD ordinance review at § 66326. Anything citing § 65852.2 has been citing a repealed section since 25 March 2024.

Written and audited by

HyreADU Research Desk

Primary-source research, data analysis and fact checking

We are a research desk, not a builder. We read the permit extract, the statute, the HCD return or the fee schedule ourselves, and publish each figure with its source and retrieval date.

Where a number cannot be traced to a primary source, we leave it out and say what we could not verify. Our store-based claims cover California only.

CA: the only state this desk will make store-based claims about
5: jurisdictions with extracted ADU permit evidence
735: CSLB-verified companies in the California store
0: national claims from a one-state store

How this desk works

Primary sources only. Permit counts come from the city or county that issued the permit. Production counts come from HCD’s Annual Progress Report. Rents come from HUD or the Census. We do not cite an article that cites a source; we download the source and compute the figure ourselves.
This is a California site. The company store is 734 California firms and one New Mexico firm. Permit evidence exists for five named jurisdictions: Los Angeles, San Francisco, Sacramento, San José and unincorporated Marin. A number from that store is titled to those places, never to the United States.
A permit is not a completion, and a license is not an ADU grade. California licenses no ADU classification. Being named on an ADU permit is evidence of engagement in that jurisdiction, not of quality, completion, or work anywhere else. Owner-builder permits are excluded from contractor counts.
Calculation is labeled as calculation. Figures we derive are never presented as something HCD, HUD, the Census or a city published. Terner Center research is cited as Terner’s, never restated as ours.
We do not design, permit or build ADUs, and we take no payment for placement, ranking or a favorable mention. Pages that look like rankings are not: they publish public-record counts and let the reader decide.
Nothing here is legal, tax or financial advice. Zoning, underwriting and appraisal practice vary by jurisdiction, lender and appraiser. The useful next step on a specific lot is the planning counter and a licensed professional.

Data as of HCD Housing Element Annual Progress Report Table A2 (922,102 rows, 281,321 ADU rows) and the 6th Cycle RHNA Progress Report, retrieved from data.ca.gov 2026-09-05; HCD publisher timestamp 2026-09-04T15:44:00Z. Census Building Permits Survey annual 2025 release, 14 May 2026.. Authorship on this site is organizational: the analysis belongs to the desk rather than to a named individual, and we do not publish credentials we do not hold.

Our editorial policy sets out how we source, date and correct what we publish.

Sources & retrieval dates

California HCD — Housing Element Annual Progress Report data by jurisdiction and year (data.ca.gov) , The primary source for every production figure on this page. 922,102 Table A2 rows across reporting years 2018–2025, of which 281,321 carry UNIT_CAT = 'ADU', covering 511 jurisdictions. Retrieved 2026-09-05; publisher timestamp 2026-09-04T15:44:00Z. Permits counted on unique (jurisdiction, project identifier, permit issue date) events. HCD’s note that Table A2 carries no separate junior-ADU category is recorded on the page. Retrieved 2026-09-05.
California HCD — Table A2, direct CSV download , The file itself, as downloaded and analyzed, so that every figure here can be rebuilt from the source. Retrieved 2026-09-05.
California HCD — Housing Element Annual Progress Report data dashboard , The department’s own presentation of the same data. Used to confirm our event-deduplicated counts sit in the right neighborhood of HCD’s published figures. Retrieved 2026-09-05.
California HCD — Annual Progress Report frequently asked questions , The department’s guidance on reporting practice and on when prior-year data may be treated as complete — the basis for treating reporting year 2025 as usable in a September 2026 extract. Retrieved 2026-09-05.
California HCD — 6th Cycle RHNA Progress Report (data.ca.gov) , CKAN resource 1e80a9cf-724c-432d-8374-e9708a6a92dc, queried through the portal’s datastore API on 2026-09-05. Source of the statewide allocation and progress figures referenced from this edition. HCD’s own description: “Show sum of units reported on the annual progress report, Tables A and A3 (2013-2017) and Table A2 (since 2018).” Retrieved 2026-09-05.
U.S. Census Bureau — Building Permits Survey, annual history by state , U.S. Census Bureau, Building Permits Survey, Annual History by State and Territory, annual 2025 release (14 May 2026). California column, units (not buildings). Used as an independent cross-check on statewide permitting levels. The survey’s own limitation, recorded verbatim on this page: “BPS has no ADU category. Detached ADUs may be counted as 1-unit new residential construction; garage conversions and many internal ADUs may not be counted as new units at all. This is a cross-check of statewide housing-permit levels, not a validation of the ADU count.” Retrieved 2026-09-05.
SB 543 (McNerney, 2025) — Accessory dwelling units. Stats. 2025, Ch. 520 , Chaptered 10 October 2025, operative 1 January 2026. The second recodification of the ADU chapter in under two years: renumbers § 66324 to § 66311.5, § 66327 to § 66313.5 and § 66332 to § 66311.7, and adds §§ 66333.5, 66335.5 and 66339.5. Retrieved 2026-09-05.
SB 9 (Arreguín, 2025) — Accessory dwelling units: ordinances. Stats. 2025, Ch. 510 , Amends Gov. Code § 66326 so that a jurisdiction failing to submit an ordinance to HCD within 60 days, or to respond to findings within 30 days, renders the ordinance null and void. Distinct from SB 9 (Atkins), Stats. 2021, Ch. 162, the urban lot-split statute. Retrieved 2026-09-05.
California Government Code § 66326 — submission of ADU ordinances to HCD and review , Retrieved in full for this edition. Requires submission “within 60 days after adoption”, allows the department to make written findings, gives the agency “a reasonable time, no longer than 30 days, to respond”, provides for notification to the Attorney General, and makes a non-compliant ordinance “null and void”. History as retrieved: “Amended by Stats. 2025, Ch. 510, Sec. 1. (SB 9) Effective January 1, 2026.” Retrieved 2026-09-05.
Terner Center for Housing Innovation — “ADUs in the Coastal Zone” , Terner’s measurement of average days from planning application to building permit inside and outside the Coastal Zone, 2018–2022: Los Angeles County 260 days inside against 147 outside; Orange County 233 against 101; San Diego County no statistically significant difference. Cited as Terner’s work and never restated as ours. Retrieved 2026-09-05.
Terner Center for Housing Innovation — “Reaching California’s ADU Potential” , Terner’s 2020 progress-and-finance brief, which reported contemporaneous APR snapshots of 5,911 permits and 1,984 completions for 2018. Later APRs backfill earlier permit dates, which is why our 2018 event-year count is higher than Terner’s — a difference in vintage, not a disagreement. Retrieved 2026-09-05.

A statewide series does not decide your lot

The production numbers tell you the market exists and the ordinances work. They tell you nothing about whether your lot takes a unit, what it would cost, or what it might return.

Feasibility checker What an ADU costs

HyreADU does not design, permit or build accessory dwelling units, and takes no payment for placement or a favorable mention. This page is informational and is not legal or policy advice.

Every production figure originates in the Housing Element Annual Progress Report, which is self-reported by jurisdictions and whose quality varies; four jurisdictions are excluded from ratio work under a published rule and are named on the page.

A permit is not a completion, and a same-year ratio of completions to permits is not a completion rate.

Table A2 carries no junior-ADU category and no affordability field, so nothing here separates ADUs from JADUs or says what any unit rents for.

hcd.ca.gov returned HTTP 403 on every attempt on 5 September 2026, retried, so this edition cites no HCD-hosted document; HCD figures come from the department’s data as published on data.ca.gov.

The Census Building Permits Survey has no ADU category and is used as a cross-check on statewide levels only.

Statutory descriptions are of text retrieved from the Legislative Counsel’s service on 5 September 2026; the ADU chapter has been renumbered twice since March 2024.