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The ABS released its small area building approvals data on 8 September, which is the cut that carries a Cairns geography. On our Trend series, Cairns SA4 approvals ran at 108 dwellings in July, down 19.1% on a year earlier. The Queensland ABS Trend over the same period rose 20.0%, to 4,361. That is a gap of 39 percentage points between the region and the state. Only two months in the past five and a half years have been wider, and both of them were May and June this year.
Set against the other Queensland regions it looks worse rather than better. Cairns ranks 17th of the 19 Queensland SA4s on Trend growth. Only Townsville, down 27.2%, and Wide Bay, down 28.3%, are weaker, so the three softest building markets in the state are the three on the northern and central coast. Seven regions in all are below where they were a year ago, and six of those seven sit outside Greater Brisbane. The split is about as clean as this data gets: Greater Brisbane approvals are up 36.6% and the rest of Queensland only 4.6%. Brisbane Inner City is up 117%, Ipswich 45%, Moreton Bay North 43% and the Gold Coast 42%. This is a real building recovery and it is overwhelmingly a south-east one.
One reading is worth heading off. The trade publication The Good Builder ran the small area release on 10 September and listed Cairns among the councils that went backwards, at 77 dwellings against 655 a year earlier, an 88% fall. The arithmetic is right but the conclusion is not, because July 2025 carried a single 468 unit approval at Woree. Our own SA4 numbers show the same trap on a wider geography: 114 dwellings this July against 705 last July, a fall of 84%, which becomes 52% the moment Woree comes out of the base. Neither is worth printing. Council level data is published in original terms only, with no seasonal adjustment and no trend estimate, which The Good Builder says plainly in its own notes. In Cairns this month, that caveat is the whole story.
None of which makes it a bad year. Take the Woree block out altogether and Cairns still approved 1,395 dwellings in 2025-26, up 24% on the 1,125 of the year before. The financial year was a good one. What has happened is that the Trend rolled over during it, and July is the fifth consecutive month it has sat below its year-earlier level. Both of those things are true at once but quoting either one on its own is how this number gets misread.
The composition is worth a closer look, because the 24% is not what it appears. Detached houses went from 1,064 to 1,111, a rise of 47 dwellings or 4.4%. Everything else came from units, and off a very small base: 53 units approved in 2024-25 against 270 in 2025-26 once Woree is excluded. Units supplied roughly 80% of the adjusted gain. A market that approves 53 units in a year and then 270 has not changed its underlying capacity, it has had a handful of projects clear. The detached market underneath is grinding upward rather than accelerating: 983 houses in 2023-24, 1,064 in 2024-25 and 1,111 in 2025-26, a rise of 13% across three years.
The Trend did stop falling in July, ticking up 1.9% on the month but we would not read much into that yet. Two months is not a turn on a series this small, and on the Woree adjusted basis the Trend is still easing over the same two months, so the two readings disagree about direction as well as level. The thing to watch is whether the southern boom reaches us at all. Approvals describe intent, and they describe it a year or more before a completion. On the evidence of July, the intent is overwhelmingly in the south-east corner, and the northern coast is watching a construction cycle it is not currently part of. The August figures land at the start of October, with the small area cut about a week later.
The Conus Trend Building Approvals date for all Queensland SA4 regions is available for download here.
We are proud to have CBC Staff Selection as supporters of the Conus/CBC Staff Selection Trend Employment and Jobseeker data series