Get Housing Starts (Total New Privately-Owned Housing Units Started) for the United States from the Census Bureau (via FRED).

Housing Starts counts the number of new residential construction projects that have begun in a given month. Residential investment is one of the most interest-rate-sensitive components of GDP, and construction activity leads the broader business cycle (it typically turns down before a recession and turns up before a recovery), making Housing Starts one of the ten components of the Conference Board’s Leading Economic Index.

Requires a free FRED API key, see the fred_api_key parameter of the Economics class.

See definition: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HOUST

Also known as: new residential construction.

No programming experience? With the Finance Toolkit MCP server, AI assistants such as Claude and ChatGPT can calculate the Housing Starts for you. Just ask in plain English.

Calculate the Housing Starts in Python

The Housing Starts is available in the Economics module of the open-source Finance Toolkit. Install it with:

pip install financetoolkit -U

Then call get_housing_starts as shown below.

from financetoolkit import Economics

economics = Economics(start_date='2020-01-01', fred_api_key='FRED_API_KEY')

economics.get_housing_starts()

Which returns:

Date United States
2026-02-01 1346
2026-03-01 1522
2026-04-01 1414
2026-05-01 1199
2026-06-01 1427

Parameters

get_housing_starts accepts the following parameters:

  • rolling (int, optional): The rolling window size to use for smoothing the data (simple moving average). Defaults to None.
  • trailing (int, optional): The trailing window size to use for summing the data over trailing periods. Defaults to None.
  • growth (bool, optional): Whether to return the growth data or the actual data.
  • lag (int, optional): The number of periods to lag the data by.
  • standardize (bool, optional): Whether to standardize (Z-Score) the result. When combined with growth=True, standardizes the growth values instead of the raw values. Defaults to False.
  • rounding (int | None, optional): The number of decimals to round the results to. Defaults to None.
Exchange Rates Producer Price Index Real Effective Exchange Rate Household Savings Rate Household Debt to Income Ratio Misery Index Retail Sales Industrial Production Index Real Personal Income Commercial Real Estate Prices Commodity Forward Curve Recession Indicator

The Economics module page introduces the module, and the sidebar lists all of its functions.

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