The Approval Gap
Do building plans passed and buildings completed move together — and what can the gap between those two parts of the construction pipeline actually tell us?
- Source
- Stats SA P5041.1 · May 2026
- Period analysed
- Jan 2025 to May 2026 monthly window
- Price basis
- Current prices + constant 2019 prices
- Created by
- Nyashadzashe Munyati
A plan approved today is not a building completed today.
Construction statistics often report two different things. Building plans passed tell us about work that has received approval and may move into construction. Buildings completed tell us about work that has reached the other end of the pipeline. The completed building may have been approved many months earlier.
That creates a practical problem. If plans passed are rising while completions are falling, is the construction pipeline strengthening, slowing down, or simply showing the normal time delay between approval and completion? A same-month comparison cannot answer that on its own.
Do not confuse an approval with a completion.
I wanted to compare the upstream and downstream sides of the building pipeline without pretending that one month’s completions came from the same month’s approvals.
Measure the gap, then test whether a lag is visible.
I extracted the published monthly series, separated current-price and real-price values, compared building types and provinces, and then tested whether plans at month t aligned better with completions several months later.
What each tool was doing
Official source for plans passed and buildings completed.
Structure the 17-month monthly series and calculate the exploratory lag correlations.
Reproduce monthly pipeline ratios and province/category comparisons.
Show timing, real-price movement and geographic divergence without hiding the source limitation.
In real terms, plans passed fell 2.9% in Jan–May 2026 — but buildings completed fell 8.0%.
The downstream side of the building pipeline weakened more sharply than the approval side. Non-residential work shows the biggest difference: real plans passed fell 6.4%, while real completions fell 20.7%.
Stats SA P5041.1 · constant 2019 prices · Jan–May 2026 versus Jan–May 2025What the source actually gives me
The official release contains both current-price values and constant 2019-price values. Current prices include inflation. Constant prices are more useful when I want to ask whether the actual volume/value of activity changed after removing price effects.
monthJan 2025 → May 2026plans_passedcurrent + real valuesbuildings_completedcurrent + real valuesbuilding typeprovinceIf construction prices rise, a current-price series can increase even when the underlying amount of building activity does not. Constant 2019 prices remove that price effect from the comparison.
How I turned the publication tables into analysis-ready data
The calculations — and what they do NOT mean
2026 real value ÷ 2025 real value − 1Plans passed: −2.9%
Buildings completed: −8.0%
Completed real YoY − Plans real YoY−20.7% − (−6.4%) = −14.3 pp
Non-residential completions deteriorated much more sharply than non-residential approvals.18.611bn ÷ 39.008bn × 10047.7%
This is a descriptive ratio only. It is not a conversion rate because the completed buildings were generally approved in earlier periods.corr(plans at t, completions at t + lag)Highest tested correlation: 0.497 at lag 0.
That is not evidence of “same-month conversion”. It means this short 17-month window does not reveal a convincing delayed peak. I do not force a lag conclusion from it.I test the finding from more than one angle
What I would say to a non-technical manager
A project approved in May can finish much later. The current release is useful for pipeline direction, but not enough on its own to calculate a true conversion rate.
In the first five months of 2026, the completed side of the building pipeline weakened more sharply than plans passed.
This is the first category I would drill into when asking whether approved non-residential pipeline is translating into completed activity.
The responsible next step is to import the full official time series and test a wider 0–24 month lag window by building type.
What I would do next
Inspect the data and calculations
The page already shows the conclusion and its limitation. These files let somebody reproduce the work.