Garden County Housing Figures Buck National Trends

Based on CSO New Dwelling Completions, Quarter 2 2026 (published 30 July 2026)

On a wet Tuesday morning in Bray, a crane still turns over a half-finished apartment block near the seafront. A few miles inland, in Greystones, a cul-de-sac of new semi-detached houses has its final coat of render going on.

Neither of these sites shows up individually in the Central Statistics Office's quarterly count — Wicklow doesn't get its own line in the national tables.

But the county's fortunes are baked into a bigger number that did land this week, and it tells a cautiously encouraging story.

Wicklow Is Bucking the National Trend

Nationally, new dwelling completions fell in the second quarter of 2026. There were 8,823 completions across the country between April and June — down 3.6% on the same period last year, when 9,152 homes were finished.

Wicklow sits within the CSO's Mid-East region, alongside Louth, Meath and Kildare.

While Dublin and the Mid-West both saw sharp regional declines — 16.4% and 13.9% respectively — the Mid-East was one of six regions where completions actually rose, up 9.4% year on year.

It's not the fastest-growing region in the country (that distinction went to the Border region, up 14.6%, followed by the South-East at 12%), but for a county that's absorbed so much of Dublin's overspill population over the past two decades, a growing regional total is welcome news.

The Mid-East also led the country in one specific category: it recorded more scheme dwelling completions — houses built as part of multi-unit developments — than any other region, with 1,301 in the quarter.

Scheme housing is the backbone of estate-style development, the kind that fills out towns like Greystones, Wicklow Town, and Newtownmountkennedy, so this figure is a reasonable proxy for the pace of family-home building across the region, Wicklow included.

A Different Kind of Development

The national picture for Q2 2026 broke down into 54% scheme dwellings, 30% apartments, and 16% single, one-off dwellings. Apartments had the roughest quarter nationally, falling 12.2% year on year, but that decline was heavily concentrated in Dublin, which accounted for three-quarters of all apartment completions in the state.

Wicklow's housing mix, by contrast, leans more towards estate housing and one-off rural builds — the kind of development the CSO groups under "scheme" and "single" dwellings rather than apartment blocks.

That regional character matters for how any slowdown or growth is felt locally. A national apartment slump driven by Dublin City doesn't necessarily translate into fewer new homes going up in Wicklow's towns — and the Mid-East's overall growth suggests it hasn't.

The Bigger Picture: Building Further From the City

One of the more striking national findings in this release is the shift in where Ireland's housing is being built. The regions with the biggest gains — Border, South-East, and Mid-East — are all outside Dublin, while the capital itself saw the steepest fall of any region.

For a commuter county like Wicklow, wedged between the capital and the traditionally more rural counties now seeing faster growth, this points to a housing market that continues to spread outward, even as construction in Dublin City itself cools.

Whether that trend holds will become clearer as the CSO's quarterly releases continue through the rest of 2026. For now, the data suggests that construction crews between the Sugar Loaf and the Wicklow coast have had, on balance, a steadier quarter than most of the country.