Senior Housing Occupancy Has Risen for 19 Straight Quarters. Almost Nothing New Is Being Built.

Senior housing occupancy has climbed for 19 consecutive quarters, reaching 89.5% at the start of 2026. Over the same period, the number of units under construction fell to its lowest level since 2012.

For families starting a search, those two facts describe the same experience from opposite ends: more competition for a supply that is barely growing.

Demand did not pause

Occupancy has risen for 19 consecutive quarters. It reached 89.5% in the first quarter of 2026, up from 89.1% at the end of 2025. Occupied units rose to about 637,000 from 634,000 in a single quarter.

Assisted living occupancy stands at 87.9%. Independent living is above 91%.

Those are the conditions that precede waiting lists.

The pipeline has emptied out

Nationally, the number of senior housing units under construction has fallen to its lowest level since 2012, according to the National Investment Center for Seniors Housing and Care, which tracks about 85% of the country's senior housing supply across 214 markets.

Inventory grew 0.4% year over year in the first quarter of 2026. That is a record low in NIC's data.

The comparison with earlier years is what gives that number meaning. Between 2010 and 2020, annual inventory growth for independent living ran between 0.6% and 2.7%, averaging about 1.5%. Assisted living ran between 1.5% and 5.1%, averaging about 3.2%. Today's 0.4% is below the floor of the entire preceding decade, not merely below its average.

Units under construction as a share of existing inventory has now declined again, continuing what analysts describe as a multi-year contraction from the development peaks of 2017 and 2018.

The starts figures show how sharply builders pulled back. In 2023, fewer than 15,000 senior housing units broke ground in NIC MAP's primary markets, the fewest since 2010, averaging 3,617 a quarter. Through 2024 the quarterly average fell again, to 2,579. Starts have since dropped below 2,000 units in three of the last four quarters, something that had not happened since 2011.

One measure captures the freeze better than any total. Of the senior housing units under construction as of the third quarter, only 29% had broken ground within the previous year, an all-time low. In most quarters that figure runs between 60% and 80%. Most of what is being built is simply old projects still working through a longer pipeline.

Average construction time stretched from 21 months in 2017 to 29 months in 2023.

And over the last two quarters, roughly 2,000 more units opened than started. The industry is now delivering buildings faster than it is beginning them.

Why builders stopped

Lisa McCracken, head of research and analytics at NIC, pointed to costs rather than demand.

"With elevated costs for labor and materials, and property valuation dynamics, many groups simply aren't ready to pull the trigger on projects just yet," McCracken said.

That is a financing problem, not a market-interest problem, which is why the slowdown has persisted through a period of rising occupancy. Senior housing is expensive to build and slow to open, and a project that takes 29 months to deliver has to pencil out against costs that are not yet settled.

What is actually in the North Texas pipeline

Metro-level senior housing construction totals are proprietary, but city development records are not, and they show the local pipeline is not empty.

The City of Plano's development review list dated Aug. 6, 2026 carries three independent living projects:

• 242 independent living units on 6.3 acres at the southwest corner of Park Boulevard and Ohio Drive, the former fitness center site at 4600 W. Park Blvd. (project PSP2026-011)
• 160 independent living units on 8.3 acres on the west side of Alma Drive, south of Park Boulevard (project PR2025-026)
• an independent living facility on 6.1 acres on the south side of Chase Oaks Boulevard, west of U.S. Highway 75, for which the list gives no unit count

In Dallas, the Culbreath Senior Living community broke ground on June 25, 2025 at 2770 Bethurum Ave. in South Dallas. It is a $96.7 million partnership between Volunteers of America and the Dallas Housing Authority, with 364 units for residents age 62 and older, 270 one-bedroom and 94 two-bedroom. More than half, 54%, carry subsidies for residents earning below 50% of area median income.

It is expected to open in summer 2027.

Note the character of what is moving. The Dallas project is publicly financed affordable housing. Two of the three Plano projects are market-rate independent living, the least care-intensive and least capital-intensive category. Assisted living and memory care, the segments serving people who need daily help, are not what is filling these lists.

North Texas is getting older on a documented curve

The North Central Texas Council of Governments projected 508,812 residents age 60 and over in its Area Agency on Aging service area in 2017, or 18.3% of the population there. By 2019 that had reached 573,265, and the agency projected 765,329 by 2024, a 33.5% increase in five years.

The older share of the population was projected to move from 18.3% to 23.3% over that span.

That service area covers 14 counties, including Collin and Denton. It does not include Dallas or Tarrant, which are served separately, so the figures describe the suburban and rural ring rather than the two urban cores.

The council's broader population estimates show the same pressure. Collin County is projected to grow from 1,229,632 residents in 2024 to 1,789,009 by 2045. Denton County goes from 1,036,720 to 1,516,522. Dallas County is projected to reach 3,533,454 and Tarrant County 3,047,872.

What the numbers support about North Texas

The obvious question is whether this national freeze is also a North Texas freeze. The public data supports an answer, with its limits stated plainly.

Metro-level senior housing construction counts are proprietary. NIC sells that detail, and it is not published for Dallas-Fort Worth, so no one can quote a verified figure for units under construction across the region without buying it.

But the aggregate is public, and it constrains the local number arithmetically. Starts across all of NIC MAP's primary markets combined fell below 2,000 units in three of the last four quarters. Those are the country's major metropolitan areas, and Dallas-Fort Worth is among the markets NIC tracks.

A national total that small, divided across that many metros, does not leave room for any single market to be building at scale.

The city records point the same way. Two Plano projects with published unit counts come to 402 independent living units.

Set that against the 765,329 residents age 60 and over the council of governments projected for its service area, and the scale of the response becomes visible: roughly one unit for every 1,900 older adults in that 14-county area, from the projects currently in one city's review list.

That comparison is not a criticism of Plano, which is doing more than most. It is a measure of the gap. A handful of projects in the region's most active suburbs is the supply response to a population that added more than a quarter of a million people age 60 and over in seven years.

So the direction is well supported, and now so is the shape of it. North Texas is still building senior housing, but at a scale that is small relative to the demographic curve, weighted toward independent living rather than care, and in a national environment where starts are at their lowest in more than a decade.

What no public dataset supports is a precise regional total. Direction and scale, yes. A verified metro figure, no.

What it means for a search

Independent living is running above 91% occupancy nationally and assisted living at 87.9%. At those levels, availability is a function of timing rather than choice, and Arick Morton, chief executive of NIC MAP, has advised prospective residents to begin looking earlier, particularly in high-occupancy markets.

The region's older population was projected to grow 33.5% in five years. National inventory grew 0.4% in the most recent year measured. Families planning around a specific building, in a specific town, on a specific timeline should assume the search takes longer than it would have five years ago.

Sources

https://www.nic.org/news-press/senior-living-occupancy-grows-amid-construction-slowdown-limiting-options-for-older-adults/

https://www.nicmap.com/blog/what-you-should-know-about-the-critical-lack-of-construction-starts/

https://www.nicmap.com/blog/construction-starts-falling-behind-needed-demand/

https://www.nctcog.org/getContentAsset/f28a28f3-5287-4418-8203-d80709cf7977/dfc3d011-8f63-43f6-9ed8-4b444333a1d0/AreaAgencyonAgingAreaPlan.pdf