Data Analysis

The Census Bureau reported that wholesalers of lumber and construction materials held 1.69 months of inventory in August 2026, against 1.18 months for merchant wholesalers overall.

Total wholesale sales were $817.5 billion in August, up 15.6 percent from a year earlier, and the overall inventories-to-sales ratio fell to 1.18 from 1.28. The building-materials line has not been below its 2015 to 2019 average since March 2022.

The Census Bureau released August 2026 wholesale trade figures today, and they divide neatly in two. Merchant wholesalers overall sold $817.5 billion in August, up 1.8 percent from July and up 15.6 percent from a year earlier, and their inventories-to-sales ratio fell to 1.18 from 1.28 a year ago. Wholesalers of lumber and other construction materials sat at 1.69 months of inventory, and the hardware, plumbing and heating line sat at 2.02. Measured against sales, building-materials distributors are carrying about 43 percent more stock than wholesale distribution as a whole.

How much inventory are building-materials wholesalers holding?

The lumber and other construction materials line, NAICS 4233, held $31.1 billion of inventory against $18.4 billion of August sales. Sales slipped 0.3 percent from July and ran 3.4 percent above August 2025. Inventories rose 0.8 percent on the month and sat 0.8 percent below a year earlier.

The ratio those figures produce, 1.69, is the number worth watching. It fell as low as 1.32 in April 2021, when builders could not get materials fast enough. It peaked at 1.82 in January 2025. August's reading is 0.07 below the same month last year and 0.13 below that peak, so the stockpile is working down, slowly.

What it has not done is return to normal. The ratio averaged 1.48 across 2015 through 2019 and ran between 1.37 and 1.62 across those five years. It has not printed below 1.48 since March 2022. Every one of the 53 months since has come in at 1.52 or higher.

What did wholesale inventories do overall in August?

The totals moved the other way, and they moved with confidence. Census reports sales "up 1.8 percent (plus or minus 0.2 percent) from the revised July level" and "up 15.6 percent (plus or minus 0.7 percent) from the revised August 2025 level." Inventories were $964.2 billion, up 0.5 percent on the month and up 6.4 percent on the year. Each of those four changes is larger than its margin of error.

Sales growing faster than inventories is what drives a ratio down, and 1.18 against 1.28 a year ago is a meaningful move for an aggregate that size. Durable goods did the same thing in sharper form: sales of $414.8 billion, up 20.3 percent year over year, against inventories up 6.3 percent, for a ratio of 1.45.

So the building-materials lines are the exception rather than the rule in this release.

Why does a wholesale inventory ratio matter for housing?

A wholesaler's inventories-to-sales ratio is a rough count of how many months of sales are sitting in the warehouse. When builders and contractors are buying, the stock turns and the ratio falls. When they slow down, product accumulates and the ratio rises even if nobody ordered anything extra.

That makes this series a demand signal dressed as a supply statistic. August's move is the unhelpful combination: sales down on the month, inventories up on the month. Distributors sold slightly less and held slightly more.

Two cautions belong here. The monthly moves in these category lines are small, and Census publishes no margin of error for individual kinds of business, only for the totals, so a one-month wiggle in the lumber line is not something to lean on. The year-over-year direction and the distance from the pre-pandemic norm are the durable facts.

What does this mean for Florida?

Nothing in this release is about Florida. Census reports wholesale trade nationally, with no state breakout, no metro detail and no Florida cut of any kind. The connection has to be made carefully or not at all.

Here is the careful version. Florida's existing-home market tightened over the summer: Florida Realtors reported statewide single-family inventory of 94,610 at the end of August, down 13.0 percent from a year earlier, with months of supply at 4.3 against 5.3 a year before and closed sales of 21,497, down 1.4 percent. New construction is the other half of supply, and national building-materials distribution is one of the inputs to it. Heavy distributor stock means materials are available to whoever wants to build. It does not mean anyone is building.

Readers who want the Florida numbers themselves can find them on our Miami, Tampa, Orlando and Jacksonville hubs, with city, county and ZIP detail in our market data.

The next Monthly Wholesale Trade release, covering September 2026, is scheduled for November 9.

Limitations

Census publishes margins of error for the merchant wholesaler totals only. The lumber, hardware and durable goods lines in Table 1 carry no published margin, so no change in those lines is described here as statistically significant, and the small month-over-month moves should be read as provisional. The report carries a general note that where a 90 percent confidence interval includes zero, there is insufficient evidence to conclude the actual change differs from zero.

July figures in this release are revised from the July report published September 10, which is why the lumber sales and inventory levels differ slightly from the figures this desk published for that month.

The historical ratio series shown in the chart is Census data retrieved from FRED series R4233IM163SCEN through July 2026, with the August value taken from today's release. The two sources agree on July, which is the overlap month. The 2015 to 2019 average of 1.48 and the count of months since March 2022 are this desk's calculations from that series.

Monthly wholesale estimates are based on a sample and are subject to sampling and non-sampling error. These are national figures. Applying them to Florida construction is an inference by this desk and is not something the Census Bureau reports.

Sources

U.S. Census Bureau, Monthly Wholesale Trade: Sales and Inventories, August 2026, Release Number CB26-152, published October 8, 2026, census.gov/wholesale. U.S. Census Bureau, Monthly Wholesale Trade, July 2026, Release Number CB26-136, published September 10, 2026. Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, FRED series R4233IM163SCEN, inventories-to-sales ratio for merchant wholesalers of lumber and other construction materials. Florida Realtors, Florida single-family market summary, August 2026.

Disclosure: Jon Brooks is a co-founder of Momentum Realty, a Florida real estate brokerage that owns and funds Florida Housing Intelligence. Momentum has a financial interest in Florida real estate transactions, including in markets named here. See our editorial standards.