Pipeline of Approved Development
Montgomery County, Maryland
The Montgomery Planning Department tracks the residential and non-residential Development Pipeline for Montgomery County planning areas and municipalities (Gaithersburg, Laytonsville, Poolesville, and Rockville). The pipeline is an inventory of development projects that have been approved by the Montgomery County Planning Board but not completely built. This inventory covers unbuilt dwellings units and unbuilt non-residential building gross square footage.
The projects tracked for the pipeline include preliminary plans that add development and site plans that do not have a parent preliminary plan to represent the project; these are known as standalone site plans. Various precursors to the approval of a preliminary plan or a standalone site plan, such as sketch plans, Natural Resource Inventory approval, and forest conservation plans, are not part of pipeline tracking. Furthermore, not every preliminary plan is tracked in the pipeline, as many are amendments that do not alter the quantities of development.
For the projects tracked in the pipeline, residential dwelling units are further categorized into single-family dwellings and multi-family dwellings. Approved commercial gross floor area is further categorized as office, retail, industrial, or institutional. These approved spaces are also listed by the number of jobs expected to be associated with those approvals.
January 2025: Pipeline by Master Plan
The Montgomery County Development Pipeline (spreadsheet) contains residential and non-residential pipeline projects by master plan. Expand each master plan to get project-record level details by clicking the plus (+) button to left of the “Master Plan” row. If you unhide columns “A” through “F” you can manipulate the data by master plan, policy area, traffic zones, submittal date, and Adequate Public Facility (APF) expiration date.
- January 2025: Pipeline Record Level Detail
- January 2025: Pipeline Master Plan Summary
If you need further assistance/questions or find a problem with downloads, please contact Steve Cary.
Pipeline Interactive Map
Frequently asked questions
The Development Pipeline (“the Pipeline”) is an inventory of development projects that have been approved by the Montgomery County Planning Board but have not been completed by the developer. This inventory covers unbuilt dwellings units and unbuilt non-residential building gross square footage. Residential dwelling units are further characterized into single-family dwellings and multi-family dwellings. Non-residential gross floor area is characterized into the number of jobs and gross floor area for office, retail, industrial, and other non-residential types associated with the project.
The Pipeline comprises approved projects and tracks the expiration of that approval but not whether or why something has stalled; these already-approved projects could be constructed within the next few years, but entering the Pipeline does not guarantee the proposed units will ever be constructed. Approved projects don’t move forward for a variety of reasons—including financing issues, changing market conditions, and changes in property ownership—but ultimately decisions to build are up to the developer.
The Pipeline offers valuable insight for planners, the development community, and community members alike into projects that may move forward to construction, including their cumulative development impacts. Planner staff and the Planning Board consider the approved but unbuilt development pipeline as a “background” condition when evaluating new proposals, such as their potential impacts on transportation and traffic congestion.
Montgomery Planning’s role is to comprehensively review the built, natural, and social environments of community planning areas and to consider opportunities to further the outcomes and objectives of Thrive Montgomery 2050. Development applications, reviewed by Planning staff, and then the Planning Board for compliance with the sector and master plans as well as applicable laws, are how master and sector plans get realized, so the Pipeline also makes clear which sector and master plans are moving ahead. Projects that are well-positioned for the market generally move on to construction, while others linger until more favorable market conditions exist or the approval expires.
A 2024 Montgomery Planning evaluation of projects that have been in the pipeline since 2018 found that only 50% had been constructed six years later. Furthermore, of the 30,000 unbuilt housing units currently in the pipeline, more than 10,600 (or 36%) were approved over 10 years ago—which suggests that many of these units will never be built, even though they will remain in the pipeline count until their approvals expire.
Approved projects don’t move forward for a variety of reasons, including financing issues, changing market conditions, and changes in property ownership. Notably, 87% of unbuilt pipeline units are in the form of large, multifamily rental buildings. While this housing is inarguably important, it does not help us meet the current and future need for more diverse housing options nor increased ownership opportunities.
Once the Planning Board approves development projects, it is up to the developers to actually build them. Montgomery Planning staff hope to find out some of the reasons that projects are not moving forward (economics, property ownership issues, county policies, etc.), and whether the reasons differ by geography or unit type. We hope that the knowledge we gain from this effort can inform potential policies that can help accelerate the movement of projects off the Pipeline and into construction.