The Central Bank confirms cumulative growth of 4.5% between January and August 2026, more than double that of the same period in 2025, with construction and record tourist arrivals as the main drivers
SANTO DOMINGO. – Last year, El Inmobiliario documented a construction sector hit by the contraction: the sector's added value fell 2.3% year-on-year in the first half of 2025 and the residential supply was reduced by about 12% throughout the year.
Twelve months later, the Central Bank confirms that a shift occurred in which construction grew 7.9% in August and has accumulated 7.0% so far in 2026, the highest rate among all the activities that make up the Monthly Indicator of Economic Activity (IMAE), which as a whole advanced 4.5% between January and August, compared to just 2.3% in the same period of the previous year.
The Central Bank attributes the rebound to two mutually reinforcing drivers: greater execution of public capital spending, which closed 2025 at 2.9% of GDP, 0.4 points above 2024, and private investment returning to residential, commercial and tourism projects, driven by more flexible credit conditions.
Credit for construction grew 16.2% year-on-year at the end of August, an additional RD$26 billion compared to the same month in 2025, and the Central Bank itself also points to institutional improvements to streamline the approval processes for new works .
Data from the Ministry of Housing, Habitat and Buildings (Mivhed) confirms this dynamism from another angle: in the second quarter of 2026 alone, RD$175,829.75 million in building projects were valued and 479 construction permits were issued, 73.49% of them for residential use.
La Altagracia led provincial investment, with RD$58,773.9 million, nearly a third of the national total, driven by the tourism and real estate boom in the eastern region.
The sector also remains a heavyweight in the real economy: Acoprovi places it at around 15% of GDP and more than 400,000 direct jobs, although its president, Annerys Meléndez, has insisted that interest rates and slow permitting continue to increase the final price of the product for the buyer.
The growth that the Central Bank is currently exhibiting coexists with the same structural bottlenecks that El Inmobiliario has been reporting and that industry players have pointed out.
Another record for tourism
The hotels, bars and restaurants sector, the approach used by the Central Bank to measure tourism within the IMAE, grew 2.3% in August and has accumulated 5.4% between January and August.
Behind that figure is a more compelling piece of data offered by the Ministry of Tourism: the country received 8,556,415 visitors in the first eight months of 2026 between air and cruise ships, 6.9% more than in 2025, 9.8% more than in 2024 and 58.9% more than in 2019, the last year before the pandemic.
August, normally a low season month, set its own record: 725,560 tourists arrived by air, the highest number ever recorded for that month, according to the Ministry of Tourism, which had never before exceeded 600,000 air travelers in the eighth month.
In addition, 131,298 cruise passengers arrived, a year-on-year increase of 31.9%. “Another record in the history of Dominican tourism,” summarized Minister David Collado when presenting the figures.
Hotel occupancy stood at 68% during the month, and the United States continued to be the main source market, with 44% of August visitors, followed by Canada (9%), Colombia (8%) and Argentina (5%).
Both sectors support the economic outlook
Financial services grew 9.4% in August, leveraging a 7.6% increase in credit to the private sector, some RD$187 billion more than in August 2025, and manufacturing in free zones advanced 3.4%, driven by exports of tobacco, jewelry and electrical products.
Not the whole map is green: mining fell 14.6% in August due to scheduled maintenance at the country's main gold extraction plant, and the agricultural sector declined 1.4% due to the drought that has hit the production of rice, legumes, tubers and pork.
The Central Bank itself frames this performance within an international context that it described as uncertain, marked by geopolitical tensions and changes in the United States' trade, immigration and social program policies.
Despite this, the institution maintains that the result from January to August is in line with the year-end target agreed with the Ministry of Finance and Economy, around 4.5%, a figure that would almost double the 2.4% that the International Monetary Fund projects for Latin America as a whole in 2026, and that would more than double the growth observed throughout 2025.
For the Dominican real estate sector, the interpretation is twofold, because on the one hand, construction is once again leading national growth after a year of contraction, supported by more credit, more public investment, and a demand that the ROE 2026-1 itself had already shown to be expanding; and on the other hand, this same rebound comes while the housing deficit, which is around 1.3 million units, persists, along with the bottlenecks in permits and financing that Acoprovi continues to point out as the next frontier to be resolved.
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