Real estate posted 24.7% output growth in June 2026, the fastest of any services sub-sector tracked by India's new government index, as air transport remained the sole laggard.
India has a new way to measure how its services economy is actually performing month to month, and in its third trial release, real estate came out on top by a wide margin. The National Statistics Office's trial Index of Services Production, tracking 19 sub-sectors against a 2024-25 base year, showed 18 of 19 sub-sectors posting positive growth in June 2026. Real estate led all of them, with output surging 24.7% year-on-year, ahead of retail trade at 18%, wholesale trade at 15.1%, and IT and computer-related services at 13.5%.
This isn't a real estate industry report, it's a genuinely new piece of government statistical infrastructure. The ISP is designed to fill a long-standing gap alongside the Index of Industrial Production, giving India its first high-frequency monthly read on services activity, a sector that accounts for the majority of the country's economic output but has historically lacked timely data.
This is only the index's third publication since MoSPI released the maiden trial series for April 2026 in mid-July, so it's still explicitly experimental, but the pattern it's showing is already notable: eight sub-sectors posted double-digit growth in June, matching May's count but down from 14 in April, while real estate specifically accelerated from 17.7% growth in May to 24.7% in June.
Air transport was the sole sub-sector in contraction, and it's been trending the wrong way for three straight months, its decline widened to 6% in June from 2.8% in May. That contrast matters for how you read this data: it's not that every part of the services economy is booming uniformly, it's that real estate specifically is pulling away from a broadly positive but uneven field, while aviation drags in the opposite direction. Two sectors that had contracted in May did recover in June, postal and courier services swung from a 1% decline to 5% growth, and information and broadcasting flipped from a 7.6% contraction to 4.6% growth.
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This data landed alongside India's Q1 FY27 GDP figures, also released the same day, showing real GDP growth of 7.8%, ahead of the Reserve Bank of India's earlier 7% projection for the quarter. Real GDP came in at ₹81.36 lakh crore against ₹75.46 lakh crore a year earlier. Read together, real estate's outsized contribution to services growth is doing real work in an economy that's outperforming its own central bank's expectations, even as global headwinds persist elsewhere.
If you've been following coverage of India's housing sales specifically, this index result might look inconsistent with reports of Q2 2026 sales volumes actually declining year-on-year in several major cities. It isn't necessarily a contradiction, output growth and unit sales growth measure different things. Output can rise through higher prices, increased construction activity, and completed project value even while the raw count of homes sold softens in specific markets.
This ISP figure is measuring the sector's production and economic contribution broadly, not transaction volume city by city, which is exactly why a single number rarely tells the whole story in real estate, the same lesson that applies whether you're reading a national growth index or a city-level sales tracker.
