Building permit timelines & delays, by jurisdiction
Data-backed guides to how long building permits actually take in major U.S. jurisdictions — sourced from official government performance reports, with every figure cited. We're expanding city coverage over time.
Building-permit review times in the U.S. range from a guaranteed 2-business-day turnaround to medians of well over a year — and the gap is mostly about local process, not the size of the project. permittable tracks the official numbers for 56 jurisdictions across 25 states, with every figure cited to a government source.
- The slowest reviews cluster in Hawaii and coastal California — Honolulu's median single-family permit runs 394 days.
- The fastest jurisdictions guarantee turnaround in days — Kansas City reviews one- and two-family homes in 2 business days.
- 21 of 56 jurisdictions run longer than their statutory or published target review period.
- Methodologies differ by city — compare a jurisdiction to its own target before comparing it to another.
Start with a statewide overview
The backbone datasets — official statewide performance data that anchors every city guide beneath it.
runs longOfficial 2024 data: most permit types ran 67–199% over statute across 50 jurisdictions.
view guide
runs longCalifornia's Environmental Quality Act lets any party sue to block approved housing — a typical suit runs four to five years, and 2020 filings targeted roughly 48,000 homes.
view guide
runs longHawaii's median permit time runs more than triple the U.S. average; delay cost Honolulu's private sector an estimated $202M in 2022–23.
view guide
strict deadlinesFlorida forces local permit decisions on a business-day clock — miss it and the fee drops 10% per day, or the permit auto-approves.
view guideFind your jurisdiction
Search, filter by state, or sort by review performance. Each guide reports official figures and names the exact source they came from.
Albany's Buildings & Regulatory Compliance cites 7–10 business days to approve a permit, longer if corrections are needed; NY's Uniform Code mandates plan exam.
The City Auditor found general building permits took a median 12–21 workdays to issue and met city targets only 34–54% of the time.
Austin publishes per-cycle review targets — relatively fast and unusually transparent.
Baltimore's standard is plan review under 30 days, but a Feb 2025 switch to a new permit system collapsed output and built a backlog.
Construction cleared well inside statute, but multifamily review ran far over.
Highest reported volume statewide, yet construction reviews still met statute.
Boise publishes actual average first-review days by permit type each quarter — from 4 days (small TIs) to 52 (new multifamily).
Routine Boston permits issue in days, but Article 80 large-project review (50,000+ sq ft) can run months or even years.
Boulder posts no fixed permit target; discretionary use reviews average ~200 days, and since Dec 2024 new construction must be all-electric.
Historic-core homes clear the Board of Architectural Review across stages; flood zones require building 2 ft above base flood elevation.
Mecklenburg County aims to review townhome plans within 12 days and single-/two-family plans within 7 days of acceptance — goals, not guarantees.
Eligible projects clear in ~10 business days via the self-certification program.
State law gives Columbus up to 30 days to approve or disapprove filed plans before inaction legally counts as a denial.
Dallas maps its commercial permit path: ~1–10 day initial review, a 15-day plan-review step, and a same-day Q-Team expedited option.
Second-slowest behind San Francisco in an official cross-city benchmarking review.
Fort Collins offers an ~14-calendar-day expedited code review for stock plans (plus a 7-day zoning target).
Fort Lauderdale processes ~24,000 permit applications a year through its LauderBuild portal, now under Florida's 30-business-day statutory cap.
Greeley typically schedules project submittals for an approximately two-week review, depending on complexity and queue.
The Big Island is Hawaii's fastest county for single-family permits at a 127-day median, but still slow by mainland standards.
UHERO clocked Honolulu single-family permits at a 394-day median (585 for multifamily) for permits issued in early 2025.
Houston has no zoning, but new homes still face separate Chapter 42 platting and Chapter 19 floodplain review on top of building plan review.
New Jersey law gives Jersey City 20 business days to grant or deny a complete permit — even amid one of the nation's biggest high-rise booms.
KCMO guarantees a 2-day first-review turnaround for one- and two-family dwelling plans; new commercial builds target 4 weeks.
Unincorporated Clark County, where most valley homes are built, targets 21 days for a custom single-family first review; each revision adds ~10.
Official data, cited line by line
Every number on these pages traces back to a government performance report or official dashboard — no estimates, no scraping, no vendor spin.
Sourced from the record
Figures come from official permitting performance reports and city dashboards — the same documents reviewers and councils rely on.
Benchmarked honestly
Where a statutory period exists, we benchmark the real review time against it — so you can see exactly where a jurisdiction runs over.
Traceable to the page
Each data point carries its exact table, figure, and page citation — so you can verify it in the source yourself.
Building permit timelines, answered
How long does it take to get a building permit in the U.S.?
It varies enormously by jurisdiction. Review times in our data range from a guaranteed 2-business-day turnaround for one- and two-family homes in Kansas City, MO, to a 394-day median for a single-family permit in Honolulu, HI. Most of that gap reflects local process — completeness checks, resubmittal cycles, and discretionary review — rather than the size of the project. Because cities measure time differently, compare a jurisdiction against its own target before comparing it to another.
Which U.S. cities have the slowest building-permit reviews?
Among the jurisdictions we track, the slowest are concentrated in Hawaii and coastal California: Honolulu (394-day median single-family permit), Maui County (379-day median), San Francisco (280-day median in the city's own Budget & Legislative Analyst review), Denver (274-day median in that same cross-city study), and Boulder (≈200-day average discretionary land-use review).
Which cities are the fastest or most on-target?
Kansas City, MO guarantees a 2-business-day first review for one- and two-family homes; St. Paul, MN clears compliant historic-district work in about 5 business days; Albany, NY states a 7–10 business-day rule of thumb; and Bellingham, WA met its 65-day statutory construction-review period almost exactly (64.57 days) despite handling Washington's highest reported permit volume. Austin, TX publishes a 25-business-day target for new-construction initial review.
Where does permittable's permit timeline data come from?
Every figure traces to an official public source — a government permitting performance report, a statute, or a city's own plan-review dashboard. Each data point names the exact table, figure, report period, or page it came from. There are no estimates, scraped numbers, or vendor projections.
Can I compare permit timelines across cities directly?
Carefully. Jurisdictions measure different things: Washington reports performance against statutory deadlines, San Francisco's review measured end-to-end median processing time, and many cities publish first-review targets that exclude resubmittal cycles. We label what each figure measures so you can compare like with like — a 30-day statutory cap is not the same as a 30-day median outcome.
How often are these guides updated?
We refresh each guide as new official reports and dashboards publish. Every jurisdiction page carries its own last-updated date; the guides in this directory were last reviewed in June 2026. Where a figure is a baseline year (such as Washington's 2024 report, which predates its new statutory periods), we flag that explicitly.
What do the status labels — runs long, mixed, on target — mean?
“Runs long” means reported review times exceed the jurisdiction's statutory or published target period. “On target” means it meets or beats that period. “Mixed” means performance depends on permit type — for example, fast construction permits but slow multifamily review. Where a jurisdiction only publishes a target or a legal deadline rather than measured outcomes, we label the figure accordingly.
know your jurisdiction before you submit
Permittable checks your plans against the codes a reviewer will actually flag — so your package clears on the first pass, wherever you build.