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 1-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 169 jurisdictions across 50 states and DC, 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 1 business days.
- 37 of 169 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 your state
Pick a state to open its statewide guide, the backbone dataset behind its city guides, and jump to the cities we've profiled there. All 50 states are covered, each guide is cited to the official record and updated regularly.
Find 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.
Alexandria targets 10 business days for residential plan review under Virginia's open-ended state standard, but historic-district work must first clear a twice-monthly Board of Architectural Review; it publishes no measured turnaround.
Anaheim posts a 10 to 20 business-day plan-review target, but its own Accela open-data permit records show plan-checked residential permits taking a median of 84 calendar days (mean 124) from application to issuance. About three-quarters of all residential permits are same-day over-the-counter; the long tail is the plan-check track, plus the city's own electric utility quoting 8 to 12 weeks for a service plan.
Anchorage's seismic (Category D2, post-2018-quake) and 50-psf snow-load requirements make residential engineering demanding, but the city publishes no permit-timeline data, and its only stated target is 4 days for pre-approved plans.
Annapolis posts a 15-day target for a single-family permit, but the binding constraints sit upstream: a Historic Preservation Commission Certificate of Approval and Chesapeake Bay Critical Area review, both on their own clocks.
Asheville's steep-slope and landslide rules already complicate hillside builds; since Hurricane Helene the city has worked through a rebuilding surge, about 945 permits by mid-2025.
Aspen's own timeline sheet puts a major residential permit at 16–18 weeks for first review, with each correction round adding another 8–10 weeks.
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.
Augusta enforces Maine's MUBEC through a small Bureau of Code Enforcement issuing about 500 permits a year. It posts no turnaround; the friction is the Kennebec River shoreland zone and floodplain, plus limited staff.
Austin's open data shows a new single-family home takes a median ~108 days from application to permit, far longer than the per-cycle review targets suggest.
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.
Baton Rouge's own open permit data shows a measured median of about 15 days from application to issuance for a new home in 2024, against a 7-business-day plan-review target. The 2016 flood and a one-foot freeboard rule dominate the friction.
Construction cleared well inside statute, but multifamily review ran far over.
Highest reported volume statewide, yet construction reviews still met statute.
Bismarck is one of the few small capitals that posts review goals: 7-10 business days for residential new construction, 14-21 for commercial, most other permits within a day. It also publishes monthly permit logs; deep frost and the Missouri River are the constraints.
Boise publishes actual average first-review days by permit type each quarter, each against its goal, from 6 days (small TIs) to 46 (new multifamily L2).
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.
Bozeman issued roughly 8,977 new dwelling-unit permits since 2020 amid 43% growth, and is now rebuilding its development code under Montana's 2023 housing-reform laws.
Burlington's open data shows a ~9-day median for residential zoning permits, with 76% closed within 30 days, and Act 250 generally doesn't even apply to single-family or duplex work.
Cambridge issues permits under the Massachusetts 30-day decision rule, but the friction is the stack of mandates on top: it adopted the Specialized net-zero stretch code (all-electric or electric-ready), joined the state fossil-fuel-free building pilot, and became the first US city to require large existing buildings to reach net-zero emissions under BEUDO. Add multiple historic and conservation districts and extensive public-comment loops, and energy and discretionary review dominate the timeline, not the 30-day clock.
Carson City, a consolidated city-county, posts no permit shot clock. Two governance moves dominate: a 3% annual cap on residential permits (774 for 2026) and a 2025 decision to bring building review back in-house after years of outsourcing.
Historic-core homes clear the Board of Architectural Review across stages; flood zones require building 2 ft above base flood elevation.
Charleston, West Virginia (not South Carolina) opted into the state code and is unusual in posting review targets: residential in 3 working days, commercial 10, industrial 30. Kanawha and Elk River flood and hillside terrain are the friction.
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.
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