2026 Los Angeles Permit Approval Timeline Report

Every Los Angeles building project has a phase before construction that nobody photographs: the wait between lodging an application and being handed a permit. The City records both dates on every permit it issues, which makes that wait measurable.

We took every new single-family house (8,132 permits), accessory dwelling unit (9,577) and home addition (33,408) permit issued by the City of Los Angeles since January 2020 and measured the months between the application date and the issue date on each one. The median for a new house was 13.1 months for permits issued in 2024 and 5.0 months for permits issued so far in 2026.

This report publishes the figures and the dataset behind them. It does not argue for an explanation. Where a number invites one, the competing possibilities are listed and left open for you to weigh.

The Dataset

• Source: City of Los Angeles open data, dataset pi9x-tg5x — Building and Safety permits issued from 2020 to present. Public, updated daily, extracted 2026-10-11.
• What is measured: calendar months from submitted_date to issue_date on the same permit — the approval phase, ending the day the permit is issued and construction may begin.
• This is not "city processing time". The clock runs while an applicant revises drawings and answers correction notices, and the record does not separate time spent waiting on the department from time spent waiting on the applicant. A long figure is not evidence of either.
• Window: every year is cut to January 1 – 9/30, applied to every year, so the partial 2026 compares like with like. The cutoff sits well behind the extract date because permits enter the record days after issue.
• Permits are grouped by the year they were issued, not the year they were applied for. That choice is load-bearing and is explained in the Method section.

Permits are issued by the Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety; zoning and entitlement questions that can precede an application sit with City Planning and are not captured in this measure.

Finding 1: The Median Rose Through 2023, Then Fell by More Than Half

For new single-family houses, the median wait lengthened from 10.3 months for permits issued in 2022 to 13.7 months in 2023. For permits issued in 2025 and 2026 it was 5.3 and 5.0 months.

Finding 2: The Permit Record Labels Wildfire Rebuilds, and They Sit Well Below Everything Else

From 2025 the work description on some permits opens with the words 2025 WILDFIRE REBUILD, and many carry a note about eligibility under a City executive order. That is the record's own classification, so these permits can be separated out without us inferring anything from location or date.

Splitting on that label, permits marked as wildfire rebuilds had a median of 2.1 months in 2025 (275 permits) and 3.9 months in 2026 (674). Every other new house permit issued in those years ran at 8.1 and 7.8 months.

The second column is worth reading on its own. New house permits carrying no rebuild label also moved — from 13.1 months in 2024 to 7.8 in 2026 — so the citywide fall in Finding 1 is not only a matter of rebuild permits entering the mix.

Finding 3: ADUs and Additions Moved on Different Paths

An ADU permit and a home addition permit are both plan-checked projects, and neither carries a rebuild programme. Their lines have a different shape from the new-house line: shallower, and without the 2023 peak.

Median months from application to permit issue, by the year the permit was issued, matched to the same part of each year.

Finding 4: The Median Is the Comfortable Number

In the 2024 cohort, 55.8% of issued new-house permits had been waiting more than a year and 25.9% more than two. The slowest ran 123.3 months. In 2026 those shares were 18.3% and 10.9%, with a longest of 110.2 months.

The quartiles for 2024 were 6.2 · 13.1 · 24.8 months, with a 90th percentile of 53.2. For 2026 they were 3.2 · 5.0 · 8.7, with a 90th percentile of 28.5. In both years the slowest tenth waited over two years.

Finding 5: The Range Across the City Is Wide

Across the 22 community plan areas with at least 25 qualifying permits, the median for houses issued in 2023–24 ran from 5.6 months in Sherman Oaks-Studio City-Toluca Lake-Cahuenga Pass to 33.9 months in Northeast Los Angeles. Batch releases are excluded — see Method.

Possible Readings

The record carries dates, not reasons. These are the explanations the figures are consistent with; the dataset cannot choose between them, and neither will we.

• A dedicated programme may process faster than a general queue. The rebuild-labelled permits reference eligibility under a City executive order. Whether that pathway, the staffing behind it, or something else accounts for the gap is not something the dates can show.
• Rebuilds may simply be easier to review. A house replacing one that stood on the same lot can raise fewer zoning and discretionary questions than a new design on a new site. That would produce the same gap with no difference in handling.
• Applicant behaviour may differ. An owner rebuilding a destroyed home has reasons to submit complete drawings and answer corrections quickly. Because the clock includes applicant time, that alone could move the figure.
• The fall in non-rebuild approvals has its own open set. Process changes, staffing, a shift in the mix of projects applying, or fewer complex applications reaching issue would each be consistent with it.
• The 2023–24 peak may be composition rather than slowdown. If a backlog of older, harder applications cleared in those years, the cohorts would look slow without anything having got slower.
• Area differences may be site conditions rather than geography. Hillside grading, subdivision work and fire-zone requirements concentrate unevenly across the city.

Opportunity Spotlight

• Approval is a phase, not paperwork. At a 5.0-month median in 2026 and 13.1 in 2024, it is long enough to belong in the programme and the carrying-cost model from the start.
• An addition clears faster than a new build in every year measured. Where a brief can be met by adding to a house rather than replacing it, the approval calendar is one of the differences.
• Plan for the tail, not the median. More than half the 2024 cohort waited over a year. A programme built on the median has no room for the outcome a quarter of that cohort got.
• The spread across areas is knowable before you buy. These are published figures by community plan area, and they can be read at the feasibility stage rather than discovered later.

Method

• Extraction. All permits with permit_type Bldg-New and use Dwelling – Single Family or Accessory Dwelling Unit, plus Bldg-Addition permits with sub-type 1 or 2 Family Dwelling, retrieved 2026-10-11. Duration is days between submitted_date and issue_date divided by 30.44.
• The dataset contains only permits that were issued. Applications sitting in plan check, withdrawn or abandoned are not in it at all. Every figure here therefore describes the permits that reached issue. What an application faces, including the ones that never got a permit, cannot be measured from this source and would be worse.
• Cohorts are grouped by issue year, never by application year. An application-year cohort is missing its own slowest members, because anything submitted recently and still stuck has not been issued and so is absent. That manufactures a tidy improvement out of nothing. For illustration, the same data grouped the wrong way gives: 2022 11.6 mo, 2023 8.3 mo, 2024 6.9 mo, 2025 3.7 mo, 2026 3.4 mo — a clean downward run that is substantially an artefact. Grouping by issue year is complete: every permit issued in a year is present however long it waited.
• Area figures exclude batch releases. Days where five or more permits were issued in one area are dropped (529 permits). Without this, one community plan area showed a 77.6-month median on the strength of 28 permits submitted in 2017 and all issued on a single day — one development, not a property of the area.
• Area names were normalised. One area appears under a truncated second spelling and again in upper case, and some rows carry two areas comma-joined.
• Alteration and repair permits are excluded. Only 33.7% of them carry an application date, because most are issued over the counter with no plan-check phase to record. Measuring the third that do would select for the slow minority. Additions, at 99.9% coverage, are used instead.
• Wildfire rebuilds are identified by the permit's own work description, not by location or date. 1,207 such permits appear, all issued in 2025–26.
• Coverage. Application dates are present on 100% of new-house permits and 99.99% of ADU permits. No permit in the extract carried an issue date earlier than its application date.

Download the Data

The processed dataset is published for reuse. Attribution to Blackbriar is welcome but not required; the underlying records are the City of Los Angeles'.

• approval-months-by-year.csv — median months by issue year for all three permit types
• approval-months-by-community-plan-area.csv — median, quartiles and 90th percentile for 22 community plan areas
• approval-timeline.json — the complete structured dataset, including the rebuild split, the full distribution, source metadata and caveats

How Blackbriar Uses This

We build custom homes in Los Angeles, so the approval phase sits inside our own programmes. What the record changes is mostly sequencing: approval is scheduled and carried as a phase with its own cost, the distribution rather than the median sets the contingency, and the site is assessed for the questions it will raise in review before anyone commits to it. Our process and services pages set out how we work, and you can talk to us directly.

FAQ

How long does it take to get a building permit in Los Angeles?

For new single-family houses issued in 2026, the median was 5.0 months from application to permit; for those issued in 2024 it was 13.1 months. ADU permits ran at 5.4 months and home additions at 3.7 months in 2026. These figures cover only permits that were issued, and the clock includes applicant time spent revising drawings.

Why measure from the year a permit was issued rather than the year it was applied for?

Because an application-year group is missing its own slowest cases. Anything applied for recently that is still in review has not been issued, so it is absent from the data entirely, which makes recent years look fast purely because they are incomplete. Grouping by issue year is complete: every permit issued in that year appears, no matter how long it waited.

Are wildfire rebuild permits processed differently?

The record does not answer that. What it shows is that permits whose work description identifies them as 2025 wildfire rebuilds had a median of 2.1 months in 2025 and 3.9 in 2026, against 7.8 months for every other new-house permit in 2026. A dedicated pathway, simpler reviews on a previously built lot, and faster applicant responses would all be consistent with that gap.

Does this measure how long the City takes?

No. The interval runs from application to issue, and it includes time the applicant spends revising drawings and responding to correction notices. The dataset does not separate department time from applicant time, so these figures should not be read as a measure of either one alone.

What about applications that never get a permit?

They are not in this dataset. It records permits that were issued, so applications still in review, withdrawn or abandoned never appear. Every figure here describes the projects that reached a permit, and the full picture including those that did not would be less favourable.

Where does the data come from?

The City of Los Angeles open data portal, dataset pi9x-tg5x, covering building permits issued from 2020 to present. It was extracted on 2026-10-11 and covers 8,132 new house permits, 9,577 ADU permits and 33,408 addition permits. The processed dataset is published for download with this report.

Recommended

• 2026 Los Angeles Home Build Timeline Report — the phase after this one, from permit issue to certificate of occupancy
• 2026 Los Angeles Residential Building Permit Report — how many permits are being issued, and where
• 2026 Los Angeles Lot Due Diligence Report — what to establish about a site before it becomes a schedule problem