Permitting takes so long because most of the elapsed time is not review. It is queue time, discretionary approvals that have to clear before a plan checker opens the file, and the days the corrections sit on your own desk between rounds. When a client asks why does permitting take so long, the honest answer is three clocks running in sequence: entitlement, plan check, and your response time. A jurisdiction that publishes a 20-business-day first review is describing a calendar month, and that is round one of two or three.
The hours a reviewer spends actually reading your set are a small part of the total. That is the uncomfortable part of the answer, because it means speeding things up is mostly a scheduling and completeness problem, not a persuasion problem.
This page is the map for the permitting series. It explains what happens between submittal and issuance, which parts of the clock your firm controls, and what the waiting costs. The posts at the bottom go deeper on each piece.
What actually happens between submittal and permit?
Five steps, and only one of them involves a plan checker reading drawings.
Intake. A clerk or a portal confirms the application is complete: forms, owner authorization, deposit, sheet size, PDF structure, consultant stamps. Miss one item and the review clock never starts. Some cities will sit on an incomplete application for a week before telling you the soils report was not attached.
Routing. The set goes to every reviewer with jurisdiction over part of it: building, structural, planning, fire, public works, and sometimes health, schools, or a utility. Some departments run those reviews in parallel. Others run them in sequence, so a three-week planning review finishes before the building queue even begins.
Review and comments. Reviewers write a correction list. In a well-run department it arrives on the published date as one consolidated list. Elsewhere it arrives by discipline over three weeks, and you cannot responsibly start responding until the last one lands.
Response and resubmittal. You revise, write a response letter, chase the consultants, and resubmit. The file re-enters a queue, sometimes a shorter one.
Issuance. Fees are calculated and paid, conditions of approval are cleared, the permit is issued. Deferred submittals such as fire sprinklers, alarm, and trusses are reviewed afterward on their own clock.
Why does permitting take so long when the review itself is a few hours of work?
Queues, sequence, and your own turnaround, roughly in that order of impact.
A building department has fixed staffing and variable arrivals. When applications spike, the backlog grows, and a published turnaround is a statement about the queue rather than about the reading. This is also why the same department can be excellent in March and hopeless in September.
Sequence multiplies the wait. Discretionary approvals, meaning anything a body can say no to (design review, a conditional use permit, a variance, environmental review), run before plan check and move on hearing calendars. Miss an agenda deadline by a day and you have lost a month.
Then there is your firm. Comments land, the project architect is on another deadline, the structural engineer takes 10 days to answer two questions, and three weeks disappear on 12 comments. That time is invisible to the client, who assumes the city has the drawings.
Which parts of the permit clock do you control?
Split every permit into two buckets: days in their court and days in yours. Track both from the first submittal.
Take numbers that would not surprise anyone who has permitted a mid-size multifamily project. First review 45 business days, your response 18, second review 20, your response nine, issuance six. That is 98 business days, and 27 of them were yours. Twenty-seven business days is more than five weeks of a schedule the client believes the city is holding.
You also control completeness, which decides how many rounds happen at all. You control whether anyone attended a pre-application meeting. You control which path you filed under, since over-the-counter, express, and self-certification routes exist in many cities for smaller scopes. And you control whether your consultants answer in five days or 15, which is a contract conversation, not a personality problem.
What does the permit delay cost your firm?
More than the client thinks and usually more than the fee proposal assumed.
A fixed fee priced for two review cycles and delivered in four absorbs the extra rounds as margin. The hours are real: reissuing a stamped set, writing a second response letter, re-coordinating consultants, and answering the owner’s weekly status email. That damage shows up on one or two projects rather than in the firm-wide number, which is why profit per project is the report that catches it.
Cash follows. The traditional fee split in the American Institute of Architects (AIA) Handbook of Professional Practice, 15th edition, runs schematic design 15%, design development 20%, construction documents 40%, bidding 5%, and construction administration 20%. That last fifth (CA, the phase after the permit when the building actually gets built) cannot be earned until construction starts, so a three-month permit stall moves it a quarter to the right. Deltek Clarity 2026, the 47th edition of Deltek’s annual architecture and engineering study, puts days sales outstanding (DSO, the average days from invoice to payment) at about 68 days on top of that.
The owner pays too, and it helps to be able to say so in a number. The National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) put regulation at roughly 24% of the price of a new single-family home in its 2021 study, and the NAHB and National Multifamily Housing Council 2022 study put it at roughly 41% of multifamily development costs. Carrying cost during review is part of that total.
Why is one jurisdiction three weeks and the next one five months?
Four differences explain most of the spread.
Adopted code and local amendments. The International Code Council (ICC) republishes the I-Codes on a three-year cycle. The 2024 I-Codes are current and the 2027 edition is in development, but adoption is a state and local decision, and jurisdictions amend what they adopt. California’s 2025 Building Standards Code (Title 24) took effect January 1, 2026, which means a set submitted in December and a set submitted in January are reviewed against different rules.
Ministerial versus discretionary review. Ministerial means staff checks the application against fixed standards and approves it, with no hearing and no discretion. California’s statewide accessory dwelling unit (ADU) law is the clearest example: the agency must act within 60 days of a complete application (California Department of Housing and Community Development). Discretionary review has no equivalent ceiling, and Terner Center research at UC Berkeley documents California multifamily entitlement and permitting timelines running from many months to several years.
Staffing and volume. A county of 40,000 people with two plan checkers and a growth spurt behaves differently from a big-city department with a dedicated commercial team.
Systems. A portal shortens transmission and gives you a status page. It does not add reviewers. Cities running mature electronic review, such as New York City’s Department of Buildings through its DOB NOW portal, are faster at the paperwork and not automatically faster at the reading.
Is permitting reform actually changing the timeline?
Somewhat, unevenly, and mostly on the discretionary clock.
Since 2023 several states have adopted shot clocks and third-party review options. Texas HB 14 (2023) lets an applicant use third-party plan review when a city misses a statutory deadline, and California’s 2025 legislation (AB 130 and SB 131) exempted much infill housing from environmental review. Self-certification has been available for years in specific programs, including New York City’s Professional Certification and Chicago’s self-certification program, where an architect certifies code compliance and accepts audit exposure in exchange for speed.
The Bipartisan Policy Center and the American Planning Association publish reform playbooks for cities, which are worth reading before you complain to a council member, because they tell you what your jurisdiction could plausibly do next.
Our read as of late 2026: reform has helped housing more than commercial work, entitlement more than plan check, and large jurisdictions more than small ones. Plan check queues shorten when a department hires, not when a statute passes.
Five habits that shorten a permit
- Estimate the duration at kickoff. Put review cycles and response times in the schedule as named assumptions, not as a single optimistic bar.
- Buy a pre-application meeting. An hour with planning and building staff before the drawings harden is the cheapest schedule insurance available.
- Submit complete. Most correction lists are dominated by things you knew and did not show, starting with an incomplete code summary on the cover sheet.
- Give the response a deadline. Five business days from receipt of comments to a circulated draft response, consultants included, written into the consultant agreement.
- Keep a jurisdiction file. Published turnaround, contact names, quirks, and what the last three submittals actually took. Your own history beats any published estimate.
None of this makes a slow city fast. It does move the part of the calendar you own, which on most projects is four to six weeks that nobody was counting.
Where to go next
Every post in this pillar, with the reason to open it.
- What’s the Difference Between Zoning Approval and a Building Permit?: two approvals, two clocks, and the order they have to run in.
- How Long Does an ADU Permit Take?: the ministerial rules, the 60-day clock, and where the real delay hides.
AECPulse Project Manager tracks each permit by jurisdiction next to the phase budget it belongs to, so the weeks a project spends waiting on plan check show up against the fee while you can still do something about them.