Finding · updated October 20, 2026
The two speeds of an LA building permit: instant, or months of plan check
43% of LA building permits are issued the moment you apply — no plan review at all. The rest wait a median of 67 days, and a new building takes about 6 months just to get its permit.
Between May 7 and October 17, 2026, the LA Department of Building and Safety issued 29,769 building permits. Ask how long each one took to get, and the answer splits into two very different cities.
12,791 of them — 43% — went through LADBS's online express system, which issues eligible small jobs with no plan review: the feed records no application phase at all, because the permit is issued the moment you apply and pay. This is the lane for the city's everyday maintenance — 6,506 of these express permits are re-roofs alone, and the rest are bathroom remodels, water-heater swaps, attic insulation, seismic anchor bolts. The two lanes carry different-sized jobs: the median express job declares $6,000 of work, the median plan-checked one $18,000.
The other 16,970 permits carried a recorded application date and went through plan check — and there, the typical wait from application to permit was about 2 months (67 days), with 1 permit in 10 waiting more than 365 days. The wait scales with ambition:
| permit type | typical wait (median) | 1 in 10 waited over | permits |
|---|---|---|---|
| Alterations & repairs | 31 days | 222 days | 7,780 |
| Swimming pools & spas | 33 days | 230 days | 1,120 |
| Signs | 50 days | 167 days | 611 |
| Non-building alterations | 56 days | 223 days | 169 |
| Grading & earthwork | 91 days | 502 days | 1,642 |
| Demolition | 96 days | 482 days | 647 |
| Building additions | 110 days | 450 days | 2,166 |
| New non-building structures | 146 days | 711 days | 789 |
| New construction | 172 days | 739 days | 2,028 |
Read the table bottom to top and it's the arc of construction itself: alterations & repairs clear in about a month, while a new construction permit — the ground-up kind — takes a median of about 6 months (172 days) just to be issued, and 1 in 10 took more than about 2 years. That clock runs before the first shovel of dirt moves.
Plan check has a fast lane of its own. Jobs simple enough to be checked over the counter — 7,504 permits in this window — were issued in a median of 15 days, and 27% of them walked out the same day they applied. The 6,379 permits routed through regular plan check — the full review queue — took a median of about 5 months.