Building Permit Timeline: Plan Check to Final Inspection

Building permit timeline from submittal to final inspection — the relay stages, what plan check comments really mean, and why tying payments to inspections protects your money.

WHAT YOU'LL DISCOVERHow long does a building permit really take? It's a relay, not a stopwatch. The clock goes back and forth between the city and you, and some legs take weeks while others take days. Bill Reid walks through every stage from the moment you submit plans to the moment the permit closes.

Leg one is intake — the completeness check before review even starts. A missing document costs you your place in line, which is why Episode 75 emphasized getting the submittal package right the first time.

Leg two is first review — the city's long leg. For a remodel or addition, three to six weeks is common. For a new home, often much longer. And your project isn't waiting on one reviewer — it's waiting on the slowest of several working at once.

Leg three is yours. Comments come back and your design team responds. That might be a few days or three weeks depending on what's being asked and how many other clients they have that month.

Leg four is the recheck. The city looks at your responses. Resubmittals are usually faster than first review because they're only checking what changed. If anything is still open, you go around again.

Stop and hear what that means. The number of times you loop through legs three and four matters more than how fast the city is. A department that takes five weeks and approves on the first recheck beats a department that takes three weeks and sends you around three times.

Most projects go around at least once. One round of comments isn't a sign something is wrong — it's the normal shape of the process. When you put the permit into your schedule, write down first review plus response plus recheck plus cushion for a second round. For remodels and additions, that adds up to two to four months. For new homes in busy places, considerably longer.

The piece you control most isn't the city's leg. It's how good your first submittal is and how fast and complete your response is when comments come back. Those two things decide how many laps you run.

And there's one more thing you control — how you use the wait time. Those weeks while plans sit in review shouldn't be dead time. This is when you finish selections, when your contractor firms up pricing and lines up subs. What it's not the time for is starting work before the permit is issued.

PLAN CHECK COMMENTS — WHAT THEY