Does the City of Surrey publish building permit approval times?

The City's figures, as published on August 31, 2026, against the targets it set itself:¹

What the clock measures

The City says plainly that the timeline does not begin when you submit. For a single-family dwelling it starts after referrals and a complete site servicing review; for a tenant improvement, after a complete and accurate application is submitted; for rezoning, after the initial review and the resolution of all major deficiencies.¹ The figures are an average of permits processed in the previous 30 days (six months for rezoning), and they apply to complete applications only. An incomplete file sits outside the number entirely.

So 4.7 weeks is the City's review of a finished application, not the time from the day you apply to the day you hold a permit. Both are real; they are not the same quantity.

Why nobody outside the City can check it

To measure approval time independently you need two dates on every permit: the day the application arrived and the day the permit issued. Vancouver and Calgary publish both in open data, which is how the medians on the related pages were computed. Surrey's open data layer for issued building permits exposes ten fields and one date, the issue date.² The same is true of New Westminster, Delta and Abbotsford. There is no arithmetic that recovers an approval time from an issue date alone, so Surrey's published average stands on the City's word, with no public data behind it to confirm or dispute.³

Reading Surrey against its neighbours

Do not set Surrey's 4.7 weeks beside Vancouver's 62-day median and call one city faster. Vancouver's figure counts from application to issue across every permit issued, complete or not, small or large; Surrey's counts from a later starting line, for complete files, by type. If Surrey adds application dates to its open data, a like-for-like figure becomes possible and this page will change, with the verified date above moving when it does.