How long does a building permit take in Calgary?

The figure is the median number of days between application and issue for building permits issued in each calendar year.¹ Calgary issues a lot of permits, so the medians are well supported: 14,502 permits issued to September 11, 2026, re-pulled on September 12, with the median at 24 days in both that pull and the late-August one, and 19,000 to 24,000 in each full year before it.

It depends on the type of permit

Calgary's permit feed labels each permit by type. Median days from application to issue, for permits issued between January 1 and September 11 of each year, so that 2026 is compared like for like:¹

Calgary is not on a steady slowdown. Its residential medians alternate, lower in odd years and higher in even ones, in every year since 2021. 2026 is a high year, and the highest yet for residential improvement projects, but a jump from 2025 is what that pattern would predict, so read it as one swing rather than a trend. Commercial and multi-family projects behave differently: they climbed from 27 days in 2021 to 43 in 2023 and have stayed between 38 and 43 since.

The mix of permits barely moved either. Residential improvement projects were half of all permits over these months in both 2025 and 2026, and commercial and multi-family projects rose only from 19% to 22%, which nudges the overall median up a little.

In 2026 the average wait was 37 days for residential improvement projects, 28 for single construction permits, 70 for commercial or multi-family projects and 9 for demolitions. The types above are the City's own labels, used as published. They do not line up with Vancouver's categories, so the two cities cannot be compared type by type.

The number to watch is the 60-day share, not the median

A median only counts files that finished, and Calgary's swings with the calendar. A steadier measure follows the applications filed in the first six months of each year and asks what share had a permit within 60 days, counting the ones that never got one:¹

That series does not alternate. It fell from 2019 to 2022, held at about 81% for four years, and dropped to 76.8% in 2026, the lowest in the table. The drop is not withdrawals: applications closed without a permit have been about 5% of each year's since 2021, and leaving them out gives the same shape, 88.4% in 2021, 85% to 86% from 2022 to 2025 and 81.0% in 2026. The 2026 figure is a single half-year, and the second half will show whether it is a new step down. The city is still fast in absolute terms, and on current figures it will stay faster than Vancouver for years. But 23% of the applications filed in early 2026 had no permit 60 days later, and a 15-day median does not show that.

Calgary does not publish a backlog history, and one cannot be rebuilt from its feed: each file carries its current status but not the date it was cancelled, so how many applications were waiting on a past date is not recoverable. What can be counted is the queue today. On September 11, 2026, 5,292 applications filed since 2015 had no permit and had not been cancelled, refused, expired or otherwise closed; 1,892 of them were in one of the City's hold statuses, and 3,799 had been filed in the previous 12 months.¹

Compared with Vancouver

Vancouver's median has fallen from 118 days in 2022 to 62 in 2026, so the gap between the two cities narrowed from 6.7 times in 2023 to 2.6 times in 2026.⁴ Banded by declared construction value, so that like is compared with like, a Calgary permit still issues three to four times faster than a Vancouver permit for the same size of job.

How this squares with the City's own timeline

The City's own page says a new-house building permit is reviewed in approximately 21 days, not guaranteed, and dependent on volumes, application completeness and how quickly the applicant answers requests for information.³ That sits close to the measured 24-day median for all permits, which is the reassuring part. The difference is what each number counts: the City describes its review of a complete application, and the median measures every permit actually issued, including the ones that waited on the applicant. The 60-day share is the number the City's page does not carry.

What is excluded

Calgary's development permit feed was checked and left out, because it does not carry a usable pair of dates.² Permits recorded as issued on the day they were applied for, and permits with a gap of 2,000 days or more, are dropped as data errors. Neither filter changes the medians above by more than a day.