How long does a building permit take in Vancouver?

The figure is the median number of days between the date an application was received and the date the permit was issued, for permits issued in each calendar year.¹ 2026 is a partial year: 2,866 permits issued to September 11, re-pulled from the City's feed on September 12. The median was 62 days in both that pull and the late-August one. The earlier years rest on 4,600 to 5,900 permits each.

It depends on the type of work

The City classifies every permit by type of work, and the wait differs by more than five times between them. Median days from application to issue, from the City's own elapsed-days field, for permits issued between January 1 and September 11 of each year, so that 2026 is compared like for like:¹

Medians are rounded to the nearest day. Because every year uses the same January to September window, they differ slightly from the full-year figures in the table above.

Additions and alterations are what changed in 2026. Their median fell from 46 days over the same months of 2025 to 32, and they rose from 47% of the permits issued to 59%. Because they are the quickest type, that bigger share pulls the overall median down on its own, on top of the speed-up.

New buildings tell a longer story. Their median peaked at 309 days in 2023 and is now 168, a fall of 46%. Almost all of that happened by 2025: over the same months of 2025 it was 163 days, so this year is flat to slightly slower. Someone building new in 2026 faces a much faster City than in 2023, and much the same City as last year.

In 2026 the average wait was 69 days for additions and alterations, 217 for new buildings and 149 for demolitions, well above the medians because a minority of files take far longer; plan to the median and budget for the tail. Two types with fewer than 50 permits so far in 2026, temporary structures (34) and salvage and abatement (21), are left out because their medians swing on small counts. The City's elapsed-days field matched the gap between the application and issue dates on all 3,000 records we checked, and same-day issues and gaps of 2,000 days or more are excluded, as in the rest of this page.

It also depends on the size of the job

One median hides a wide range. Banded by the declared value of the work, for permits issued from 2023 onward, Vancouver's medians run from 53 days for a $25,000 to $100,000 job up to 220 days for work declared over $2 million.³ A small renovation permit and a multi-family building permit are not the same wait, and a quote of "62 days" to someone building a six-storey project would be wrong.

Why the drop is real and not a statistical trick

A median of permits issued in a year only counts files that finished. A city could make its number fall by quietly letting slow files pile up unissued. Vancouver shows no sign of doing that. In 2022, 2023 and 2024 it issued more permits than it has since issued from that year's own applications: 5,951 against 5,102, then 4,680 against 4,248, then 4,917 against 4,844, close to even. 2025 looks the same so far, 5,145 against 4,657, but that year's files are still issuing. The City's feed lists only issued permits, so applications still pending or withdrawn are missing from the second number in each pair. The pattern is a queue being worked down, not slow files being hidden.¹ That is the check that makes the 62-day figure trustworthy.

How this squares with the City's own numbers

The City reports its own processing times by permit type, and they are larger than 62 days because they describe the biggest jobs. In June 2026 it said a single-detached house permit took 160 days in 2025, down from 250 in 2022; a laneway house 100 days, down from 200; a multi-family development permit 9.8 months, down from 18.1; and that 92% of simple renovation permits now issue within three days.² Those are the City's own start and end points for each type. The 62-day figure is the middle of every permit the City issued, about 59% of which are additions and alterations. The two measures describe the same thing from different ends: Vancouver has become materially faster since 2022, and the wait still depends heavily on what you are building.

What this figure is not

It is not a promise for your project. Permit time depends on the completeness of the application, the zoning, whether a development permit is needed first, and the size of the work. It is the measured middle of what the city actually issued, which is a better planning number than any anecdote.