Is it faster to get a building permit in Calgary or Vancouver?

Both cities publish an application date and an issue date on every permit, so the comparison can be measured rather than argued.¹²

The direction of travel is the part most people have backwards. Vancouver has come down from 118 days in 2022 to 62, holding at 77 in both 2024 and 2025. Calgary has not moved steadily either way: its annual median alternates, lower in odd years and higher in even ones, and 2026 is the highest so far.

Controlling for what each city builds

The two feeds carry different work, so the raw medians are not comparing like with like. By the City's own type of work, 51% of the permits Vancouver issued from 2023 to September 11, 2026 were additions and alterations, 23% new buildings, 15% demolitions and 10% salvage and abatement.¹ Calgary labels its permits differently: 50% residential improvement projects, 27% single construction permits, 19% commercial or multi-family projects and 4% demolitions.² The categories do not line up between the two cities, which is why the comparison below uses declared construction value instead.

Banded by declared construction value, for permits issued 2023 onward, the gap survives at every size:

So the honest answer to a builder choosing between the two is that Calgary is still meaningfully faster for the same job, by three to four times, and least so on the largest projects.

The number that should change the decision

Calgary's median alternates year to year, but a steadier measure is moving one way. Of the applications Calgary received from January to June 2021, 84.6% had a permit within 60 days; for the same months of 2026 it was 76.8%, after four years at about 81%.² Applications closed without a permit have held at about 5% since 2021, so the drop is slower files, not more withdrawals.

The two cities' queues also moved differently. Comparing the permits each city issued in a year with the permits that year's own applications have produced so far:¹²

Vancouver fell behind in 2021, when its applications went on to produce 1,464 more permits than it issued that year, then worked that queue down in 2022 and 2023 and ran close to even in 2024. Calgary has run close to even throughout, a little behind in three of the four years. The second column for each city counts only permits issued by September 11, 2026, so it will rise slightly as files still in review are issued, and Vancouver's feed lists only issued permits, so its pending and withdrawn applications are not counted at all.¹

A city that cleared more than it took in, with a falling median, genuinely got faster. A city where a growing share of applications waits past 60 days is slowing at the edges before its median shows it. Anyone picking a market on a 15-day permit should be reading that share rather than the median.

What this comparison cannot tell you

It is city-wide, so it is not a forecast for your project. It excludes permits issued the same day they were applied for and gaps of 2,000 days or more, both as data errors. And it covers only the two cities that publish enough to be measured; several Metro Vancouver municipalities do not.