Which Metro Vancouver city takes the longest to issue a building permit?
Of the municipalities that publish both an application and an issue date, the City of North Vancouver: its median permit took 112 days in 2026 against Vancouver's 62, slower in every year we can measure. Surrey, New Westminster and Delta publish no application date in their open data, so they cannot be ranked.
The honest version of this question has a caveat attached: it can only be answered for municipalities that publish both an application date and an issue date for their permits, in open data or in their own reports, and several large ones do not.
Among the municipalities that publish both dates:4
| City | 2021 | 2024 | 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|
| North Vancouver (City) | 140 days | 165 days | 112 days |
| Vancouver | 89 days | 77 days | 62 days |
| Port Moody | 56 days | 116 days | 62 days (2025) |
North Vancouver City has been slower than Vancouver in every year we can measure, and it is the only one of the three that was slower in 2024 than in 2021.1 Port Moody is quick in most years; its 2024 spike rests on only 174 permits and should not be read as a trend.3
Why the list is this short
To measure approval time you need two dates on each permit: when the application arrived and when the permit issued. Surrey, New Westminster and Delta put only the issue date in their open data, so no approval time can be computed for them from it, by us or by anyone else. Surrey does publish its own rolling average, on a clock that starts later than the application.
Abbotsford, just outside Metro Vancouver in the Fraser Valley, also puts only the issue date in its open data, and publishes something different again: a live queue report showing which submission date each plan-review category is working on and how many applications are waiting. As of September 9, 2026, renovations of residential homes were at plans submitted before June 29, 2026, with 39 pending.5 That is a position in the queue, not a processing time, and it cannot be set beside the medians above.
Maple Ridge publishes both dates but its median reads three to four days, with a third of records showing exactly one day between application and issue. That pattern looks like a recording convention rather than a planning department, so we left it out rather than report a figure we do not believe.4
What the ranking is worth
Treat it as a floor, not a league table. The slowest measurable city is not necessarily the slowest city. One of the municipalities without an application date in its open data could be slower than North Vancouver, and no measured figure would show it.
That is the more useful takeaway for a builder comparing municipalities: for Surrey, New Westminster and Delta, an application-to-issue time cannot be computed from open data, and any table that gives every city a measured number is filling those gaps from somewhere other than open data.
One question per page. The first sentence is the answer. When a figure changes, the page changes and the verified date moves. All answers.