9Builders Original Research
How long do ADU permits actually take?
We analyzed 67744 ADU permit applications across San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego to find out.
Get a Free QuoteNobody publishes a real number for how long an ADU permit actually takes. So we pulled the public permit data for San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego and computed it ourselves — every application, not a sample. The three cities operate under the same California ADU state law and produced three genuinely different results.
The three cities, side by side
| City | Data since | Applications | % eventually issued | Median days |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| San Francisco | 2015 | 4154 | 71.2% | 278 |
| Los Angeles | 2016 | 55388 | 80.9% | 100 |
| San Diego | 2022 | 8202 | 65.8% | 265 |
What each city's data actually shows
San Francisco
eventually issued
median days
applications
Only 12.5% of applications filed 5+ years ago are genuinely still unresolved -- most of the rest withdrew or were cancelled, not stuck.
Read the full San Francisco analysis →Los Angeles
eventually issued
median days
applications
Median time to issue roughly doubled, from 65 days (2017-19) to 144 days (2020-24) -- a real slowdown, not a data artifact.
Read the full Los Angeles analysis →San Diego
eventually issued
median days
applications
The city’s own ADU tracking field was never backfilled before 2022 -- real ADU permits from earlier years are invisible in its own open data.
Read the full San Diego analysis →How we built this
Each city's page documents its own methodology in full, because the three datasets are genuinely different shapes. San Francisco's permit system creates a new database row for every revision filed against a permit, so its analysis groups by permit family and takes the earliest filed and issued dates in each. Los Angeles has no such duplication but also no withdrawn/cancelled status in its data, so its "never issued" figure cannot be split the way San Francisco's can. San Diego's data is served as flat yearly files rather than a queryable API, requires downloading a 693MB historical archive, and its ADU tracking field was introduced without a backfill in August 2021. None of these limitations are hidden -- each city's own page explains exactly what its data can and cannot support, and this page does not paper over the differences to make three cities look more alike than they are.
Data pulled and analyzed as of 2026-08-04. Full sourcing, methodology and known limitations are documented on each city's own page, linked above. This is general information, not a projection for any specific property.