9Builders Original Research
How long do ADU permits actually take in Los Angeles?
We analyzed every ADU permit application filed with the city since 2016 -- 55388 applications -- using the same method as our San Francisco analysis. Median: 100 days.
Get a Free QuoteWe pulled and analyzed every ADU building permit application submitted to the City of Los Angeles since 2016 — 55388 applications — using the same method we used for our San Francisco analysis. The headline number is not the interesting part. What changed over time is.
LA got about twice as slow, and it does not look like a data illusion
Permits filed in 2017–2019 took a median of 65 days to get issued. Permits filed 2020–2024 took a median of 144 days — more than double. Before trusting that gap, we checked it against the same right-censoring effect we flag on our San Francisco page, where a recent cohort can look artificially fast simply because its slow permits haven't resolved yet. That does not appear to be what is happening here: every year from 2020 through 2024 shows a stable 81–84% eventual-issuance rate, essentially flat and in the same range as 2017–2019's 87–88%. That is a different pattern from a still-resolving cohort — compare the table below, where 2025 dips to 78% and the still-open 2026 partial year sits at 53%. So 2020–2024 looks like a genuine slowdown, not five years of unresolved backlog. We don't know the cause from this data alone — plausible candidates include COVID-era department disruption and a near-doubling of application volume over the same years with no visible change in review capacity — but the timing lines up with both.
The one comparison this data cannot make cleanly
San Francisco's data lets us split "never issued" into withdrawn, cancelled and genuinely stuck, because SF's permit system records why an application closed. Los Angeles's does not: every one of the 3744 applications in our 5-year-old cohort that never got issued is still sitting in some stage of plan check or corrections in LA's own data — there is no withdrawn or cancelled status to separate out. So 14.8% of 5-year-old LA applications never issued is a real number, but it is not directly comparable to San Francisco's equivalent breakdown, and we are not going to pretend otherwise by forcing a split the source data doesn't support.
By year filed
Full calendar years only. 2026 is excluded from the table above because the year is still in progress — only 52% of that year’s 3784 applications have been issued so far, which is expected for a partial year, not a slowdown.
| Year filed | Applications | Issued so far | Median days (among issued) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2016 | 91 | 92.3% | 381 |
| 2017 | 3245 | 86.6% | 63 |
| 2018 | 5104 | 87.2% | 67 |
| 2019 | 5537 | 86.8% | 64 |
| 2020 | 5335 | 82.2% | 178 |
| 2021 | 5985 | 83.9% | 200 |
| 2022 | 6584 | 82.0% | 137 |
| 2023 | 6184 | 81.3% | 119 |
| 2024 | 6430 | 82.2% | 94 |
| 2025 | 7099 | 78.2% | 65 |
- San Francisco — 71.2% issued, 278-day median
- San Diego — 65.8% issued, 265-day median
How we built this
Every ADU-tagged building permit application in the LA Department of Building
and Safety's public "Submitted" datasets, which -- unlike a naive pull of just the
"Issued" datasets -- retain applications that were never issued, so this number is
not survivorship-biased. Each application appears once in the source data (verified
directly: 55388 rows, 55388 distinct permit numbers, no
revision-row duplication of the kind we found and corrected for in San Francisco's
data). ADU applications are isolated using LA's own use_desc field
rather than text-matching a free-text description, which is the cleanest ADU
identification of any city we've evaluated.
Source: City of Los Angeles Building and Safety, Building Permits Submitted, a public dataset published by the City of Los Angeles. Data pulled and analyzed 2026-08-04. This is general information, not a projection for any specific property, and 9Builders is not the City of Los Angeles.