9Builders Original Research
How long do ADU permits actually take in San Diego?
We analyzed every ADU/JADU application filed with the city since 2022 -- 8202 applications. Median: 265 days.
Get a Free QuoteWe analyzed every ADU and JADU building approval filed with the City of San Diego since 2022 — 8202 applications — using the same method as our San Francisco and Los Angeles analyses. San Diego's own data only supports going back to 2022, and we explain why below rather than pretending otherwise.
Why this page starts in 2022, not the year the state ADU law took effect
San Diego almost certainly approved ADUs before 2022 — California's statewide ADU law dates to 2016–2017. But the specific fields the city uses to count ADU and JADU units on an approval record were not applied to older permits. We checked this directly rather than assuming it: thousands of pre-2021 approvals carry an unmistakably ADU-shaped job code and description ("new detached companion unit," "convert garage," and similar), and every one of them shows zero in the ADU count field. The field itself only starts appearing in the data in August 2021 and ramps up through 2022. Publishing a "since 2016" number built on top of that gap would understate San Diego's real ADU history, so this analysis instead starts at 2022, the first year the data is reliably complete.
One consequence: unlike our San Francisco and Los Angeles pages, we cannot report a 5-year-old cohort here. San Diego's oldest reliable year, 2022, is only 4 years old as of this analysis — so that is the cohort we report on below, labeled for what it actually is.
What happened to the 2022 cohort
1375 ADU/JADU applications were filed with the city in 2022, our oldest reliable year — 4 years ago as of this analysis. Here is what happened to them:
San Diego's system records almost none of its closures as "withdrawn" in particular — most abandoned applications are marked cancelled or expired instead, so we report those together rather than force a withdrawn/cancelled split the way our San Francisco page does with SF's own vocabulary. Only 21 applications from 2022 — 1.5% — are still genuinely open with no resolution, 4 years later.
By year filed
Full calendar years only, from 2022 onward. 2026 is excluded from the table above because the year is still in progress — only 21% of that year’s 637 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) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2022 | 1375 | 85.7% | 373 |
| 2023 | 2082 | 77.2% | 280 |
| 2024 | 2017 | 71.8% | 233 |
| 2025 | 2091 | 49.3% | 199 |
- San Francisco — 71.2% issued, 278-day median
- Los Angeles — 80.9% issued, 100-day median
How we built this
Every approval record in the City of San Diego's public "Approvals for development projects" dataset where the ADU or JADU unit-count field is greater than zero. The dataset has no query API — it is served as flat yearly CSV files — so we downloaded each year directly, including a 693MB historical archive covering everything through 2023. The same approval can appear in more than one yearly file, since San Diego's files are point-in-time snapshots rather than a strict one-time partition by date; we confirmed this directly (4,733 of 8,299 distinct approvals appeared more than once) and resolved it by keeping the most recently captured snapshot of each one, which is also the most complete.
Source: City of San Diego Development Services Department, via the DataSD open data program. Data pulled and analyzed 2026-07-23. This is general information, not a projection for any specific property, and 9Builders is not the City of San Diego.