Garage conversion permit timeline
Los Angeles, Seattle, San Francisco, San Diego. Measured from 50,655 public city permit records, not a national average. Updated August 16, 2026.
Your project
San Jose, Sacramento, Oakland do not publish both dates, so their wait cannot be measured.
Printed on the application. Most conversions are an alteration.
Typical wait
Los Angeles · An ADU or JADU · Alteration or repair
109days
Fastest 25%
50d
Typical
109d
Slowest 25%
207d
Slowest 10%
386d
Solid line, typical permit. Dashed line, the 60-day legal deadline. Gold band, the middle half.
7,582 Los Angeles permits. Applications from 2021 to 2024, application date to issue date. Each city uses its own most recent settled years, so the windows differ.
Issued within 60 days of applying
30% were issued inside 60 days of the application going in.
California law sets a 60-day clock, but it starts when the application is deemed complete and pauses when you ask for time. This is your wait, not the city’s compliance.
| 30 days | 13% | |
|---|---|---|
| 60 days | 30% | |
| 90 days | 43% | |
| 180 days | 70% | |
| 365 days | 89% |
What actually decides it
The review track, not the project. Ask which one yours is on.
| Track | Wait | Under 60d |
|---|---|---|
| Plan Check at Countern = 1,898 | 106d | 32% |
| Expanded Countern = 9,180 | 112d | 29% |
| Regularn = 4,603 | 242d | 3% |
Not in any number above
1 in 5 applications had no issued permit when these records were pulled. 4,471 of 23,735.
These datasets have no withdrawn, cancelled or expired status, so an application with no issue date may be a stalled review or an abandoned project. The records do not distinguish the two, and none of them are marked denied.
Three Los Angeles ADU builders, editor-screened. Four questions.
See my 3 matchesLos Angeles, An ADU or JADU. Typical wait 109 days, based on 7,582 permits.
Data note: this tool reads a snapshot generated August 16, 2026 from 50,655 cleaned issued-permit records across Los Angeles, Seattle, San Francisco, San Diego; the timeline cells use the 19,841 permits in mature application years and are filtered by project and permit type. The citable open dataset, version 2026.1 retrieved 24 August 2026, holds 64,427 applications including those with no permit issued yet, and lives at /data/permit-timelines with CSV and JSON downloads. Same pipeline, two pulls: where a number here differs from that page, the tool is showing one project and permit type while the dataset page reports each city overall.
Cities
4
Records used
50,655
Extracted
August 16, 2026
Min sample
30 permits
Deduplicated on permit number, revisions dropped, and a permit only counts when the garage is becoming living space. Cohorts group by the date the application was submitted, never the date it was issued, because grouping by issue date mixes in old backlog and oversamples slow permits. A city only appears when it publishes both dates on the same record. Nothing under 30 records is published. Design, plan preparation, any planning review before the application is submitted, and everything after the permit is issued. Public data from each city, analysed by Renology. Reviewed by Dror Gigi, Co-Founder. Published by JOYOAI LLC. Not legal advice, and not a prediction of any individual permit. Free to cite with a link to therenology.com/tools/permit-timeline.