How Long Does a Building Permit Take? We Timed 99,540 GTA Permits

Ontario law gives a city 10 business days to decide on a complete house permit application. The whole wait is another matter. Toronto's median new detached house permit took 50 calendar days, from the day the City logged the file to the day the permit came out. Mississauga's took 173. Burlington's, 62. Those are two different clocks, and that is the point of this piece. We timed 99,540 permits issued in three GTA cities between January 2024 and August 2026.

How long a permit really takes, city by city

Median means half the permits came out faster and half took longer. The n is how many permits sit behind each figure. Every number counts calendar days from the application date the city recorded to the issue date on that file.

Only three cities publish an application date: Toronto, Mississauga and Burlington. Oakville's permit layer carries an issue date and no application date at all, and Brampton publishes permit records with issue side fields only. Neither can be timed, and neither is slow or fast here. There is nothing to measure.

A median hides the tail. A quarter of Toronto's new detached house permits came out within 29 days; a quarter took more than 99, and one in ten more than 258.

Two caveats travel with the table. Toronto's field records the day a file was "received and entered". Mississauga's metadata calls its field "the date the application was accepted", which lands after a prescreen (a first check that a file is complete). Those may not be the same moment, so read the gap between the two cities as rough. Burlington publishes no definition of its "In Date" field, on the layer, in its metadata or on its portal. We read it as the intake date because it precedes the issue date on 4,728 of 4,729 files. That reading is ours.

The two clocks, and why they never line up

Almost every page about permit timing mixes up two clocks.

The review clock is the legal one. It starts the day after you file a complete application. It stops when the city issues your permit or refuses it in writing. Complete means the form is filled in and signed, the drawings are in, the fees are paid, and you have declared in writing that the work breaks no other law.

The recorded wait is what the table counts. It starts the day the city logs your file, complete or not. It ends the day the permit is issued. It holds intake, every day the file sat incomplete, every round of corrections, and your own time answering them.

A 50 day recorded wait and a 10 business day review clock can both be true of one file. No GTA open dataset records the day a file became complete, or the day the first reviewer comment went out. So nothing here can say whether a city met its legal period.

What the law actually promises

The periods live in the Ontario Building Code, Division C, Article 1.3.1.3 and Table 1.3.1.3. Four classes:

• a house where no dwelling unit sits above another, or a detached structure serving it up to 55 square metres: 10 days
• a small Part 9 building: 15 days
• a large Part 3 building: 20 days
• a post disaster or high building: 30 days

Almost every homeowner job is the first row. A second unit with one dwelling above another is the exception: it sits in the 15 day row, and Mississauga publishes 15 business days for second unit applications. Toronto's House Stream still promises 10 business days for a house of up to two units.

Four of the five cities and towns here publish a 10 business day first review for house scale work. Toronto and Mississauga tie it to a complete application. Brampton attaches its 10 business days to its Standard Permit Application Service, available for all home renovation projects, with no completeness condition at all. Burlington publishes its periods in a council report rather than on its permit pages, and Oakville publishes no number of its own.

The Code writes "10 days", not "10 business days". Sentence 1.3.1.3.(8) is what turns them into business days: they "shall not include Saturdays, holidays and all other days when the offices of the principal authority are not open". Sundays fall under that last phrase. Each city counts its own closed days, so two cities can reach different deadlines from one filing date.

The clock also ends at a decision, not at a permit.

Housekeeping: the current Building Code is O. Reg. 163/24, in force January 1, 2025; it revoked O. Reg. 332/12. Toronto's own complaints page still reprints the table from the revoked rule, though the day figures did not change.

The late permit refund that does not exist

Some pages promise a fee refund when a city misses its deadline. That is wrong twice over.

Bill 109 (More Homes for Everyone Act, 2022) did create rising fee refunds for late decisions. They went into the Planning Act, for zoning by-law amendments and site plan control, and into section 114 of the City of Toronto Act. Those are planning approvals. Nothing in Bill 109 touched the Building Code Act or the Building Code, so no permit fee was ever covered. Bill 185 (Cutting Red Tape to Build More Homes Act, 2024) repealed the refunds on June 6, 2024, leaving only transition wording for files received before that date.

So the Building Code Act holds no penalty, no automatic approval and no refund for a slow review. Toronto's own refund section, § 363-4.11 of Municipal Code Chapter 363, pays out when a file is withdrawn, cancelled or abandoned, or a permit is revoked. Lateness is not on the list. Toronto offers an appeal instead: "If you have a dispute about the time frames not being met. You may appeal to the Building Code Commission".

Why the recorded wait runs past the review clock

Toronto's by-law shows the mechanism in one sentence. Under Municipal Code § 363-3.2, a file sent in without a Zoning Applicable Law Certificate (the City sign off that your plans obey zoning) is "deemed by the Chief Building Official to be incomplete such that the periods within which a building permit shall be issued or refused ... will not apply".

Toronto's permit stream page puts it plainly: "Applications where no Zoning Applicable Law Certificate has been issued for the project are considered incomplete. There is no time frame for review of incomplete permit applications".

Zoning review therefore sits before the review clock starts, and so does most of the back and forth. Mississauga says so outright: "There is no guaranteed review time for resubmissions ... Each resubmission cycle could add two or more weeks". Burlington's building department told its council the same in report BB-05-24: "Subsequent resubmissions do not have stipulated legislated timelines in the OBC".

One study does test the review clock: Toronto auditing itself. In February 2024 the Auditor General reviewed 58 permit files. Of the 27 that were complete, 17 (63 per cent) did not meet the legal time frames, by 1 to 52 business days. Toronto Building's own budget notes had reported 89 per cent compliance for 2022. Intake alone took over two business days on more than 38 per cent of about 236,000 files, which is time before the review clock starts. The Auditor General adds that "the reasons for delays are not tracked". That is a finding about 58 files, not a verdict on the whole city.

What has changed since 2019

Toronto's small permits got much faster, and they have stayed faster.

Each cell rests on 190 to 1,278 permits.

We checked whether the drop was a quirk of grouping. It is not: the same break shows up when permits are grouped by the quarter they were applied for. What caused it is not in the data, and no City page we read announces a change.

Mississauga moved the other way on new houses.

Each cell rests on 59 to 1,398 permits.

Each city is compared only with itself in these two tables, so the wording caveat above does not touch them.

The files that never became permits

A median only sees permits that were issued. It cannot see a file still sitting, or one that ended with no permit. So we counted forward from the application instead, using Toronto's cleared and active permit extracts together.

Of Toronto applications filed in 2019, 94.5 per cent had produced a permit by August 26, 2026. Of those filed in 2024, 83.3 per cent had. The share recorded as Cancelled rose from 6.1 to 14.0 per cent. Decks are the sharpest case: 12.4 per cent of 2019 deck files ended Cancelled, against 49.1 per cent of the 379 filed in 2024.

The 2024 and 2025 groups are still open, so their issued share can only rise. Toronto publishes no definition of the Cancelled status, and the data cannot show which files an applicant dropped and which the City closed. We are not claiming that half of Toronto's 2024 deck applicants gave up.

On August 26, 2026 Toronto had 13,438 files with no issue date in a live review status, 7,710 of them over a year old. That count leaves out anything cancelled, refused, withdrawn or abandoned.

How to keep your file out of the slow half

Most of the recorded wait happens before the review clock starts, which is where you have leverage.

1. Get the zoning sign off first. In Toronto an issued Zoning Applicable Law Certificate is part of what makes a file complete. File without one and there is no review period at all.
2. Send a complete package. Toronto's House Stream list is six items: the completed form, the owner's or agent's signature, one set of plans and specifications, an issued Zoning Applicable Law Certificate (ZAP), proof that applicable law is met, and all fees paid.
3. Answer comments quickly. Nothing in the Code sets a deadline for reviewing a resubmission, and Mississauga puts a price on each round: two or more weeks.
4. Check for a fast lane. Toronto Building aims to review Express Services jobs (small residential and commercial projects, solar panels, sign permits) "within 3 business days after the permit has been taken in".
5. Watch the file. Toronto runs a public status lookup, updated as of the previous business day.

Mississauga is blunt about the part you control: total time "will vary depending on the quality of the submission and how responsive you are as an applicant".