Palisades Permits Actually Take 96 Days, Not Six Weeks

Every guide to rebuilding in the Palisades — including, until now, parts of this one — tells you the same thing: expedited review, six to fourteen weeks to a permit, thirty business days if your submittal is clean.

We measured what actually happened to 1,152 real applications. The typical one took 96 days.

Against what you were told

Thirty business days is about 42 calendar days. Here is how the real distribution lands against the published expectations:

Benchmark	Share of applications that met it
Within 42 days — the LADBS 30-business-day target	10.6%
Within 98 days — top of the published “6–14 weeks”	52.1%
Longer than 98 days — outside published guidance entirely	47.9%
Longer than six months	13.3%
Longer than a year	1.2%

Roughly one application in ten met the thirty-day target. Barely half landed inside the six-to-fourteen-week band that nearly every rebuild guide quotes as the normal case.

That band is not wrong, exactly. It describes a real outcome that a real minority of owners get. It is just not what most people should plan around, and planning around it is how a construction loan gets sized wrong.

One fair caveat: the city’s thirty-day target refers to review time on a complete application, while our figure measures the whole submission-to-issuance span including every correction cycle. Those are different clocks. But the second one is the clock an owner actually lives on, because corrections are not an exception — they are the normal path.

The trap in this data

Here is where it gets interesting, and where we think most people reading these records will get it wrong.

Group applications by the month they were submitted and look at how long each cohort took. It appears to show a system accelerating hard:

Submitted	Median days to permit
Feb 2025	142
Jun 2025	83
Oct 2025	104
Dec 2025	106
Feb 2026	83
Apr 2026	66
May 2026	50

Fifty days by May 2026. Cut in half. A great headline.

It is an artifact.

An application only appears in that calculation once it has been issued. Applications submitted in May 2026 that are still sitting in plan check have no issuance date, so they are invisible — and the ones that have come through are, by definition, the fast ones. The slow half of that cohort hasn’t finished being slow yet.

You can see the distortion directly by counting what share of each month is still unresolved:

Submitted	Still un-issued
Jun 2025	5.9%
Oct 2025	19.2%
Jan 2026	45.8%
Apr 2026	72.3%
May 2026	81.6%

That May figure of “50 days” is computed from the 18% that finished. It tells you nothing about May.

This is right-censoring, and it is the single easiest way to misread permit data. Any analysis that plots time-to-issue by submission month without accounting for it will show an acceleration that is not there.

What the mature data says

Restrict to submission months old enough that most applications have resolved — where under a quarter remain pending — and the picture steadies:

Between February and November 2025, 823 applications were issued at a median of 97 days, with a quarter under 62 and a quarter over 147.

Month to month across that stretch, the median ran 142 → 97 → 80 → 91 → 83 → 85 → 99 → 102 → 104 → 103. After the chaotic first weeks, the system found a level around three months and stayed there, drifting slightly upward through the autumn as volume climbed.

So the honest summary is not that permitting sped up, and not that it broke down. It normalised early, and it has held roughly steady under sustained load ever since. Which, given that permit volume in ZIP 90272 has run about 3.7 times its pre-fire rate, is a genuinely creditable performance — just not the one the raw recent numbers appear to promise.

The 565 people not in any of these numbers

Every figure above describes applications that made it out. As of July 27, 2026, 565 Palisades rebuild applications had been submitted and not yet issued.

Their median wait so far is 108 days — already past the overall median, with no permit yet. About a third have been waiting more than six months.

They are the least visible group in the rebuild, because they appear in no completion statistic. They are counted in the 1,722 applications submitted and absent from the 1,157 issued, and the gap between those two figures on our status page is largely them.

What to do with this

Plan on three months, not six weeks. If your financing, your rental, or your family’s school year depends on a permit date, size that decision against 96 days with a real possibility of 144. Roughly one in eight applications takes more than six months.

Completeness is the lever you control. The spread between the fast quarter and the slow quarter is 61 days versus 144 — a difference of nearly three months on the same process. Corrections drive most of that gap, and corrections come from incomplete submittals. A team that returns corrections in days rather than weeks is worth more than one that promised a shorter review.

Mobilisation is not your bottleneck. Once permits issue, the median Palisades owner breaks ground in 34 days. Nobody is dragging their feet after approval. The wait is upstream, in plan check, which is where attention belongs.

Do not extrapolate from your neighbor. With a median of 96 and a p75 of 144, two identical projects filed the same week can finish eleven weeks apart. That is the ordinary variance of this process, not evidence that someone got special treatment.

Method

Derived from parcel-level permit records compiled by the Pali Rebuild Map, an independent tracker built by Palisades resident Kevin Pazirandeh from public Los Angeles County records and published by the Palisadian-Post. The derivation is ours; any error in it is ours rather than theirs.

We counted every parcel flagged as a fire rebuild that carried both a submitted and an issued permit event, measuring calendar days between the earliest of each. Spans of zero or negative days, and spans beyond 1,200 days, were excluded as record artifacts — 1,152 applications remained. Cohort analysis groups by submission month; months with fewer than fifteen issued applications are not shown. “Mature” months are those with 25% or fewer applications still pending.

Headline percentiles at the top of this page update daily. The cohort and share figures are a snapshot taken July 27, 2026.

The counts behind all of it are on the rebuild status page, and you can project your own dates with the Rebuild Reality Check.