Palisades Fire Rebuild Status: July 2026

Eighteen months on from the January 2025 fire, the Palisades rebuild has moved from paperwork into physical construction. Here is where it stands today.

The shape of that funnel is the story

Roughly seventeen hundred applications have been filed. Fewer than thirty homes have reached a certificate of occupancy — the point at which a family can legally move back in.

That is not evidence of failure. It is what the arithmetic of construction looks like. A home permitted in early 2026 is, in the ordinary course, still being framed today. Construction alone runs 10 to 18 months for a single-family home, and most owners spent the better part of a year on debris clearance, insurance and design before they could file at all.

Permits issued is the number to watch

Certificates of occupancy tell you where the rebuild was roughly a year and a half ago. Permits issued tells you where it will be next year.

On that measure the picture is considerably healthier: about two-thirds of all applications filed have now cleared review. The remainder are not stuck so much as queued — LADBS targets 30 business days to review a complete application, and owners on the expedited like-for-like track have been seeing issuance in six to fourteen weeks.

Permit volume across ZIP 90272 has run at roughly 3.7 times the pre-fire annual rate. The pre-fire baseline was about 186 permits a month across all types; the post-fire peak hit 688 in a single month.

Construction starts have caught up to permits

The ratio of homes under construction to permits issued is tight — and that is genuinely encouraging. It means owners who get a permit are overwhelmingly proceeding to build rather than pausing.

Where owners are not proceeding, they are usually selling the lot instead, and that behaviour is heavily concentrated by neighborhood. The Palisades Highlands recorded 15 vacant-lot sales, the most anywhere in the Palisades, against just six permits in a February 2026 sample. The Alphabet Streets, by contrast, had 11 sales and 29 permits.

That inversion is the clearest evidence that terrain and cost, not willingness, separate the fast neighborhoods from the slow ones. Hillside parcels needing caissons, retaining walls and deep geotechnical work carry a rebuild budget that an insurance settlement rarely covers.

What this means if you have not started

Three things are worth acting on regardless of where you are in the process.

Get a real number before you decide anything. The average insurance carrier estimate in a study of Palisades claims worked out to roughly $462 per square foot. Actual hard construction costs in the Palisades run $550 to $950, and high-end custom rebuilds $800 to $1,200. The average gap between carrier estimate and local rebuild budget came to about $1.45 million per home. More on costs and the insurance gap.

Investigate the ground before you finalise a design. On hillside and bluff parcels, the geotechnical report determines the buildable envelope. Owners who commission architectural drawings first routinely pay to redraw them.

Understand which permit track you are on. A like-for-like rebuild moves materially faster than a larger new home, and in the coastal stretch the difference can be four to six months of Coastal Development Permit review. The permit process, stage by stage.

The honest summary

Fewer than thirty finished homes out of 6,837 structures destroyed is a small fraction, and no framing of the data makes it otherwise. But close to a thousand homes under construction is a substantially different Palisades from the one that existed a year ago, and the permits already issued guarantee that number keeps climbing through 2027.

The figures at the top of this page update as new permit records are published. Every number, with its source and date, is on the rebuild status page.