If you are considering a remodel, addition, or building a new home, this thought has probably crossed your mind: “how do I get a building permit?” You probably have also thought, “how long does it take to get a permit, and how much does a permit cost? You’re in the right place, because I will answer those questions (and more)!
Let’s get the easy one out of the way: how much does a permit cost? This obviously varies, and it depends on size and complexity of the project. The building department has a spreadsheet that calculates estimated permit fees for you: https://www.seattle.gov/documents/Departments/SDCI/Codes/2024FeeEstimator.xlsx
You can plug in your project type and size, and it spits out an answer. If you just want a basic idea for the cost of residential permits in Seattle, plan for around $5000 for small remodels and additions and around $10,000 for new construction. Those are just estimates, however. They charge you about half when you turn your project into them to start the review, and they charge the other half, PLUS additional time they spend once they finish the review process. The base rate is $257 per hour, and the zoning people charge $439 per hour!! This is much higher than the typical architect charges to design and check plans. Nobody ever said government was efficient:)
Also keep in mind, you may have to pay for other permits like electrical, plumbing, mechanical, demolition, or environmental critical area permits too. Those are often less expensive than building permits though.
Next, let’s talk about how long the permit process takes. This largely depends on how busy the economy is. When things are booming, the whole process can take close to a year or maybe more. In slower economies, the permit process may only take a couple months.
The length of the process also depends on the steps you must go through. There’s a lot of hoops to jump through, so an experienced architect can help save you time and money by jumping through the relevant hoops at the appropriate times.
Here’s what the process looks like for a typical Seattle project that has an ECA (environmental critical area) since it’s common for properties to have an ECA like steep slope, landslide prone, liquefaction zone, shoreline, wetland, etc.
STEP 1: Pre-application
The “pre-app” is basically just to get your project on the city’s radar. This means you need to draw a site plan that shows where you will do the project and what it is, and you submit it through the city portal with an online application form. You also submit a form that says you agree to pay their fees, and yes, they will soon send you an intake fee invoice. You will need to pay this fee to move to the steps below. Once you submit the pre-app, the city will often send an inspector to do a drive-by to confirm your address, determine if you drew the trees on your site plan accurately, document the size and location of nearby water, sewer, and fire hydrants, verify the presence of any ECA’s, and include a few other special instructions for what to include with your full permit submittal when that time comes (like tell you to add curbs, sidewalks, street trees, street lights, or even to put in a better sewer in the street). The city of Seattle calls that a PASV (pre-application site visit). Once this is complete, they assign you a project number in their system.
STEP 2: Schedule Intake Appointment
Once you have your project number, you can now log into their portal (if you have an account) to work through the steps of getting permits. Since most people want to work quickly, we usually schedule the intake appointment right away, and we pick the soonest date available. We have seen these vary from 2 weeks away to over 6 months away. An intake date is the deadline for sending in your full set of drawings to apply for the actual permit. If you miss that deadline, you get fined, and you need to start over and schedule a new intake date (which can be devastating). If your property does not have an ECA on it, then skip down to step 4.
STEP 3: ECA Review
Since most properties tend to have an ECA on them, this step is like a mini permit process that must get approved before the actual building permit process can continue. Depending on your situation, your experienced architect can advise on whether you need an ECA exemption, relief, small project waiver, or variance. In those processes, the building department determines if your project will have an adverse impact on the environment, and they mandate a few items to protect the environment (in their opinion) such as a survey, geotechnical report, certain structural accommodations, or some other sort of mitigation. Once the issue the ECA approval, you now know what to include with your actual building permit application. Think of the ECA process as a prerequisite for your actual building permit process. On complicated properties, it is possible that you may have to go through several subsequent ECA processes. These usually take around 2-4 months each.
STEP 4: Permit Intake
Sometime prior to 7am on your scheduled intake date, you must upload all of your drawings and other forms onto the city permit portal. If you submit early, this enables you to get bumped up sooner if someone else cancels. At your intake, the city staff review your project to determine if you have submitted a complete application. If you forget a form, don’t provide enough detail, etc, they can kick you out, and you would need to schedule a new intake date to submit a more complete application. I once got rejected because 3 copies of the drawings were required, and one copy was on heavier weight paper than the other two. I argued my way out of that one, but it makes me appreciate the online submittal process since it saves the time, expense, and hassle of printing and submitting hard copies. Also, once a permit is accepted for intakes, it is deemed to be a complete application, and the project is vested in the rules applicable at that time. Since permits take so long to review, it is common for the rules to change during the review process. That would be unfair to make people redesign and redraw their project every time a rule changes. That would be like a cop giving you get a ticket for going through a green light because he changed the rule for green to mean stop.
STEP 5: Review
After the city staff has determined that your plans include the required pages and forms, then your application waits in a queue until they actually start reviewing it. The review of the work is not just for completeness this time. They are now reviewing it for the quality of the work to ensure it adheres to the codes (or at least their interpretation of the codes). Several different departments will review the drawings such as addressing, zoning, building ordinance, structural, civil, geotechnical, tree, energy, and others. Those departments will each issue a correction notice which requests additional information to be added to the plans. We try to only submit the bare minimum for the initial review since we don’t want the city officials to scrutinize stuff that is not in their purview. The correction notices may ask to add a smoke detector, include another calc for a beam, or add trees, for example. Once all of the departments have completed their review, they send a consolidated report with all of their requests aggregated.
STEP 6: Review Responses
Once we receive all of the plan review comments from the various city departments, we first make fun of a few of them for how ridiculous they are (like being asked to put a big box around a note to emphasize it - we politely tell them to stick to enforcing real rules instead of telling us to bend over to comply with their personal preferences). Then we add the additional information to the plans, and we resubmit using the city online portal. That process can repeat several times until all the reviewers are happy with the info provided. It is common for the reviewers to make mistakes, forget to ask for something, or to completely miss seeing something on the plans.
STEP 7: Approval
Once all the reviewers are content with the plans, they approve them form permit, and each page gets a city approval stamp on it. This doesn’t mean the process is over though.
STEP 8: Payment
Of course the city holds your permit and approved drawings hostage until you pay them the permit approval fee.
STEP 9: Issuance
Once the city receives your final payment for the permit, they take their sweet ass time and eventually issue you the permit and approved drawings in digital form usually about 2 weeks later.
STEP 10: Printing
Your architect will help you to coordinate getting the large drawing sheets printed, so you can have them displayed on site as required.
STEP 11: Inspections
Once you have your permit, you can start building, and at various points throughout the process, you need to schedule inspections for things like foundations, framing, insulation, etc.
STEP 12: Trade Permits
As you move through the construction process, you will need to get other permits for things like plumbing, electrical, mechanical, etc. Usually the plumber or electrician will apply for those permits on your behalf. They are often much simpler than building permit applications and just need a single page filled out. Often, they get approved and issued within a day - if you pay the fee:)
I hope that summarizes the permit process and answers your questions. Feel free to reach out for more specific questions.
If you’d like to learn more about our design process, visit www.josharch.com/process, and if you’d like to get us started on your project with a feasibility report, please visit www.josharch.com/help
