Filing to permit
Across 50,115 filings that carry both dates, half were permitted within 18 days of being filed. A quarter were permitted within 2 days. A quarter took longer than 4 months.
The median is the honest figure here and the average is not. The same filings average 5 months from filing to permit, because a handful that sat for years pull the mean somewhere no ordinary job has ever been. Half of everything is faster than the median and half is slower. That is the whole of what it claims.
It depends almost entirely on what you are building
The single number above hides the thing that actually decides how long a filing waits. A new building and a kitchen alteration are not the same application and do not move at the same speed.
| Work type | Median | Fastest quarter | Slowest quarter | Filings |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| New buildings | 8 months | 4 months | 1.4 years | 2,147 |
| Alterations | 15 days | 2 days | 3 months | 47,731 |
| Demolitions | 5 months | 2 months | 8 months | 237 |
And, rather less, on which borough
The spread between boroughs is real but small beside the spread between work types. A filing is not slow because of where it is; it is slow because of what it asks for.
| Borough | Median | Fastest quarter | Slowest quarter | Filings |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Brooklyn | 15 days | 1 day | 4 months | 39,512 |
| Manhattan | 21 days | 4 days | 3 months | 5,907 |
| Staten Island | 2 months | 7 days | 5 months | 730 |
| Queens | 2 months | 7 days | 7 months | 2,512 |
| Bronx | 2 months | 5 days | 8 months | 1,454 |
The other intervals
A permit is not the only milestone, and the wait is not evenly distributed across the ones before it.
- Filing to approval: a median of 4 days, across 60,761 filings. Approval is a plan examiner accepting the application; it is not permission to start work.
- Approval to permit: a median of 30 days. This is usually the longer half of the wait, and it is the half that is least about the Department of Buildings.
- Filing to sign-off: a median of 1.4 years, across 31,959 filings that have reached it. This is the building work itself, not the paperwork.
What this cannot tell you
It cannot tell you how long your filing will take. These are the intervals that have already happened, and a median is not a promise. A filing that draws objections, changes scope or waits on another agency leaves the distribution entirely, which is exactly why the slowest quarter is shown beside the median rather than hidden inside an average.
It also only counts filings that reached the milestone. A job filed last month and still in review is in none of these numbers, so the figures describe filings that got there, not filings in general.
Recomputed from the catalog on every release. Built from DOB NOW: Build – Job Application Filings (w9ak-ipjd), accessed Sep 14, 2026.