Plan check is taking too long: what AB 253 now lets you do about it

Law verified as of 10 September 2026 against the text published by the California Legislature.

What changed in October 2025

Plan-check delay used to be something you absorbed. AB 253 turned it into something with a defined remedy.

The California Residential Private Permitting Review Act was approved on 10 October 2025 as an urgency statute, effective immediately rather than the following January. It amends Health and Safety Code §§ 17951 and 17960.1 and adds § 17960.3, which remains in effect only until 1 January 2036.

Three obligations follow from it.

The agency must tell you how long it will take. Once your residential permit application is deemed complete, the city or county must provide an estimated timeframe within which it will determine whether the completed application complies with permit standards.

If that estimate is too long, you may go around it. You may retain a private professional provider to perform the plan check if the estimated timeframe exceeds 30 business days, or if the agency has not determined the completed application is compliant within 30 days of it being deemed complete.

The fee schedule has to be published. A city or county that prescribes residential building permit fees must prepare a residential building permit fee schedule and post it on its website.

The two clocks are not the same clock

This is the detail most worth getting right, and summaries tend to collapse it into “a 30-day shot clock.”

Trigger	Measured in
The agency’s estimated timeframe exceeds 30 business days	Business days
The agency has not determined compliance within 30 days of the application being deemed complete	Calendar days

Thirty business days is roughly six weeks. Thirty days is about four. They are different thresholds doing different jobs — the first tests the promise, the second tests the performance — and either one opens the private-review route independently.

Both run from the application being deemed complete, not from first submittal.

Which projects qualify

The Act applies to a residential building permit, defined as either:

• new residential construction of a building containing at least 1 and no more than 10 dwelling units, containing only residential units, with no floor used for human occupancy located more than 40 feet above ground level; or
• a residential addition to, or remodel of, an existing building meeting the same description.

That covers essentially the whole of ordinary single-family and small multi-family work, including additions and remodels.

Who can actually do the review

A private professional provider must be:

1. A professional engineer licensed under the Professional Engineers Act, or an architect licensed under the Architects Practice Act; and
2. Currently certified as a residential plans examiner by the International Code Council, or as a plans examiner by the International Association of Plumbing and Mechanical Officials, or by another state, national or international association the local agency recognises for the plans examiners it employs itself; and
3. Without a financial interest in the residential building permit or in preparing the plans and specifications.

The third condition is the one that reshapes the decision

Read that last clause again, because it is routinely missed: the provider “shall not have a financial interest in the residential building permit or in preparing the plans and specifications.”

Your designer cannot check your own plans. Neither can anyone with a stake in the permit. Taking this route means engaging a second, independent licensed professional who holds a plans-examiner certification on top of their licence — a genuinely small population — and paying them, on top of the agency’s fees.

That is not a reason to dismiss the route. It is the reason to price it honestly before invoking it. On a project where a six-week estimate is costing you a construction slot, an interest-rate lock, or a rental period, the arithmetic can be clearly favourable. On a project with no such pressure it usually is not.

How the process runs

1. Your application is submitted and deemed complete. The clocks start here.
2. The agency gives you its estimated timeframe.
3. If a trigger is met, you notify the city or county of your intent to retain a private professional provider, within the timeframe the statute prescribes. This is a prerequisite, not a formality — the route is not available retrospectively.
4. The private professional provider performs the plan check and prepares an affidavit under penalty of perjury.
5. You submit the report of the plan check to the city or county.
6. The agency has 10 business days from receiving the report to consider it and either issue the permit or notify you that the plans and specifications do not comply.

Note what step 6 is not: it is not automatic issuance. The agency still decides, and it can still come back with non-compliance. What the statute compresses is the waiting, not the judgement.

What this does not fix

AB 253 addresses the plan-check stage of a residential permit. It does not touch planning or zoning entitlements, environmental review, Coastal Development Permits, fire department or utility clearances, or the inspection process during construction. A project held up at any of those is not helped by it.

Nor does it reduce the value of a submittal that is right the first time. The fastest route through plan check remains a complete, coordinated set that does not generate a correction list — and every hour spent making that true is worth more than any statutory remedy for delay.

For how the equivalent clocks work on an ADU, which has its own and stronger deadlines, see how long an ADU permit takes.