Vancouver Halved Its Permit Time. Calgary's Backlog Tripled.
Every builder in BC believes Vancouver is slow and Alberta is fast. We measured 246,000 building permits. The gap has narrowed from 6.7x to 2.6x in three years, and Calgary is the one heading the wrong way.
Ask any builder in British Columbia why they are looking at Alberta and permit speed comes up in the first two minutes. The belief is that Vancouver takes months and Calgary takes weeks.
That was true. It is becoming less true quickly, and the direction of travel is the opposite of what most people assume.
We pulled every building permit from Vancouver and Calgary that carries both an application date and an issue date, 246,000 of them, and measured the gap between the two dates.12 Vancouver has nearly halved its median since 2022. Calgary has drifted slower and is accumulating a queue.
The gap, year by year
| Year | Vancouver | Calgary | Gap | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2021 | 89 days | 16 days | 5.6x | |
| 2022 | 118 days | 20 days | 5.9x | |
| 2023 | 101 days | 15 days | 6.7x | |
| 2024 | 77 days | 23 days | 3.3x | |
| 2025 | 77 days | 16 days | 4.8x | |
| 2026 | 62 days | 24 days | 2.6x | 12 |
Vancouver's 2026 figure rests on 2,714 permits and Calgary's on 13,664. 2026 is a partial year.
Vancouver peaked at 118 days in 2022 and has come down in every year since. That is a 47% reduction over four years, and it is not a rounding artifact. It shows up in 4,000 to 6,000 permits a year, every year.
It is not a difference in what each city builds
The obvious objection is that the two cities publish different work. That objection is correct. Vancouver's feed is 35% additions and 28% demolitions, with new construction making up only 385 of the 17,462 permits it has issued since 2023.1 Calgary's is 29% new construction.2 Comparing the raw medians compares two different things.
So we banded the permits by declared construction value and compared like with like. The gap survives at every size:
| Construction value | Vancouver | Calgary | Gap |
|---|---|---|---|
| Under $25,000 | 59 days | 15 days | 3.9x |
| $25,000 to $100,000 | 53 days | 17 days | 3.1x |
| $100,000 to $500,000 | 71 days | 21 days | 3.4x |
| $500,000 to $2M | 155 days | 49 days | 3.2x |
| Over $2M | 220 days | 104 days | 2.1x |
Permits issued 2023 onward, with between 770 and 28,911 permits in each cell.7
A Vancouver permit takes three to four times as long as a Calgary permit for the same declared value of work. The ratio is tightest on the largest projects, where Vancouver takes roughly twice as long rather than four times.
Is Vancouver actually faster, or just hiding the slow files?
This is the question that decides whether the trend above means anything.
A median calculated from permits that were issued in a year only counts files that finished. If a city is quietly accumulating applications that never come out the other end, its median can fall while the real wait gets worse. The number would improve because the slow files are missing from it, not because anything got faster.
Vancouver passes that test. It has issued more permits than it received in every year since 2022:
| Year | Applications received | Permits issued | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2021 | 6,478 | 5,031 | |
| 2022 | 5,102 | 5,930 | |
| 2023 | 4,245 | 4,684 | |
| 2024 | 4,841 | 4,901 | |
| 2025 | 4,645 | 5,155 | 1 |
The queue is draining rather than hiding anything. A city clearing more work than it takes in, while its median falls, is a city that genuinely got faster.
Calgary is going the other way
Calgary's open application backlog was 2,348 at the end of 2021. By July 2026 it was 7,370, more than triple.2 Over the same period its median crept from 16 days to 24.
Calgary is still much faster than Vancouver in absolute terms, and on current numbers it will stay faster for years. But it is absorbing more applications than it clears, and that is the condition that produces the slow medians Vancouver spent the last four years digging out of. Anyone choosing a market on the strength of a 15-day permit should be looking at the backlog line rather than the median.
The rest of Metro Vancouver
Vancouver is not the slowest city in its own region.
| City | 2021 | 2024 | 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|
| North Vancouver (City) | 140 days | 165 days | 112 days |
| Vancouver | 89 days | 77 days | 62 days |
| Port Moody | 56 days | 116 days | 62 days (2025) |
North Vancouver City has been slower than Vancouver in every year we can measure.4 Port Moody is quick in most years, with a 2024 spike that rests on only 174 permits and should not be read as a trend.5
What we cannot tell you, and why
This is the part most permit comparisons leave out.
Surrey is missing, and that is not an oversight. Surrey publishes issued building permits and no application date. We queried the live open data layer in August 2026: it returns ten fields, and the only date among them is the issue date.6 There is no arithmetic that recovers an approval time from that. The same is true of New Westminster, Delta and Abbotsford. Any table you see that gives Surrey a permit approval time is either using a private source or making it up.
Maple Ridge looks like the fastest city in the province and we do not believe it. Its median reads three to four days. But a third of its records show exactly one day between application and issue, and two thirds show a week or less. That pattern looks like a recording convention rather than a planning department. There is a real tail underneath it, with the slowest tenth of permits taking 90 days or more, but the median is not trustworthy and we have left the city out.
Category comparisons across cities do not work. The labels are not equivalent. Vancouver's "mechanical and service" permits carry a median declared value of $900,000. Calgary's carry $6,500.12 Those are not the same class of work wearing the same name, which is why the comparison above is banded by value rather than by category.
Method
Every figure comes from municipal open data, listed in full below.7 We count the days between the application date and the issue date on each permit, then take the median for the city and period. Medians rather than averages, because a handful of multi-year approvals will drag a mean anywhere you like.
Two filters matter. Permits with an application-to-issue gap of 2,000 days or more are dropped as data errors. So is any permit recorded as issued on the same day it was applied for. Calgary's development permit feed was checked and excluded on the same basis: it carries no usable application-to-issue pair.3
That second filter is worth explaining, because getting it wrong is how these numbers usually go bad. Several cities publish an issued-permits feed with no application date in it. Load that naively and you record the issue date in both fields, which produces an approval time of zero days. We had exactly that defect in our own dataset until this month: 173,412 Edmonton permits were reporting a zero-day approval, which is why Edmonton does not appear in this piece at all. A city that appears to issue permits instantly is almost always a city that is not telling you when the application arrived.
The first issue of The Brief looked at why rebuilding after a wildfire takes three to five years and found that permitting throughput, not construction capacity, was the binding constraint. This is the same question asked of a normal market.
Kyrax is a builder and works in both of these markets, so read the numbers rather than us. Every source is public and the method above is the whole of it.