Ontario publishes a real review-time commitment for building permits — but that clock only starts once the application is complete, and an incomplete package doesn’t fail quickly, it just sits. Getting it complete the first time is the whole game.
Key takeaways
The threshold is broader than most applicants assume. A permit is required before you “construct any new building over ten square meters in area or place another structure, such as a mobile home, on your property,” “make renovations or repairs or add to a building,” “change the use of a building,” “excavate or construct a foundation,” “construct a seasonal building,” or undertake work on an on-site sewage system, per Ontario’s citizen’s guide. Ten square metres is a small shed — the kind of structure a homeowner might assume is below any permit threshold at all.
Applications are filed locally: applicants “get an application for a building permit from your municipality” and submit it there, “not to the provincial government.” That means the specific documentation list, the fee schedule, and the intake process are all set by the municipality, within the framework the province sets for what a complete application has to contain.
Ontario publishes a real commitment on review time, and it’s worth quoting precisely because it’s often mis-stated as a flat number: “the timeframe on a permit application for a house is 10 days… for a more complex building, such as a hospital, the timeframe is 30 days.” The guide recommends speaking with municipal building department staff before submitting, to clarify “what information, drawings and plans you’ll have to include with the application” — advice that matters because the clock is a review-time commitment on a complete application, not a guaranteed turnaround from the day something gets dropped off.
Staff review the application “to confirm compliance with the Building Code and applicable laws,” and that review is checking the package against a real, changing technical standard. The National Building Code 2020 carried “over 280 technical changes” into that edition, covering areas from large farm buildings to a new “home-type care occupancy” classification and revised accessibility requirements. It is a model code — nothing on the NRC’s own page says which province adopted it or when, so confirming the code edition and any local amendments in force is part of assembling a complete package, not an afterthought.
That review clock isn’t just guidance from the citizen’s guide — it’s the Building Code itself: Division C, Article 1.3.1.3 requires the chief building official to either issue the permit or refuse it in writing, within the time period Table 1.3.1.3 sets for the building’s class, once an application meeting the article’s own completeness requirements has actually been submitted. The Building Code Act, 1992 backs that up directly: incompleteness is its own explicit ground for refusal, separate from any Code violation — a chief building official may refuse to issue a permit simply because “the application for the permit is not complete” (s. 8(2)(e)), which is exactly why the completeness check matters as much as the technical content of the drawings.
On some sites, the building permit isn’t the first approval needed — and treating it as though it is produces an application that’s technically complete on its own terms but sequenced wrong. Where site plan control applies, “most development or redevelopment projects require site plan approval by the municipality” before the building permit stage, covering “access for pedestrians and vehicles, walkways, lighting, waste facilities, landscaping, drainage, exterior design,” per Ontario’s site plan control guide. That approval carries its own 30-day municipal clock: “if a municipality fails to approve a site plan application within 30 days, the applicant may appeal to the Ontario Land Tribunal.”
Site plan control cannot be used to regulate what zoning already covers — “minimum or maximum parking requirements, minimum lot area, or height and density” — nor interior design, so it isn’t a substitute review, it’s a separate one, running on its own clock, that a complete building-permit strategy needs to account for in the schedule rather than discover partway through.
A worked example
A property owner applies for a building permit for a two-storey addition without first checking whether the site sits inside a designated site plan control area. The municipality returns the application as incomplete on intake, because a site plan approval condition needs to be resolved first for that address. The 10-day house-scale review clock never starts — it can’t, because the package was never accepted as complete — and the owner now has to file the separate site plan control application, which carries its own 30-day municipal decision window before the building permit application can even be resubmitted.
Had the owner confirmed the site plan control designation before assembling the building permit package — a five-minute check against the municipality’s own mapping — the two approvals could have run on a coordinated timeline instead of sequentially by accident: site plan control filed first, building permit package assembled in parallel while that 30-day clock ran, ready to submit the moment site plan approval landed. The month lost wasn’t a review-time problem; it was a completeness problem one check upstream would have caught.
Yes, if it’s over ten square metres in area — a threshold small enough to catch many sheds that owners assume are exempt, per Ontario’s citizen’s guide.
Ten days for a house-scale application, up to 30 days for a more complex building such as a hospital — but only once the municipality has confirmed the application is complete. An incomplete package doesn’t start that clock.
The municipality. Applications are filed and reviewed locally, not submitted to the provincial government, per the same guide.
Often not as a complete application. Where site plan control applies, most development or redevelopment in that area needs site plan approval, per Ontario’s site plan control guide — check whether the site is designated before assembling the building permit package, not after.
A pre-submission conversation with municipal building department staff to confirm the exact drawing and document list for the specific project — the guide’s own recommendation — because the documentation requirement is set locally and varies by municipality and building type.
A 30-minute call is enough to tell you whether AI pays for itself here.
