Maps & data · Housing
How long a permit takes
In short
Building a new house takes longer to permit than it did in 2010 in all five cities. Bellevue took 86 days in 2010 and 171 in 2025; Kirkland went from 78 to 195, and since 2023 it has been the slower of the two. The slowest of the five since 2023 is Mercer Island, at 273 days against Bellevue's 178.
A remodel takes 49 to 74 days at the median in every city since 2023; Kirkland and Issaquah slowed sharply around 2021 and have come back down. A demolition takes Kirkland about twice as long as Bellevue: a median of 135 days against 71 since 2023.
A new house: slower in all five cities
Median days from application to permit, by year applied. Sammamish's 2024 point rests on 16 permits. Issaquah's line ends in 2021: it has filed fewer than 15 a year since. Mercer Island's 2024 point rests on 15 permits.
A remodel: 49 to 74 days in every city since 2023
Median days from application to permit, by year applied.
A demolition: Kirkland takes about twice as long as Bellevue
Median days from application to permit, by year applied; a gap is a year with too few to read. Issaquah files too few to draw. Sammamish's line ends in 2022: it has filed fewer than 15 a year since. Mercer Island's 2025 point rests on 15 permits.
A new house, applied 2021 or later
The bar is the middle half of cases and the dark line the median; the whiskers reach the 10th and 90th percentile.
Where the time goes is in the review files
A permit's dates say how long it took, not who held it: the city's queue, a round of review comments, or the months an applicant takes to send back revised plans. Each review round is dated in the city's own file for the permit, and those files are a public record. Splitting the wait into the city's days and the applicant's, for a sample of houses in each city, is what would say why Kirkland and Bellevue slowed.
Corrected 29 October 2026. Kirkland files every single-family permit under one code, and this page counted all of them as new houses; more than half were additions, alterations, re-roofs and repairs. Kirkland's new-house line read 24 days in 2010 and 108 in 2025; the houses alone took 78 and 195, and Kirkland, not Bellevue, is the slower of the two. Permits issued the day they were applied for are now left out of every chart. The page also said Issaquah and Mercer Island file no new houses here; they file them under the same code as a remodel, and both are now drawn. Taking those houses out of the remodel count lowered the top of the remodel range from 82 days to 74. Earlier the same day the page also replaced two figures typed by hand, Kirkland 107 and Sammamish 356, that did not match its own chart.
How this was checked
Source. 827,057 permits from permitsearch.mybuildingpermit.com, the portal five Eastside cities share, swept 29–30 August 2026 (Bellevue 421,526, Kirkland 196,083, Sammamish 78,839, Issaquah 50,702, Mercer Island 79,907). Permit kinds are matched across cities with plat's crosswalk, and a new house counts only where the permit creates a dwelling.
Measure. Days from application to issue, as a median for each year applied. A year is drawn only where a city has at least 15 dated records, and a city with fewer than 30 in all is left off rather than drawn thinly.
The latest year reads fast. A case still waiting on the sweep date has no issue date yet and is not counted, so 2025 leaves out its slowest cases and 2026 is left off the line. The slowdown is if anything larger than the chart shows.
Kirkland's code. Kirkland files new houses, additions, alterations, re-roofs and repairs under one permit code; the description's class line says which. Only "New" counts as a house here, and the rest count as remodels.
Same-day permits are left out. A re-roof or other over-the-counter permit is issued the day it is applied for, and the share of those differs by city and by year, so a median that counts them measures the mix rather than the wait. Before 2019 Sammamish also recorded about a third of its new houses as issued the day they were applied for. Every permit issued on the day it was applied for is left out.
Issaquah and Mercer Island. Both cities file a new house under the same code as a remodel, so a house is found by its description: "New SFR", "NSFR", "demo/rebuild" with a house. A remodel or addition that mentions a house stays a remodel, and so does a duplex. In a hand-read sample of the matches, one duplex was the only one that was not a single house.
Since 2023. Bellevue 178 days, Kirkland 225 days, Sammamish 243 days, Mercer Island 273 days; Issaquah filed 24, too few for a median.
If your city's number looks wrong, say so. A city that records its dates differently lands in the wrong place here. Send the correction to [email protected] and it is published beside the original.