"How long does permitting take?" is one of the first questions almost every homeowner asks us, and it's a fair one — permitting is the part of the process you can't see and can't really control yourself. Here's exactly what happens, in order, from your first call to your final inspection.
Before anything gets designed, we walk your property and pull your lot's zoning designation, setbacks, and any overlay restrictions specific to your city. This is also when we confirm whether your city requires owner-occupancy (Salt Lake City, Provo, and Ogden still do) and what size cap applies to your lot. You can read city-specific detail on our Salt Lake City, Provo, Park City, and Ogden pages, or see our full breakdown of what's changed under HB82 and SB284.
Once we know what your lot allows, we move into design — either from one of our existing floor plans or a fully custom layout. For a stickbuilt or garage conversion, this means stamped architectural drawings ready for submittal. For a modular unit, the factory's engineering department handles plan development, and we coordinate the site-specific foundation and utility plans locally.
We submit your complete application package to your city's building department: site plan, floor plans, elevations, structural details, and energy code compliance documentation. Every Utah city we build in has slightly different submittal requirements and fee schedules, which is exactly why doing this yourself the first time is where most delays happen.
City plan reviewers check your submittal against the Utah Residential Code (Utah adopted the 2021 IRC statewide effective July 2023) plus any local amendments. Review timelines run anywhere from a couple of weeks to a couple of months depending on the city and how busy their department is. If reviewers come back with comments or requested revisions, we handle the resubmittal, so you're never the one going back and forth with city staff.
Once your permit is issued, construction begins, and inspections happen at specific milestones. A typical Utah ADU project goes through inspections at these stages:
Missing or failing an inspection doesn't just cost time, it can mean opening up finished work to fix something a crew rushed past. We schedule and attend every one of these ourselves.
Once your final inspection passes, the city issues a certificate of occupancy, and the unit is legally ready to be lived in or rented. This is the document that protects you at resale, at refinance, and if you ever need to prove the unit was built legally.
Adding it all up: garage conversions typically move through this whole process in 2-3 months, modular ADUs in 3-5 months, and custom stickbuilt units in 5-8 months, with permitting itself usually accounting for 4-10 weeks of that depending on your city. See our full cost and timeline comparison in How Much Does an ADU Cost in Utah?
The honest truth is that permitting is the one part of this process a homeowner can't shortcut or DIY effectively. It's also the entire reason we exist as a founder-led company: we manage the plans, the submittal, the revisions, and every inspection so you're never the one calling city hall.