If you build on Oʻahu, you don't need a study to tell you permits take a long time. But a new one puts numbers on it, and they aren't pretty.
Researchers looked at permit and construction timelines in 60 U.S. cities over the last two decades, and Honolulu came out near the slow end, as Honolulu Civil Beat reported. The study was done by Evan Soltas, an assistant professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton University; Leonardo D'Amico, an assistant professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business; and Audrey Wang, a senior research specialist at Princeton.
The numbers
Here's the one that'll make you wince. In 2000, a permit for a 2,800-square-foot single-family home in Honolulu took an average of a little over two months. By 2024, it was more than 14 months.
In Sunbelt cities like Raleigh, Orlando and Phoenix, the same home goes from permit submission to completion in about a year, according to the research.
Nationally, things have slowed down too, just not as much. A typical U.S. single-family home permit took an average of two months to approve in 2002 and now takes four, Soltas told Civil Beat. A permit for a 20-unit apartment building used to take about six months and now takes a year.
"This represents a massive slowdown in the average regulatory performance across the United States," Soltas said.
Using data from 2015 through 2019, a 20-unit apartment building in Honolulu would have taken 14 months to get final approval and a little over three years to build. Over that same 2015-2019 sample, Honolulu had the 10th-longest wait times, with total project time of just over two years for a typical single-family home. Since at least 2015, Honolulu has been in the top 25% of cities for the longest delays, alongside Seattle, Boston and Providence.
The researchers found slower permitting goes along with less construction, more demand and higher rents. Soltas said it takes roughly a year longer to build a 20-unit building in Honolulu than in Columbus or Indianapolis, and the figures suggest that extra year is connected to rents about a third higher.
"While not necessarily cause and effect, the numbers suggest that regulatory differences have really large consequences," Soltas said.
He also put it in terms every builder understands. "If it takes two years to permit, and five years to build, that's an imposition on every developer," he said. "They're tying up capital, construction and labor for a lot longer than other cities."
The city's side
Honolulu's Department of Planning and Permitting says it agrees permit times matter and that the study backs up its push to speed things up. Spokesman Davis Pitner told Civil Beat most of the Honolulu data covers 2004 to 2025, before many of the department's improvements took hold.
Pitner pointed to electronic plan review, the HNL Build platform, standardized workflows and tighter adherence to review timelines. He also said the department's AI-assisted screening tool, CivCheck, which became mandatory Sept. 1, is showing early results: applications that used CivCheck got a permit decision an average of 40 days sooner than comparable ones that didn't.
The researchers suggested reforms like processing time limits, one-stop-shop approaches and having agencies review plans at the same time instead of one after another. Pitner said those ideas "align with several of the changes DPP has been implementing."
Still, more recent data from 2021 through 2025 for 19 western cities, analyzed by the same team, shows Hawaiʻi's ranking hasn't changed much, with single-family homes taking an average of six months to permit and more than two years to build.
Why it matters for Contractors
Every month a permit sits in the queue is a month your crew isn't working that job, your client's loan is accruing interest, and material prices can move. This study gives contractors and homeowners hard numbers to bring to conversations with city leaders about permitting reform. In the meantime, it pays to use every tool DPP offers: if CivCheck can shave weeks off a decision, build it into how you submit. Plan your schedule and your client's expectations around realistic permit times, not hopeful ones. And keep an eye on whether DPP's changes show up in the next round of data, because faster permits would mean more jobs moving and more steady work for Oʻahu's trades.