Planning
The Burnaby Custom Home Permit Timeline in 2026: Intake to Issued
A field-note walk through the actual phases of a Burnaby single-family custom home permit in 2026 — from engineering pre-application to digital issuance — with realistic durations, common rejection reasons, and what an owner can do to keep the file moving.
On site with Sanj
This can't be built in Burnaby anymore — not a design choice but a bylaw restriction.
Open Reel on Instagram →How long does a custom home permit take in Burnaby?
A Burnaby custom home permit takes 4–9 months from submission to issuance in 2026. A clean application on a flat infill lot averages 12–20 weeks. Hillside lots, heritage overlays, and incomplete packages add 4–12 weeks. The pre-application phase — design, survey, arborist, geotech — takes a further 3–6 months before submission.
The question we get most often at the kitchen-table stage of a Burnaby custom home is some version of "how long until we can swing a hammer?" The honest answer in 2026 is "longer than you think, shorter than the worst stories you've heard, and almost entirely a function of how clean the file is the day it arrives at the City." Burnaby has spent the last two years rewiring its building-permit pipeline — engineering pre-approval, the My Permits Portal, eCheck, the digital-only issuance rule that took effect this spring — and the projects that move quickly are the ones that respect the new shape of the process instead of fighting it.
This is the timeline we walk every new Burnaby client through, from Capitol Hill teardown-rebuilds to Government Road infill to the Buckingham Heights and Cariboo Heights lots where slope and trees complicate everything. We work primarily in Burnaby, with regular projects in Vancouver, Coquitlam, and North Vancouver, and Burnaby's process is its own animal — not slower than its neighbours, but more sequenced. Skip a step or arrive at intake with a thin package and the file goes to the back of a queue you didn't know existed.
Phase 0: Pre-application — the work that happens before the City sees anything
The single biggest predictor of how long your permit will take is what you do in the months before you submit. This is design, survey, geotech, arborist, BC Hydro coordination, and the conversations that don't have a portal screen yet. Owners routinely underestimate this phase because nothing visible is happening at City Hall. Everything visible later depends on it.
A complete pre-application package for a Burnaby single-family custom home includes a current topographical survey, a proposed driveway drawing, a tree inventory by a certified arborist, a preliminary site plan that respects setbacks and the Burnaby Tree Bylaw, and a working set of architectural drawings developed enough to show building footprint, height, and grade. On a hillside lot in Capitol Hill or Burnaby Heights, add a geotechnical report. On a lot with creeks or streamside protection — common around Deer Lake and along the Brunette ravines — add the riparian assessment. Skipping the arborist conversation is the most common mistake we see. The City's own guidance is explicit that owners should "contact the city to discuss any trees that may be affected by development prior to submitting your Engineering pre-application" (City of Burnaby, New Home Construction).
Realistic duration for Phase 0 on a competent project: three to six months. That covers schematic and developed design, structural engineering, mechanical and electrical layout, and the package assembly. We've seen it done in two when the owner has very clear direction and an experienced design team; we've seen it stretch past nine when the design changes mid-stream.
Every week you save in Phase 0 by rushing, you give back twice in Phase 2 fixing comments. Burnaby's plan checkers are not your design team.
— Sanj Aggarwal, CHBA BC Master Residential Builder
Phase 1: Engineering pre-application — the gate before the gate
This is the step that catches Burnaby newcomers off guard. Since the 2023 process overhaul, Burnaby requires Engineering Department pre-approval before you can submit a building permit application (City of Burnaby, New residential building permit process). It's a separate review focused on driveway location, servicing, grading, frontage works, and any street-related conditions that affect how the lot connects to City infrastructure.
You submit through the My Permits Portal with the topographical survey, the proposed driveway drawing, and the applicable fees. The City quotes approximately fifteen business days for the engineering review (City of Burnaby, New Home Construction). In practice that's the floor, not the ceiling. We have seen clean Brentwood and Metrotown infill files come back in eleven business days. We have seen Government Road files with curb-cut conflicts or boulevard tree issues sit closer to twenty-five.
What gets a project bounced at engineering: a driveway that crosses a protected boulevard tree, a curb cut too close to an intersection, frontage that triggers a sidewalk requirement the owner didn't budget for, or grading that pushes runoff onto a neighbour. The fix is almost always a redesign of the driveway or site plan, which means another round, which means another fifteen business days. This is why we walk lots with the arborist and the civil before we draw anything we love.
Phase 2: Building permit intake and first plan check
Once Engineering signs off, you submit the full building permit application through My Permits Portal. As of January 1, 2026, paper applications are no longer accepted, and as of March 31, 2026, all permits are issued exclusively in digital format (City of Burnaby, General Building Information). The intake itself is fast — the file either passes the completeness check or it doesn't. What follows is the substantive plan check: zoning compliance, BC Building Code review, energy step code, structural, plumbing, electrical, and the line items the Burnaby Application Completeness Checklist enumerates.
There is no published guaranteed turnaround for a single-family plan check in Burnaby. The City states that "processing time for all applications will depend on the volume of applications and the application complexity" (City of Burnaby, General Building Information). The honest range we see in 2026 for a clean single-family file is eight to sixteen weeks to first comments. Files that arrive incomplete get held in a triage state and don't accumulate review time at all — they sit. This is the most common reason owners think "the City is slow" when really their package never entered the queue.
The eCheck digital review tool is worth opting into. It runs your drawings against Burnaby's objective zoning rules — height, setbacks, parking, dwelling-unit count — and returns an automated compliance report within two business days (City of Burnaby, eCheck). It does not replace City staff review of judgment-based items or the building-code review, but it catches the dimensional violations that cause the most embarrassing comment letters. We run every Burnaby file through it before submission.
Phase 3: Comments, conditions, and the resubmission cycle
This is where projects either stay tight or sprawl. A first-pass comment letter on a Burnaby single-family permit typically runs anywhere from a few items to several pages, organized by discipline. The common categories:
- Zoning: setback misreads, lot-coverage calculation errors, FAR or floor-area definitions applied wrong, height measured from the wrong reference point.
- Building code: stair geometry, guard heights, egress windows in basement bedrooms, fire separation between attached garages and dwellings, the new BC Building Code 2024 cooling requirement that one living space stay below 26 degrees Celsius, and the radon rough-in language (Province of BC, 2024 BC Codes).
- Energy step code: missing or inconsistent energy-advisor pre-construction modelling, airtightness targets, mechanical ventilation calculations.
- Engineering and grading: drainage, retaining walls, lot grading certificate references.
- Tree bylaw: trees missing from the site plan, replacement plantings short, protection fencing not shown.
Each resubmission is its own clock. A tight resubmission turned around in a week or two by your design team typically gets re-reviewed in three to six weeks, depending on queue. Most Burnaby custom homes go through two rounds of comments before approval; some go through three. Files that need four or more rounds almost always have an underlying design problem that the comment letter is circling — usually a height, FAR, or grading issue the design hasn't fully solved. We tell owners: if you're on round three and the same category of comment keeps coming back, stop responding line-by-line and have the architect and the plan checker get on a call.
Phase 4: Pre-issuance conditions and the final fee package
When plan check is satisfied, the file moves into pre-issuance. This is where outstanding conditions get cleared — Schedule F (the Owner's Undertaking), agent authorization, the construction and demolition waste diversion plan if you're tearing down, the consent-to-construction package, electrical checklists and load calculations (City of Burnaby, New Home Construction). All applicable fees are paid in full, and the permit is issued digitally. The City's standard is plain: "Building Permits are issued digitally once: all City requirements have been met; and all applicable fees have been paid in full" (City of Burnaby, General Building Information). Fee schedules are published on the official Burnaby fee page — ask your builder to walk you through them rather than trusting third-party summaries.
Pre-issuance is short — often a week or two — but only if the conditions list isn't a surprise. Owners who treat Schedule F as a formality at the end discover that their lender, their insurer, and the City want slightly different things from it, and that takes time to reconcile.
Adding it up — what to actually expect
For a single-family custom home in Burnaby in 2026, on a non-pathological lot, with an experienced team, the realistic intake-to-issued range is:
- Engineering pre-application: 3–5 weeks
- Building permit intake to first comments: 8–16 weeks
- Comment rounds (typically two): 6–12 weeks combined
- Pre-issuance and fees: 1–3 weeks
That's roughly four to nine months from engineering pre-app submission to issued permit, on top of the three-to-six months of pre-application design work. Vancouver projects are not meaningfully faster — the Vancouver process has its own queues and its own surprises around the energy step code and the urban-design review on certain streets. Coquitlam and North Vancouver tend to be a touch quicker for straight single-family work but slower for anything on slope. We've broken this down in more depth in How long does a custom home actually take in BC.
A Burnaby permit issued in six months on a hard lot is a small miracle. The owners who get it didn't push harder — they prepared better.
— Sanj Aggarwal, CHBA BC Master Residential Builder
How a homeowner actually keeps the file moving
There are three things an owner can do that genuinely move the timeline, and a dozen things that feel productive but don't.
The first thing that works is paying for the survey, the geotech, and the arborist before you fall in love with a design. Every redesign caused by an unexpected slope, soil, or tree finding burns weeks. The second is treating the energy advisor and the structural engineer as part of the design team, not as a checkbox at the end — pre-construction step-code modelling that lines up with the drawings is one of the fastest paths through plan check. The third is responding to comments fast and completely. A comment letter that sits with your team for six weeks is six weeks the City was never going to give you back. Our planning-stage checklist lays out the sequencing we use.
What doesn't help: calling the front counter weekly, asking for expedites that don't exist for single-family, or trying to negotiate code requirements at intake. The plan checkers are reviewing dozens of files a week. They respond to clean, complete, well-organized resubmissions. They don't respond to pressure.
Where we fit
We sit on the owner's side of this process. On most projects we're coordinating the design team, the engineering pre-app, the My Permits Portal submission, the eCheck run, the comment responses, and the pre-issuance conditions — so that by the time you hold the issued permit you've spent your energy on the house, not on the file. If you're in early days on a Burnaby lot — Capitol Hill, Brentwood, Big Bend, anywhere — and want a realistic conversation about what the next year looks like, request a consultation. We can walk you through what we'd do in your first ninety days, where the likely friction sits on your specific lot, and how the planning and custom homes work together when the timeline is the constraint that matters most.
Related on the Journal
