“How long will the permit take?” is one of the first questions a client asks and one of the hardest to answer honestly, because the true answer depends entirely on which municipality is reviewing the application. We pulled every recorded permit time frame in our corpus — 8,595 rules — and computed the distribution across all of them rather than a sample.
First finding: 43.7% of these rules contain no number
Before any distribution, the most important fact about this field: of the 8,595 recorded permit time frames, 3,756 — 43.7% — contain no digit anywhere in the rule text. They describe the process (“application shall be reviewed by the zoning administrator”) without committing to a clock. A further 57 say explicitly that no review time frame is specified. Those 8,595 rules are written in 7,462 distinct value strings, which is to say almost every municipality that does state a time frame words it differently from every other.
So the honest starting position on any new jurisdiction is that there may simply be no published answer, and the practical consequence is that a schedule built on “permits usually take about two weeks” is built on a rule that, four times out of nine, the ordinance never made.
The distribution, where a number exists
3,015 rules state a time frame in days with a parseable number. Across all of them:
| Percentile | Stated time frame (days) |
|---|---|
| Minimum | 1 |
| 10th percentile | 10 |
| 25th percentile | 14 |
| Median (50th) | 30 |
| 75th percentile | 45 |
| 90th percentile | 90 |
| Maximum | 365 |
The mode and the median disagree, and the median wins
Ten days is the single most-stated figure: 595 of the 3,015 numeric rules — 19.7% — say exactly 10. That is why “about two weeks” is the industry’s folk answer, and it is not wrong so much as unrepresentative. Only 1,145 rules (38.0%) fall anywhere in the 7-to-20-day band at all, while 1,745 of them — 57.9% — state 30 days or more. The most common answer and the typical answer are different answers, and quoting a client the most common one is how a schedule slips by a month.
The tail is long and real. The 90th percentile sits at 90 days and the maximum recorded value is 365. The gap between the 10th percentile (10 days) and the 90th (90 days) is ninefold — the same order of divergence we found between neighbouring governments’ dimensional limits in why two towns in the same county can have opposite sign rules, and for the same underlying reason: each of these is a separate legislature making its own call.
Why the spread exists
The variation is not random noise — it tracks real differences in how municipalities structure their review. A flat 10-business-day commitment typically describes an administrative, staff-level sign permit review with no public hearing involved. The longer values — 30, 45, 90 days — usually indicate that the sign permit is routed through, or can be escalated into, a more involved process: planning commission review, design review board sign-off, or a public notice and comment period, particularly for larger signs, electronic message centres, or anything requiring a variance. The stated time frame is telling you something about the review pathway, not just the calendar. What happens when a project needs a variance is covered separately in temporary sign rules and the variance path.
Days, business days, and working days are not the same number
Municipalities are also not consistent about what a “day” is. 472 of these rules specify business days, 252 specify working days, and 161 go out of their way to say calendar days — leaving the large remainder simply saying “days” and letting the reader guess. Ten business days is two full calendar weeks at minimum, and longer if a holiday falls inside the window — a meaningfully different commitment from ten calendar days, even though both get shorthanded to “about a week and a half” in conversation. A further 880 rules state the period in months and 125 in weeks. When you read a stated time frame off an ordinance, read the unit as carefully as the number — the same discipline that the unit split in digital sign dwell time demands.
One more caveat about this field
A stated “time frame” in a sign chapter is not always a review deadline. Some codes use the same sentence to say how long an issued permit stays valid before it lapses, which is why values like 180 and 365 days appear at the top of the range; the corpus carries a separate permit_expiration attribute for 381 municipalities that state that explicitly. Where the ordinance is ambiguous, we record what it says rather than deciding for it, so treat a very long value here as a prompt to read the cited section rather than as a review-queue estimate.
What this means for scheduling a job
Never quote a fixed install date before confirming the actual time frame for the specific municipality. Plan against the median of 30 days rather than the mode of 10, treat anything under two weeks as a pleasant surprise rather than an assumption, and remember that for nearly half of jurisdictions the ordinance gives you no number to plan against at all — in which case the only reliable input is a phone call to the office that will actually do the review.
How to check the permit review time frame for your project
A report shows the stated permit time frame for the applicable municipality, cited to the ordinance section, and shows plainly when the code states none — which for this particular field is the single most likely outcome. Creating an account is free.