Plan review

Plan review is the stage where the building department actually reads your submittal. Reviewers compare the drawings and calculations against the adopted building code, the local amendments to it, and the zoning rules that apply to the site.

A project is rarely reviewed by one person. Depending on scope, separate reviewers look at structural, electrical, plumbing, mechanical, energy, zoning, fire, and sometimes floodplain or environmental aspects. Each discipline can approve, or return comments, independently.

Cycles

Review is iterative. The first pass usually produces a set of comments. You resolve them, resubmit, and the reviewers check your responses. Each round trip is a review cycle. Two cycles is a good outcome on a nontrivial project; four or five is common when the first submittal was thin.

What reviewers are looking for

Reviewers are checking that the design is code compliant and that the drawings say so clearly enough to be verified. A design can be perfectly buildable and still draw comments because the drawings do not show the reviewer what they need to see. A large share of comments are about missing information rather than about bad design.

Where the time actually goes

Departments publish target review times, and those targets usually describe one cycle. A project quoted at 10 business days that goes through three cycles has taken six weeks of review, plus your own turnaround time on each set of comments.