Los Angeles ADU Permit Tracker

The numbers at a glance

Are ADU permits in Los Angeles going up or down?

Down, gently. The city issued 5,976 ADU permits in the latest 12 months against 6,570 the year before, a change of -9.0%. Over the last 12 months, monthly volume stayed between 469 and 541 permits. The chart shows the last 36 months; the darker bar is September 2026.

Source: City of Los Angeles, LADBS Building Permits open data, permits issued October 1, 2025 to September 30, 2026; monthly counts by issue date. Dataset refreshed October 25, 2026; queried October 29, 2026.

How long does an ADU permit take in the City of Los Angeles?

The median permit took 114 days, about 16 weeks, from the day the application was filed to the day LADBS issued it. The type of work makes the biggest difference. New construction, which covers detached ADUs, took 152 days. Converting space that already exists, such as a garage, took 68 days.

The plan check route LADBS assigns tells the same story: projects reviewed at the counter were issued much sooner than projects sent to regular plan check.

Source: City of Los Angeles, LADBS Building Permits open data, permits issued October 1, 2025 to September 30, 2026; days from submitted date to issue date. Dataset refreshed October 25, 2026; queried October 29, 2026.

Where in Los Angeles are ADUs being permitted?

Mostly in the Valley. The South Valley and North Valley planning areas together issued 3,304 permits, 55.3% of the city total.

At the neighborhood level, these ten community plan areas issued the most ADU permits:

And the ten busiest ZIP codes:

Source: City of Los Angeles, LADBS Building Permits open data, permits issued October 1, 2025 to September 30, 2026; LADBS area planning commission and community plan area fields. Dataset refreshed October 25, 2026; queried October 29, 2026.

Wildfire rebuilds. 270 of the permits describe the work as part of a 2025 wildfire rebuild, all of them in Brentwood - Pacific Palisades. They are counted here because they are real ADU permits, but rebuilds run under emergency orders, so they are not a guide to ordinary timelines elsewhere in the city.

How should you read these numbers?

Four limits are worth knowing before you quote any of this.

• Permits, not units. One project can need several permits, for example a supplemental permit to revise plans. That is why the page shows both permits (5,976) and properties (5,470). A permit can also lapse before anything is built.
• The clock includes the owner’s time. Days to permit run from the filing date to the issue date. Time spent answering plan check corrections is inside that number, so a well prepared set of plans can beat the median.
• City of Los Angeles only. Long Beach, Pasadena, Glendale, Torrance and the other cities of Los Angeles County run their own building departments and are not in this data. For county-wide and statewide counts see our California ADU statistics.
• Single-family and two-family lots only. ADUs added to apartment buildings are a different product and are left out.

Check it yourself. The source is the City of Los Angeles LADBS Building Permits open data, published by the Department of Building and Safety. This page counts permits flagged as adding or changing an ADU or Junior ADU, with a permit sub-type of 1 or 2 family dwelling, by issue date.

Using this data. You may quote or reuse this summary with credit and a link to L Square Design & Build, under CC BY 4.0. The underlying permit records come from the City of Los Angeles.

What do the numbers mean if you own a home in Los Angeles?

Three things. First, the process works at volume: roughly 498 ADU permits a month means LADBS plan checkers see projects like yours every day. Second, plan for about 22 weeks of permitting on a detached ADU and about 10 weeks on a conversion, then add construction time. Third, because correction rounds sit inside those numbers, a complete plan set and fast answers to plan check comments are the parts of the wait an owner can control. For the city’s rules see our Los Angeles ADU guide, and for the full schedule from design to move-in see how long an ADU takes.