Site Plan Review: What Happens After You Submit

You submitted the drawing. Now nothing is happening, the portal says "in review," and nobody has told you what that means or how long it lasts. This page is the inside of that black box.

One disambiguation first, because it is the reason this term is so confusing to search for.

Two different things are called "site plan review"

The phrase means two genuinely different processes, and most of what you will find online describes the one you are almost certainly not in:

• Discretionary site plan review is a formal land-use process for commercial buildings, subdivisions and multi-family development. It involves a planning department, published criteria, sometimes a planning commission hearing and a public comment period, and it runs in months. This is what a city's "Site Plan Review" web page usually describes, because that page is written for developers.
• Administrative plan review is the desk check your deck, fence, shed, patio or garage application gets. A reviewer opens your drawing, checks it against the zoning table and the submittal checklist, and either approves it or writes comments. No hearing, no neighbors, no discretion. If a rule is met, it is met.

If your project is a backyard structure on an existing single-family lot, you are in the second process. Reading the first one's timeline and getting frightened is one of the more common ways homeowners talk themselves out of pulling a permit.

Who actually reads your drawing

More than one desk usually touches it, which is why review takes days rather than minutes:

• Intake or permit technician. Checks that the package is complete before any real review starts. This is where an application bounces in 24 hours for a missing signature or an absent site plan, which is not the same as being reviewed and rejected.
• Zoning or planning reviewer. The main audience for your site plan. Checks setbacks, lot coverage, height, easements, and whether an accessory structure is allowed where you put it. Most residential comments come from this desk.
• Building plans examiner. Reads the construction drawings rather than the site plan: framing, footings, guardrails, fire separation. They use your site plan mainly to understand what is being built where.
• Specialist reviewers, when triggered. Engineering for grading and drainage on larger paved areas, floodplain review if your parcel is in a mapped flood hazard area, fire for access and hydrant distance on bigger structures, and a historic or design board if your property sits in an overlay district.

Each of these is a queue, and they are often sequential rather than parallel. That is the single biggest reason a two-minute check takes two weeks.

How long site plan review takes

From the review timelines published by the cities behind our state guides, 985 city and project records with a stated turnaround:

The median upper bound is 14 days, and 96% of tracked records land within a month. By project, patios are the slowest of the four we can measure at about 20 days at the median upper bound, because covered patios pull structural review in behind the zoning check; decks, sheds and garages sit around 14 to 15 days.

Two caveats worth holding onto. These are the timelines cities publish, and a published timeline is a target rather than a promise. And the clock in most departments starts at acceptance, not at submission, so a package that sits three days at intake for a missing document has not started its two weeks yet.

Your own city's figure is in the permit cost calculator alongside its fee.

What the reviewer is actually checking

It reads like a short list. It is not. Each line below is several separate checks, and each one has its own way of failing:

• Setback distances to every property line, written as numbers. Not one measurement but one per line the structure faces, plus the separation to any other building where the code regulates it. Each is measured to the nearest projecting point, which on a deck is the bottom step and on a garage is the eave, not the wall you drew.
• A stated scale the drawing actually holds. Reviewers put a scale ruler on the page. A plan labeled 1 inch = 20 feet has to measure that way everywhere on the sheet, not only where you started.
• Every existing structure, not just the new one. House, garage, shed, driveway, walkways, an existing patio or deck. Lot coverage is cumulative and the reviewer recalculates it from what you drew, so a forgotten driveway makes the total wrong rather than incomplete.
• The project's own dimensions and area, matching the figures on your application form. A drawing that disagrees with the form is a correction on its own, even when both numbers are legal.
• Easements of record, with the project clear of them. These live on your recorded plat, not in the yard, and nothing marks them on the ground. This is the check that forces a redesign rather than a redraw.
• The basics block: north arrow, stated scale, parcel number or address, adjacent street names. Plans missing these are sometimes returned before anyone reads the drawing at all.
• The submission format: file type, sheet size, flattening. A correct drawing in the wrong format still bounces at intake, before review has started.

The real difficulty is not the list. It is that the legally meaningful content, your boundary dimensions and your easements, does not exist anywhere on your property. It has to be pulled from county records and reconciled against what the aerial shows, and a few feet of error in that step is exactly the size of the setback being measured.

Our drafters run a longer version of this before any plan leaves the shop. The pre-submission checklist publishes the reader's version, seven checks you can hold any drawing to, ours or your own. What happens internally goes further: the parcel outline is reconciled against the dimensions on your recorded plat rather than trusted from GIS alone, easements are drawn from the recorded documents rather than from what is visible on the ground, every setback is dimensioned from the nearest projecting point, and the scale is verified across the whole sheet rather than assumed from the software. All seven checks arrive done, the submission format included, so the plan is ready to upload rather than ready to reformat.

That is the difference between a drawing that looks right and one that survives a reviewer, and it is why 98% of the plans we deliver clear review with no correction notice at all, with revisions free until your building department accepts the drawing.

What comes back, and what it means

Review ends in one of three outcomes:

1. Approved. The permit is issued, usually with conditions printed on it and an inspection schedule attached.
2. Approved with corrections, or comments to address. A numbered list of what to change. Your application stays alive, you fix the items, and you resubmit into a recheck queue that normally moves faster than the first review because only the flagged items get re-read.
3. Denied. Rare on residential accessory structures, and it means the project conflicts with a rule that redrawing cannot fix, almost always a zoning conflict rather than a drafting problem.

Outcome 2 is by far the most common non-approval, and homeowners routinely read it as outcome 3. If a letter has landed and you are not sure which one you got, what to do when a building permit is rejected reads the letter with you.

Five things that make review go faster

1. Submit a complete package the first time. Intake bounces cost days and do not start the review clock.
2. Label every setback with a number. The most common single comment, and entirely preventable.
3. Pull your recorded plat before you draw. Easements are invisible in the yard and are the correction most likely to force a redesign rather than a redraw.
4. Match the submission format. Many departments want a single flattened PDF at a stated sheet size. A drawing that is correct but formatted wrong can still bounce at intake.
5. Answer comments completely and in one pass. Partial responses guarantee another cycle, and some departments start billing hourly after the second or third review.

Across everything we deliver, 98% of plans clear review with no correction notice at all, and the ones that do come back are typically accepted within days of the fix.

If you would rather not gamble on it

A permit-ready site plan is $89 to $259, delivered in 24 to 48 hours, drawn to scale from county GIS records and satellite imagery with setbacks dimensioned, existing structures shown and easements of record included. If a reviewer does comment on it, revisions are free until your building department accepts the drawing.

Drawing it yourself is a legitimate route for a simple lot. The six-step walkthrough covers the method, the blank site plan template gives you a permit-formatted sheet to work on, and the complete guide covers every element in more depth.