Who Pulls the Permit, and What the Inspector Checks

California requires a permit from the local building official before a building is built, enlarged, altered, repaired or demolished, and the code requirements vary from one city to the next. Los Angeles County issues a permit only to a contractor with the right license, to the property owner in certain cases, or to someone authorized to act for one of them.

When the owner signs the permit application as an owner-builder, the State's contractor board is plain about what follows: the owner takes full responsibility for every phase of the project and its integrity. That can mean state and federal taxes, workers' compensation insurance and other legal liabilities, and a worker hurt on the property can become a claim against the owner's homeowner's insurance. The board's advice: unless you are very experienced in construction, leave these matters to your licensed contractor.

The address decides which office reviews your plans.

Inside the City of Los Angeles, the Department of Building and Safety (LADBS) reviews plans and approves permits. Simple projects that need no plan check can get an express permit online. Simple projects that do need plan check can be approved over the counter. Other plans go in through ePlanLA, the City's online plan review. Palisades fire rebuilds run through LADBS, which keeps a dedicated permitting and inspection support center at 16925 Marquez Avenue in Pacific Palisades. Brentwood, Bel Air, Hollywood, Silver Lake and the other neighborhoods on our service areas pages inside the City follow this path.

In unincorporated Los Angeles County, and in the cities that contract with the County, the permit comes from the Public Works Building and Safety district office that serves the address. Altadena is an unincorporated community of the County, so an Eaton fire rebuild there is a County permit; the County opened the Altadena One-Stop Permit Center at 464 West Woodbury Road, Suite 210, Altadena, with the departments that approve rebuilding plans under one roof. Simple work that needs no plan check can be issued as an express permit. Inspection requests for unincorporated County projects go in online; the County no longer takes them by phone or voicemail.

Your own city. Beverly Hills, Santa Monica, Malibu, West Hollywood and Culver City are their own cities and review their own permits. West Hollywood's Building and Safety Division, for one, issues the building permit for a kitchen remodel and the trade permits ride on it. The Beverly Hills and Malibu pages on this site walk through those two offices; the West Hollywood kitchen page covers that city's remodel path.

A County permit has a clock on it. It expires if work has not started within 12 months of issue, or if work stops for more than 180 days at any point after it starts. On a stalled job, that date matters; see when a rebuild stalls.

Los Angeles County lists the work that generally needs one: new buildings, additions, accessory dwelling unit conversions, garage conversions, kitchen remodels, stucco, window and door changeouts, decks, patios, fences over six feet, fireplaces, pools, retaining walls, new or replaced electrical, mechanical and plumbing work, and grading. Some minor repairs may not need a permit. The City of Los Angeles reviews the same kinds of work under its own code.

I answer the permit question at the first walk, and the answer goes into the written scope.

Permitted work is not approved until an inspector has seen it and accepted it. Inspections come in order, and no work may go past the point of each one until the inspector signs off. Before any work is covered or concealed, it gets inspected.

In the City of Los Angeles, the common inspection items include foundation excavations, concrete work, wood framing, shear wall nailing, roof nailing, ventilation equipment, plumbing and electrical. A completed project gets a final inspection and approval.

On a bathroom, that means a rough inspection after the plumbing and electrical go in and before the walls close, then a final. On an addition, it means foundation, framing, rough trades and final. I hold each stage until the matching inspection passes, and the next stage starts after. How long each job takes shows where those inspections fall.

I will not promise a permit issue date. That calendar belongs to the agency, and anyone quoting you a firm permit date is guessing. What I control is the submittal: complete, so nothing stalls on our side. The five checks before you commit to a rebuild contractor include reading the permit record yourself.

At close-out you get the permit record with the warranty and the full documentation package. Permitted square footage becomes part of the property record, which matters at appraisal and at resale. How a job runs, step by step, shows where the permit sits in the whole process.