Orlando's New Construction Permit Timeline: 16, 21, 70 Days

TL;DR

• Orlando trade permits follow a new-build permit by 16, 21 and 70 days.
• The sequence holds outside the master plans, so it is not a builder artifact.
• Remodel anchors break it: mechanical arrives 24 days sooner and far noisier.
• Read the building permit subtype first, then diary the trades forward.

In the City of Orlando, the first plumbing permit on a lot lands a median of 16 days after the new-construction building permit at that same address. Electrical follows at 21 days, mechanical at 70 and gas at 112. Those numbers come from 1,912 Orlando addresses carrying Orlando's own Building Permit - New subtype, not from a handful of subdivisions, and the ordering is stable enough to run a calling calendar off.

We published the narrower version of this finding five days ago, measured inside three master-planned communities. The obvious objection was that production builders file on a schedule because that is what production builders do, and that a sequence measured inside EverBe and Laureate Park says nothing about the rest of the city.

That objection turns out to be wrong. Here is the measurement.

What is Orlando's new construction permit timeline?

Anchor on the first Building Permit - New at an address, then take the first permit of each trade at that same address on or after that date. Across the whole Orlando file, current to September 7, 2026:

Trade	Addresses	Median lag	Middle half of filings
Plumbing	1,422	16 days	6 to 51 days
Electrical	1,476	21 days	8 to 52 days
Mechanical	1,297	70 days	40 to 111 days
Gas	160	112 days	70 to 164 days

Two things in that table matter more than the medians.

The first is the ordering. Plumbing and electrical are effectively simultaneous, roughly three weeks behind the building permit. Mechanical sits ten weeks out. Gas, where it appears at all, is a different quarter of the year. That is a rough-in schedule showing up in an administrative record, which is why it repeats.

The second is the spread. The middle half of mechanical filings covers 71 days. The middle half of plumbing covers 45. A trade with a wide interquartile range needs a longer follow-up cadence, not an earlier call.

Is the sequence just a production builder artifact?

No. Split the same 1,912 new-construction addresses into the three big master plans and everything else, and the two cohorts land within a fortnight of each other on the slowest trade.

Cohort	Addresses (electrical)	Plumbing	Electrical	Mechanical
EverBe, Laureate Park, Meridian Park	676	17 days	22 days	76 days
Rest of Orlando	800	15 days	19 days	63 days

Scattered-lot construction across the rest of the city sequences slightly faster than the production communities, not slower. The gap is two days on plumbing, three on electrical, thirteen on mechanical.

That is the finding worth carrying out of this piece. A trade sequence measured inside a master plan is usually dismissed as the developer's internal schedule leaking into public records. In Orlando it is not. Two builders working two unrelated infill lots in different parts of the city produce the same ordering, at almost the same offsets, as a production phase inside one of the big master plans. The sequence describes how a house gets built and how Florida's trades file, not how one developer runs a program.

Why does the anchor permit change everything?

Because the thing that actually breaks the sequence is not geography. It is the subtype of the building permit you anchored on.

Orlando issues 2,179 Building Permit - New records, 2,621 Building Permit - Alteration and 3,037 Building Permit - Repair. Anchor on a remodel instead of a new build, using the 4,183 addresses that carry an alteration or repair permit and no new-construction permit at all, and the timeline flattens:

Trade	New-build anchor	Remodel anchor	Difference
Electrical	21 days	26 days	5 days later
Plumbing	16 days	27 days	11 days later
Mechanical	70 days	46 days	24 days sooner
Gas	112 days	73 days	39 days sooner

Mechanical is the whole story there. On a new build it is a late-stage trade waiting on a shell. On a remodel it is frequently the reason for the permit, so it arrives early. Look at the same-week share and the shape gets clearer: 17.9% of remodel mechanical permits land within seven days of the anchor, against 5.5% on new construction.

The remodel distribution is also much noisier. Its middle half of mechanical filings runs from day 14 to day 135, nearly twice the width of the new-build range. There is no rough-in schedule holding it together, only a homeowner or a property manager deciding when to start.

So the practical failure mode is precise. Pool the subtypes, get a citywide mechanical median of 74 days, and apply it to a remodel address. You have now scheduled an HVAC call three and a half weeks after the median remodel already filed its mechanical permit.

Which trades actually attach to a new build?

Not all of them, and this is where an optimistic reading of the sequence goes wrong.

Of the 1,912 Orlando addresses carrying a Building Permit - New, 77.2% eventually show an electrical permit at the same address, 74.4% show plumbing and 67.8% show mechanical. Gas reaches 8.4%.

A fifth to a third of new-construction addresses never produce a matching trade record. Sometimes the work is commercial and the trades filed against a master file rather than the site address. Sometimes the address string in the trade record does not normalize to the same value. Sometimes it is genuinely a shell with no fit-out yet.

Gas at 8.4% is the honest one to sit with. Most new Orlando construction is not gas-served, so a gas permit is a genuine signal rather than a routine step. When one appears at a median of 112 days, that is a real and unusual event on that lot.

How do you turn one building permit into a call calendar?

The method is short, and it is the part that transfers to any operator running Orlando territory.

1. Filter to Building Permit - New. Do not accept a pooled building median. The subtype is the single largest determinant of everything downstream.
2. Reduce to one first date per address per permit type. Orlando carries 51,116 permits over 17,934 distinct addresses, so lots hold repeat filings that will drag any average you compute naively.
3. Take the building permit date as day zero on that address.
4. Diary plumbing at day 6 through day 51, electrical at day 8 through day 52, mechanical at day 40 through day 111, gas at day 70 through day 164. Those are the interquartile ranges, and they are better targets than the medians.
5. Re-check the address at each window rather than calling once. On a wide-spread trade like mechanical, one attempt at the median catches a small minority of the filings.

For a mechanical contractor this is the most valuable read in the Orlando file, because HVAC is both the widest window and the latest. A building permit filed today is an addressable mechanical opportunity for most of the following quarter, and the HVAC contractor playbook treats that kind of lead time as the difference between a bid and a referral.

The same logic runs backwards for anyone selling into the early trades. Plumbing at a median of 16 days means the decision was effectively already made when the building permit posted.

What this timeline will not tell you

It will not tell you a permit was issued, only that an application was filed. Orlando's decision date mirrors its application date in our file, so nothing here measures municipal turnaround, and no figure above should be read as a review time.

It will not tell you the trade contractor was chosen at the moment of the building permit. It tells you when the permit was filed, which is usually after selection and sometimes long after.

It will not extend past the city line. All 51,116 records are City of Orlando. Orange County's unincorporated area runs its own permitting outside this file, and the other 66 Florida counties are not in it. The permits per address analysis covers what that boundary does to any citywide count.

And it will not survive being applied to small work. Jobs below the state exemption threshold may never generate a building permit to anchor on, which the sub-$7,500 exemption piece works through in detail.

One more constraint worth naming. Orlando records carry no coordinates and no ZIP field, so normalized_address is the only join key available for this kind of analysis. Get the normalization wrong and the sequence disappears into noise.

How permits.llc fits in

A permit is a signal about the property owner, not the contractor. What the build sequence adds is that the signal is not a single event. It is a schedule, and most of it has not happened yet when the first record posts.

That is a different product from a lead list. Contractors licensed through Florida's Department of Business and Professional Regulation and its Construction Industry Licensing Board file under one code, the 8th Edition (2023) Florida Building Code, on a shared rough-in order. The order is why 1,912 unconnected Orlando addresses agree with each other. It also means the highest-value moment for most trades is weeks after the record everybody else is watching. Ranking which of those forward-dated opportunities deserve a call is what permit lead scoring is for, and the closed-roster problem inside the big communities is covered in Orlando's master-planned clusters.

Two ways in. Download Orlando permit records and run the anchor-and-lag calculation against your own territory, or start from our Florida county coverage to see the shape of the file first. New filings arrive daily through permit alerts.

Most operators treat a building permit as a lead that is already going cold. In Orlando it is closer to a dated invoice for work nobody has ordered yet.