We've been pulling restaurant permits in Los Angeles since 2019. LA DBS's first-review timeline for restaurant tenant improvements has historically been one of the slowest in our 50-state coverage — averaging 64 business days in our 2025 data set, with first-cycle clears under a month being rare enough that we treated them as outliers.
That math shifted on January 1, 2026. California Assembly Bill 671 went into effect, and most of the restaurant operators we've talked with in the months since — including two new clients walking properties in Eagle Rock and Glassell Park — have never heard of it.
What the bill actually does
AB 671 makes two material changes to the way California building departments process restaurant tenant-improvement applications:
"Local building departments must approve or deny restaurant tenant improvement permit applications within 20 business days. If they fail to respond within this timeframe, the application will be automatically approved for permitting purposes, provided that the required documents and fees have been submitted." — Santa Barbara South Coast Chamber summary of AB 671.
That's the first change: a hard statutory deadline with auto-approval as the consequence. If LA DBS sits on your application for 21 business days without issuing approval, denial, or a correction list, your permit deems approved. On a resubmittal, the clock is even tighter — 10 business days.
The second change is the Qualified Professional Certifier pathway. AB 671 lets a licensed architect or engineer with at least five years of commercial design or plan-review experience and at least $2M of professional liability insurance certify, themselves, that the restaurant TI plans comply with applicable building, health, and safety codes. The QPC certification substitutes for full conventional plan check. The building department still issues the permit, but it doesn't re-do the technical review.
Why this is the kind of rule change operators miss
Building-code legislation isn't beat-covered by restaurant trade press. The story lives on the LA County building-department forums, in a few architectural-trade publications, and in the construction-law substack ecosystem. The actual restaurant-operator publications cover labor cost, menu trends, alcohol licensing — not section-by-section state building law.
The result: every operator we've walked a space with in 2026 so far has been planning their build-out budget against the old LA DBS timeline. They're padding 8-12 weeks for plan check. They could be planning for 3-4.
What changes in practice
For a typical restaurant TI in LA County under AB 671, our updated working assumption is:
- First review: 20 business days maximum. Realistically LA DBS will return corrections inside the window — they're not going to risk an auto-approval — but the corrections will land faster than they used to. The change isn't just speed; it's predictability.
- Resubmittal: 10 business days maximum. Same logic. If you have a clean response document, you're cleared on the same scale as a Phoenix DSD second cycle, which historically clears in 5-7 days.
- QPC pathway: skip the conventional plan-check entirely. The applicant pays the QPC's fee (typically $4-$8K for a mid-size restaurant TI, based on the rates we've seen circulating in early-2026 chatter) and the building department issues the permit on the QPC's certification. We expect this to drop total permit timeline to 5-8 business days for properties where the QPC pathway is well-suited.
Put differently: a restaurant TI in LA County in 2026 should clear in 25-35 business days on the conventional path, or 5-10 days on the QPC path. That's the same range as Phoenix DSD or Mesa, two of the fastest markets in our coverage. California is no longer the slowest.
The catch: what the QPC pathway is good for, and what it isn't
The QPC is an optional pathway. Operators we've talked to are excited about it but should understand the tradeoff:
The QPC takes on professional liability for code compliance. Their insurance ($2M minimum per occurrence) backs that. So they will be conservative — they're going to push back on edge-case design choices that a conventional building-department reviewer might accept after a quick conversation.
In practice that means the QPC pathway is best for restaurant TIs that look like the median — same occupancy class as the previous tenant, no exterior changes, hood schedule that fits standard NFPA 96 patterns. Pizza ovens, downdraft Korean BBQ tables, solid-fuel smokers, and any change of occupancy classification are projects where a QPC is more likely to refuse certification or charge a premium, because the liability exposure rises.
If your concept is on our restaurant conversion field-guide library under one of the high-MEP cuisines — wok, BBQ, Mediterranean, Indian, pizza — assume conventional plan check is still the right path. The 20-day deadline still helps you; you just don't get the additional QPC speedup.
For the lower-MEP cuisines — coffee, deli, sushi, juice/boba — the QPC pathway is potentially a major time savings. If you're walking those spaces in California now, the QPC question goes on the pre-lease checklist.
What we're doing about it on our end
Two things changed in our LA workflow on the AB 671 effective date:
- Every California restaurant TI proposal now includes a line item for QPC pathway evaluation. If we think the project is QPC-eligible, we say so on the kickoff call, and we coordinate the QPC engagement separately if the operator chooses that path.
- Our LA permit-timeline assumptions in client communications dropped from 60-90 days to 25-40 days for conventional and 5-10 for QPC.
What to do if you're looking at a California restaurant space right now
If you're under lease or pre-lease in California for a restaurant build-out, three things are worth doing this week:
- Confirm with your designer whether your project qualifies for the QPC pathway under your specific cuisine + AHJ. The pathway is statutory but the AHJ implementation guidance is still landing.
- Ask your landlord whether the 20-day deadline shifts any of the lease's milestone dates. Most leases were written when LA plan check was 60+ days; the timeline compression has cascading effects on rent commencement, TI allowance draws, and contractor mobilization.
- If you're between two California cities (say LA and San Diego), the AB 671 deadline applies to both, so the AHJ-speed comparison flattens. That changes the calculus on where to open.
AB 671 is the largest single change to California restaurant permitting in a decade. Most operators we've talked to in May 2026 haven't heard of it. The ones who have are using the time to negotiate harder TI allowance from landlords who were budgeting on the old timeline. The state law caught up; the lease language has not.
We do California restaurant TI work in LA, San Francisco, San Diego, Oakland, and Sacramento. If you have a space and want a written assessment of whether the QPC pathway fits — no obligation, no follow-up — send the address through /contact. We'll send back the conventional-vs-QPC math the same day.
The full California-specific restaurant-conversion landing page lives at /locations/california/restaurant-conversion. The 20-cuisine library is at /guides/restaurant-conversion. And the technical-term glossary covers the underlying code references (NFPA 96, IECC, plan check) for anyone newer to restaurant TI vocabulary.