Santa Monica building permits

Verified

Department contacts, adopted codes, permit types, fees, and gotchas for Santa Monica, California.

Last verified 2026-09-21 · Source · Embed this page’s badge · Version history

Building department

Address: The Permit Services Center is at "1685 Main Street, South Entrance, access from Olympic Dr., Santa Monica, CA 90401". The entrance instruction is part of the published address, not an aside - the counter is not reached from the Main Street frontage.
Phone: NOT PUBLISHED on the pages read for this record. Neither the Permit Services Center page nor the plan review page carries a telephone number for Building and Safety; the published route in is the appointment booking address below.
Email: NOT ESTABLISHED. A seismic-specific address was reported by a search summary but did not appear on either city page read directly for this record, so it is not asserted here. Treat the counter and the booking system as the published channels.
Office hours: A FOUR-DAY COUNTER WEEK, SEVEN HOURS A DAY: "The Permit Services Center is open 8:00 a.m. - 3:00 p.m. Monday through Thursday" - twenty-eight hours a week, with the building closed to permit business on Fridays. Appointments are booked at checkin.smgov.net.
Website: Official site

Codes adopted

California publishes its building standards as Title 24, adopted by state agencies and republished on a three-year cycle. A city or county may change those standards only after its governing body makes an express finding that the change is reasonably necessary because of local climatic, geological, or topographical conditions, and no change becomes operative until the finding and the change have been filed with the California Building Standards Commission.

THE PLAN REVIEW PAGE NAMES ONE EDITION AND ITS EFFECTIVE DATE AND NOTHING ELSE: applications are evaluated under the "2025 California Standards Code (Title 24), effective January 1, 2026". Title 24 is the container for the whole California suite - Building, Residential, Electrical, Mechanical, Plumbing, Energy, Green Building and the rest - so this is an edition statement rather than a code-by-code list.
NO CODE-BY-CODE ENUMERATION AND NO LOCAL AMENDMENT LIST WAS FOUND ON THE PAGES READ. Santa Monica publishes the edition year rather than a chapter-by-chapter adoption list, so what it adds locally on top of Title 24 is not established from the pages read for this record.
Health and Safety Code 18938(b) provides that building standards in the California Building Standards Code apply to all occupancies throughout the state, so the 2025 Title 24 suite is the floor in Santa Monica regardless of what the city adds on top.

Permit types & fees

Building Permit
Santa Monica says plainly that its plan review is running late, publishes no number to be late against, and runs its permit counter four days a week. A separate seismic programme reaches over two thousand buildings.
See fee schedule

Santa Monica's permit history isn't searchable here yet

This page covers what the permit requires. What we don't have for Santa Monica yet is the record of permits actually issued — the history you'd search by street address. That is a gap in our coverage, not a statement about any particular property.

Your email, and the place — never an address. We only use it to tell you when Santa Monica lands. Privacy.

Tips & gotchas

THE CITY ADMITS IT IS LATE AND GIVES YOU NOTHING TO MEASURE THE LATENESS AGAINST. "Plan review timelines are currently delayed beyond the estimated timeframes" is a genuinely helpful thing for a city to publish, but no first-review or recheck figure appears anywhere on the pages read, so the delay is announced relative to an estimate the reader has never been shown.
AND THAT NOTICE CARRIES NO DATE AT ALL. No posting date, no last-reviewed date, no expiry. "Currently" is doing all the work and cannot be aged. A dateless warning is indistinguishable from a stale one, and this page gives independent reason to think its time-sensitive content is not swept - see the next item.
THE PERMIT SERVICES CENTER PAGE IS CARRYING AN EARLY-CLOSURE NOTICE FOR A DAY THAT HAS ALREADY GONE. Verbatim: "Please note that the following services will close at 2 p.m. on Thursday September 17, 2026: Permit Specialist, Building and Safety, and City Planning." As at 21 September 2026 that Thursday was four days in the past. The notice is correct in its details - 17 September 2026 was indeed a Thursday - it has simply outlived its occasion and nobody has taken it down.
A FOUR-DAY, TWENTY-EIGHT-HOUR COUNTER WEEK. 8:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. Monday through Thursday, no Friday service. A four-day counter is not itself unusual - 171 of the 691 records in this corpus describe a Monday-to-Thursday week, measured 2026-09-21 - but combined with a plan review the city says is already delayed, it is worth arriving early in the week rather than late.
THE ADDRESS CONTAINS A ROUTING INSTRUCTION AND IT IS PART OF THE ADDRESS: "1685 Main Street, South Entrance, access from Olympic Dr." Navigating to the Main Street frontage does not get you to the counter.
"SUCH AS" IS DOING REAL WORK IN THE SAME-DAY REVIEW LINE. Reroofs, mechanical installations and facade remodels or repairs are given as examples, not as the eligible set, and no enumerated list appears on the page. A scope that resembles one of the three is not thereby eligible.
PAYMENT IS PART OF COMPLETENESS, NOT A STEP AFTER IT: "submittals must be complete with all required supporting documentation and fee payments at the time of submission." An application lodged without payment has not been lodged.
OVER TWO THOUSAND BUILDINGS SIT INSIDE A MANDATORY SEISMIC PROGRAMME, across five construction types, and affected owners are served an "Order to Structurally Analyze Potentially Seismically Vulnerable Building". For a commercial or multi-family property this is the first thing to establish, because a retrofit obligation reshapes any other permit you were planning.
TWO OF THE CITY'S OWN PAGES COULD NOT BE READ FOR THIS RECORD AND THAT IS A STATEMENT ABOUT THE ATTEMPT, NOT ABOUT SANTA MONICA. The Building Permit Application Types page and the How to Comply with the Seismic Retrofit Program explainer both returned bot-detection responses. Anything those pages carry - the permit type list, the retrofit deadlines, who may perform a structural analysis - is UNREAD here, not absent. Do not read the silences in this record as the city publishing nothing.
A VENDOR SUMMARY AND THE CITY DISAGREED ON THE SIZE OF THE SEISMIC PROGRAMME, and the city is the one quoted here. Third-party retrofit-engineering pages put the figure near 1,700 buildings; the city's own page says "Over 2,000". Retrofit vendors have a commercial interest in the number and the city does not, so where they differ the city's page is what this record carries.
NO TELEPHONE NUMBER FOR BUILDING AND SAFETY APPEARED ON EITHER PAGE READ, AND THAT IS GENUINELY RARE: 688 of the 691 records in this corpus carry at least one telephone number for the permitting department, measured 2026-09-21, and Santa Monica is one of the three that do not. The published way in is the counter and the checkin.smgov.net booking system, so plan on booking rather than ringing ahead.