Huntington Beach building permits

Tips & gotchas

• THE DEMOLITION PERMIT IS A PREREQUISITE, NOT A PARALLEL TASK: "A demolition permit for the existing building is required on a separate permit prior to the new construction permit issuance." On a teardown-and-rebuild that ordering sits on the critical path.
• A POOL PERMIT DOES NOT COVER THE FENCE. "Walls and fencing are required to be on separate permits" - which matters because the enclosure is the part that is legally required around the pool.
• GETTING AN ADDRESS IS ITS OWN PLANNING APPLICATION, listed as a step for both residential combination records and commercial projects. On a new build this is easy to discover late.
• THE FEE CALCULATOR EXCLUDES THE TRADES. "The total fee calculated is for Building permit only and does not include Plumbing, Mechanical, Electrical permit fees or any other department's fees", and developmental impact fees are separate again. The city also states the figure is "an approximation ... subject to change without notice".
• NO COUNTER HOURS ARE PUBLISHED ANYWHERE THIS RECORD COULD FIND. Neither the Permit Center page nor the issuance process page states hours, days, or whether an appointment is needed. That is unusual in this corpus and it is recorded as absent rather than guessed - phone 714-536-5271 before travelling.
• THE PERMIT CENTER ADDRESS IS PermitCenter@surfcity-hb.org, AND IT IS OBFUSCATED ON THE PAGE RATHER THAN ABSENT. The city renders its addresses through Cloudflare email protection, so a reader - and a naive scrape - sees only a placeholder where the address should be, and the page carries no mailto link. The real address is encoded in the markup and recoverable. An earlier version of this record reported the address as NOT PUBLISHED on exactly that evidence; that was wrong, and the correction is recorded here rather than made silently.
• AND THE CORRECTION SAYS SOMETHING ABOUT THE EARLIER READ, NOT ONLY ABOUT THE ADDRESS. The first pass over this page recorded an email as NOT PUBLISHED and recorded nothing at all about the phishing warning, the 3% card fee, or the void deadline for incomplete applications - all of which sit in the same region of the same page. The record it produced looked complete and was not. Treat the rest of this record as read to the depth described in each field: where a field says NOT PUBLISHED on the pages read, that is a statement about the reading as much as about the city.
• THE CITY PUBLISHES A PHISHING WARNING NAMING THE FRAUDULENT ADDRESS, and it is aimed precisely at people with live permit applications: "The City of Huntington Beach has recently been made aware of a phishing scam targeting applicants who have projects pending before the Planning Division/Commission and Permit Center. In this scheme, scammers pretend to be City officials requesting payments for their projects. So far, these emails have been originating from the email address Planning.CityOfHuntingtonBeachca@usa.com." The city adds that "Official City emails will only come from an @surfcity-hb.org email address", that online payments are made only through its own portal, and that "We will never ask you to wire money to a bank account unsolicited." It states that victims have been identified nationwide and links an FBI bulletin.
• AND THE WARNING NAMES PUBLIC RECORDS AS THE SCAM'S RAW MATERIAL: "The scammers use project information that is publicly available to make the scam look more legitimate." Anyone working from published permit data - including this corpus - should read that sentence as describing the same source they are using. The city's stated defence is the channel, not the information: verify any payment request against the sender domain and the official portal, and contact "your assigned case planner or permit technician directly using the contact information previously provided."
• A CODE TRANSITION WITH A HARD VOID DATE THAT HAS NOW PASSED. The city published: "The new 2025 California Building Standards Code went into effect on January 1, 2026. The 2022 California Building Standards Code remains in effect and is applicable to all plans submitted prior to January 1, 2026", followed by "Applications that remain incomplete after March 31, 2026, will be voided. To move forward with the project, a new application and plans stating the 2025 California Building Standards Code must be submitted." Read on 2026-09-19, that deadline is nearly six months past, so an application left incomplete through it has already been voided and needs re-filing to the 2025 code rather than the 2022 code it was drawn to.
• THE CITY'S SITE USES TWO SPELLINGS OF THE SAME PATH AND THEY ARE NOT FULLY INTERCHANGEABLE. Both building_inspection and building___inspection (three underscores) appear in its own links. Most pages answer on either - the permit center index and the fee calculator both do - but permit_issuance_process.php answers ONLY on the three-underscore form and 404s on the single-underscore one. If a link fails, try the other spelling before concluding the page is gone.
• OLDER building_safety LINKS LEAVE THE CITY'S DOMAIN. A building_safety URL returns a 302 to cms3.revize.com, the content-management vendor's host, rather than to a huntingtonbeachca.gov page. Those paths are legacy; the current ones live under community_development.