Plan check resubmittals: who pays for the second, third and fourth round of comments?

What the proposal can say before the first submittal

The cheapest place to settle who pays is the proposal. A line that names what the fee covers — for example, responses to one round of plan-review comments per permit set, with later rounds caused by owner changes or new code interpretations billed hourly — gives the project manager something to point at when the third letter arrives. The number of rounds is the firm’s choice; the point is that a number exists.

In California, a procedure for extra work is a contract requirement in its own right. Business and Professions Code section 5536.22(a)(5) requires an architect’s written contract to include “a description of the procedure that the architect and the client will use to accommodate additional services and contract changes,” and section 6749(a)(4) requires engineers’ contracts to describe the procedure for additional services, each with its listed exemptions. A plan-check line is one concrete piece of that procedure.

The client’s own permit fees are a separate bill. The City of Long Beach, for example, says on its plan review page that revisions made to address its plan reviewers’ comments before approval are not charged additional plan review fees, while revisions made for other reasons may be. The applicant pays the city; the firm’s fee is a different agreement. Confusing the two in a client conversation helps nobody.

The clocks: statutes that time both sides of the counter

Two states show how much a resubmittal can depend on dates. In Florida, section 553.792 sets the local government’s review deadlines for many building permits. Under subsection (1)(f), a local agency that finds an application fails to satisfy the Florida Building Code can avoid the statute’s fee reductions by sending written notice, within those deadlines, that states the reasons. The notice must also tell the applicant it has 10 business days to submit revisions, and that failure to correct the application within 10 business days will result in a denial. Under (1)(g), once revisions arrive within that window, the agency has 10 business days to approve or deny unless the applicant agrees in writing to more time.

In California, Government Code section 65913.3 applies to postentitlement phase permits — building permits among them — for housing development projects. After an application is deemed complete, the agency must either approve it or, if it is not compliant, “return in writing a full set of comments to the applicant with a comprehensive request for revisions,” within 30 business days for projects of 25 units or fewer and 60 business days for 26 or more, with exceptions written into the section.

For the firm, these statutes are not a legal strategy; they are calendar entries. A Florida comment letter starts a ten-business-day response clock that the project manager has to see on the day it arrives. A California housing project’s comment letters can be checked for dates and completeness against the statute. Whether a particular letter meets either statute is a question for the firm’s or the client’s attorney.

Count the rounds: comment letters per permit set, and how many were billed

Before rewriting proposals, find out what the last year of permits actually cost. The count needs the permit tracker or the jurisdictions’ portal history, the comment letters, time entries and invoices for the projects that went through plan review in the last twelve months.

• One row per permit set: project, jurisdiction, first submittal date, and the date of each comment letter and each resubmittal.
• For each round, the number of comments, and how many were sorted into each cause: the firm’s gap, a reviewer’s new reading or code change, the client’s change or missing information.
• The hours coded to the project between the first comment letter and the permit, by discipline — including consultant sheets answered by the firm’s own engineers or passed to outside consultants.
• Whether any round beyond the first produced an additional-services request, the date it went out and the amount billed.
• Days from each comment letter to the resubmittal, against any statutory or contractual response window.

Illustrative example: a firm took 20 permit sets through review in a year. Twelve were approved after one round of comments. Eight needed two to four rounds, with about 300 hours of work after the first round. Sorted by cause, about a third of those hours traced to the firm’s own coordination gaps, and the rest to reviewer reinterpretations and owner changes — none of it billed. At a hypothetical $140 an hour, the billable share is about $28,000. Replace every number with the firm’s own. If the time entries cannot separate permit-response hours from construction-documents hours, that is the first finding.

A time code and a sorting rule that make the count automatic

Two small changes turn a once-a-year count into a weekly habit. The first is a time code — “Permit comments, round 2,” “round 3” and so on — so the hours stop disappearing into the construction-documents phase. The second is a sorting rule: whoever logs a comment letter tags each comment with its cause on the day it arrives, before anyone starts drawing.

Then the money follows the tag. Comments tagged as the firm’s own gap are fixed and counted, and the count goes to whoever runs quality control, because it is the cheapest feedback a firm can get. Comments tagged as a reviewer’s new reading or a client change go to the principal who signed the agreement, with an hours estimate, so the notice and the written request go out before the work rather than after it. Engineering consultants’ comments follow the same rule under their own agreements: a structural or MEP firm working for the architect has its own scope and its own rounds to count.

None of this needs new software. A column in the permit tracker, a time code and a named person do the work.

When not to hire anyone — and when to call an attorney

If a year of permits produced a handful of second rounds, nobody needs a consultant. Add the time code, add the proposal line, and recount after the next few permits. A firm that works in one jurisdiction with one reviewer it knows well may already settle these in a phone call.

Call the firm’s attorney rather than a consultant when there is a live dispute — a client refusing to pay for rounds caused by its own program change, an agreement that names no procedure for extra work in a state that requires one, or a question about whether a city met a statutory deadline. We give no legal advice and read no agreement for its legal effect.

If plan-check rounds are one of several places fee slips between the signed agreement and the cleared payment — next to additional services drawn on a verbal yes, construction administration run past its fee and invoices paid months late — that is where an architecture & engineering business consultant earns a fee, and it is what the Revenue Review counts. It takes two weeks, with read-only access to agreements, the permit tracker, time entries, invoices and the aging; drawings and models stay where they are. It ends in a written report with a monthly dollar figure wherever the records support one, a ranked list of fixes and a 90-day plan. We are not architects or engineers, and there is no published A/E client case study on this site yet. The next step is a free 20-minute call that says plainly when the arithmetic does not justify the fee.