A third of Sacramento County's ADU permits took over a year

Four backyard homes got building permits this spring on the 7500 block of Winding Way in Fair Oaks. All four are three-bedroom units with their own garages. One of them, at 7537 Winding Way, was filed with Sacramento County in November 2023. Its permit came out June 18, 2026. That is 945 days.

In Fair Oaks, where the typical home was worth about $666,700 in October 2026 according to Houseberry data, a backyard unit is one of the few ways a homeowner can add a home without buying another lot. So the wait matters.

Three of those four count toward a number the county does not put in a press release. From Jan. 1 through Nov. 4, Sacramento County issued 127 permits coded as accessory dwelling units in its unincorporated area, by our count of the county's permit records. By the same date it issued 113 in 2023, 110 in 2024 and 121 in 2025.

The count barely moves. The wait is the story. This year the county finally pushed out a pile of files that had been sitting since 2022, and the ADUs filed in 2026 are clearing far faster than anything filed the year before.

The old files came out first

Sort the 127 permits by the year they were filed and the year splits into three classes.

The 22 oldest files, from 2022 through 2024, waited a median of 745 days. That is just over two years. The 57 filed in 2025 took a median of 272 days, about nine months. The 48 filed this year and already permitted took 98.

The 2025 class has an obvious suspect. The county took its permit portal offline from March 15 to 19, 2025 to upgrade its Accela system, promising applicants reviewer names, estimated completion dates and one consolidated letter of comments. The county's data also shows 242 older ADU-related records stamped issued on March 15, 2025, the first day of the outage. We read that as a records conversion and left those 242 out of every count here, including the 2025 comparison.

The 98-day figure needs one warning. It only counts this year's filings that already have a permit. The slow ones are still in review, so the true number for the 2026 class will climb before it settles.

Our clock also starts at the application and stops at the permit, which means it includes the weeks an owner spends redrawing plans after a correction letter. State law runs a different clock. Under SB 543, in effect since Jan. 1, 2026, a county has 15 business days to say whether an ADU application is complete and 60 days to approve or deny a complete one, as Bay Legal summarizes it. The permit records cannot tell us whether the county missed that deadline on any file. They do tell an owner what the whole trip took.

Here is our view.

A 98-day ADU permit is a good number for a county of this size, and it should be the one Sacramento County publishes and holds itself to every quarter. The two-year files were a backlog. Owners deciding whether to start next spring deserve to see the median before they pay an architect.

Three older suburbs pull in almost half

Arden-Arcade, Fair Oaks and Carmichael account for 59 of the 127 permits, or 46 percent. Arden-Arcade led with 25 across its three ZIP codes, 95821, 95825 and 95864. Fair Oaks (95628) had 18 and Carmichael (95608) had 16. These are the county's postwar ranch-house suburbs, with the deep lots and wide side yards that make a detached unit easy to place.

The value on a permit is the construction value the county uses to set fees, not a contractor's bid. It still shows how big the projects are relative to the homes they sit behind. Here it is against October 2026 typical home prices for the four communities where Houseberry tracks them. Fair Oaks permits ran from a 500-square-foot cottage on Deseret Avenue to a 1,200-square-foot unit on Pepperbrush Court.

Home prices come from Houseberry's 12-month price history for Carmichael, Fair Oaks, Orangevale and Antelope. By Houseberry's analysis, the median Fair Oaks ADU permit carries a value equal to 39 percent of the typical Fair Oaks home. In Orangevale it is a quarter.

Fair Oaks runs high because the projects are bigger. Winding Way is the pattern: 1,000- and 1,200-square-foot units with attached garages, on lots big enough to hold them. In Carmichael and Orangevale the typical permit is a smaller cottage. None of Carmichael's 10 scored neighborhoods reaches 4 out of 5 overall on Houseberry's Carmichael ranking, where Fair Oaks Boulevard and San Juan Avenue leads at 3.3, so a $150,000 backyard unit is often the biggest single upgrade a lot there will ever get.

The free plans did not skip the line

The county's answer to slow ADU permits was the Shelf Ready program: five plan sets in four sizes, from a 460-square-foot studio to the 1,184-square-foot, three-bedroom Magnolia, paid for with a state planning grant and already checked against the building code. The owner submits a site plan and picks a model.

It worked for some people. In February 2025 the county quoted Rick Field, the second customer, saying he had his permit "within about a week or two" of finishing his site plan.

We searched the permit descriptions and found at least 65 applications since 2024 that name a Shelf Ready model. Eleven of those got permits in 2026. Their median wait was 154 days. Faster than the 233-day median for everything, and still five months.

The plans are pre-approved. The lot is not. Setbacks, fire separation, sewer and water hookups, a separate fire district review and, for the three larger models, a solar permit all still ride on the site. Some of the delay sits with owners, too. Eight of the 65 Shelf Ready files currently show "Resubmittal Required," which means the county is waiting on the applicant, not the other way around.

Size matters for cost as well as fit. The county charges impact fees on ADUs over 750 square feet, so the 460-square-foot Laurel and Willow avoid them and the three bigger models do not. State law draws that 750-foot line, and our guide to California's 2026 ADU rules covers the rest of what it lets an owner build.

What to do with the numbers

If you are buying in Fair Oaks, Carmichael or Orangevale with a backyard unit in mind, budget three to six months for the permit on a clean file, more if the lot is tight or the design is custom. Ask the county for its completeness letter in writing, since SB 543 now puts a 15-business-day clock on it. And if a listing advertises an ADU, look up the permit number on the county portal before you count the rent.

We used the same county records to track home battery permits this year, and that count doubled. ADUs did not. A battery is a day's install. A backyard home is a year of someone's savings and evenings. If the 98-day pace holds through the 2026 filings still in review, Sacramento County will have a real case that it fixed the problem. Before you choose the lot, see how all 12 neighborhoods score on Houseberry's Fair Oaks ranking, from Lake Natoma Heights at the top to the streets around Winding Way.

Sources

• Sacramento County building permit records, queried Nov. 4, 2026. We counted permits with activity code 101A, "Secondary Residential Dwelling Unit," issued Jan. 1 through Nov. 4 of each year, and excluded 242 records stamped issued on March 15, 2025.
• Sacramento County, "A Better Building Permit Experience Is On the Way," Feb. 28, 2025.
• Sacramento County, "Our Shelf Ready ADU Plans Are a Hit with Residents," Feb. 13, 2025.
• Sacramento County Shelf Ready ADU program.
• Bay Legal, California ADU permit timelines in 2026 and SB 543.
• Houseberry 12-month price histories and neighborhood rankings for Fair Oaks, Carmichael, Orangevale and Antelope, October 2026.