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Ask three people how long Gateway 2 takes and you will get three answers, all of them technically correct, because there are three different sets of numbers in circulation and almost nobody distinguishes them.
That matters commercially, because a contractor pricing to the statutory target and a client programming to the published median are twenty weeks apart, and somebody is going to pay for the difference.
The three sets of numbers
The statutory targets. Set by Regulation 41 of the Building (Higher-Risk Buildings Procedures) (England) Regulations 2023: 12 weeks for new higher-risk buildings, 8 weeks for work to existing ones. This is what the law says.
The regulator’s own targets. The Building Safety Regulator’s strategic plan for 2026-27, published on 31 March 2026, commits to responding to non-complex Gateway 2 applications in 18 weeks or less and non-complex remediation applications in 12 weeks or less by March 2027, with a 65% approval rate on both. Note that the regulator’s own target for new build is 50% longer than the statutory one.
The actual published medians, from the BSR’s own data for May to July 2026, released on 12 August:
| Category | Live cases | Approval rate | Median time to approve |
|---|---|---|---|
| New build and conversions | 131 | 91% | 22 weeks |
| Remediation of existing HRBs | 330 | 85% | 34 weeks |
| HRB internal works | 981 | 77% | 32 weeks |
| NHS | 36 | 84% | 24 weeks |
| Gateway 3 | 127 | 72% | 16 weeks |
Total Gateway 2 applications in progress: 1,547.
So: statutory 12, regulator’s target 18, actual 22. And on remediation, statutory 8, target 12, actual 34.
The direction of travel is genuinely good
It is worth being fair about this, because the regulator has been improving faster than its reputation suggests.
The legacy new-build backlog fell from 94 cases in September 2025 to 40 by December, and to three legacy cases by mid-2026. Legacy 2024 remediation applications dropped from 42 at the start of the year to 13. The approval rate across all Gateway 2 categories reached 82% in the twelve weeks to 1 August 2026. Government reports approvals up 28% and processing times down fifteen weeks since June 2025.
What got it there: a fast-track process announced in June 2025 that brought engineering and inspection in-house rather than outsourcing to multidisciplinary teams, around 100 additional staff, weekly validation feedback, account managers for repeat applicants, and streamlined IT.
For context on how bad it was: Gateway 2 approvals averaged nine months between October 2023 and March 2025, with a 43-week median for higher-risk buildings and 48 weeks in London. A House of Lords committee report in December 2025 called the delays unacceptable and found decisions taking over nine months.
The change most applicants are still not using
This is the practical heart of the post.
The BSR abandoned its non-statutory “viability threshold” in mid-2025. What that means is that you can now submit Gateway 2 in stages — substructure, frame, and so on — using performance-based design information, and receive approval with requirements, without first proving that producing a full design was impossible.
That is a significant change and it is still under-used. It converts Gateway 2 from a single all-or-nothing gate near the end of design into a sequence you can programme around. Batched and staged applications have been reported running at 12 to 14 weeks against the 39-week median for a full remediation submission.
It is a design management strategy rather than a legal one, and it requires three things:
- A design programme built around package readiness, not a single completion date. Which packages can be fully evidenced first, and what performance-based information covers the rest.
- Discipline about what “approval with requirements” actually commits you to. The requirements are conditions you have to discharge. Staging is not a way of deferring the work; it is a way of sequencing it.
- A clean change control record, because staged approval means later stages are assessed against what was approved earlier. A change that undermines an earlier stage is a much bigger problem than a change caught before submission.
Gateway 3 is now the pinch point
The queue has moved. Gateway 3 runs at a 16-week median against an 8-week statutory target. Of 158 applications submitted in 2025, 55 took more than three months, and one took 550 days. As at January 2026, roughly 5,600 completed homes were sitting empty awaiting sign-off.
Building assessment certificates for occupied buildings are worse again — a refusal rate reported between 66% and 73%, which the regulator attributes to applicants submitting documentation that describes processes rather than demonstrating that safety is actually managed.
What to put in the contract
If you take one thing from this, take this. The regulator is now on the critical path of every higher-risk building project, and its determination periods are outside anyone’s control.
- Price 20 to 35 weeks, not 8 to 12. On remediation, price 34 and hope for better.
- Name the regulator’s determination period in the extension of time and loss and expense provisions. If the contract is silent, the risk sits with the contractor by default — and on a subcontract with no equivalent protection, it sits with a subcontractor who is carrying liquidated damages exposure for a delay caused by a regulator.
- Do not tie the whole retention release to Gateway 3. Split it into a defects tranche and a certification tranche.
- Use the account manager route if you are a repeat applicant. It exists and it helps.
- Budget for the fees. The 2026-27 charging scheme runs at £156 an hour core rate, with £195 for a building control approval application, £195 for change control, £234 for a completion certificate, £251 for HRB registration and £312 for a building assessment certificate.
And a proportionality change worth watching
Around 46% of non-cladding remediation applications were falling into Category A — roughly five times what was anticipated — which is what clogged the internal works queue at 981 live cases. A consultation on re-categorisation ran from 26 March to 28 May 2026, with a government response published on 9 July indicating an intention to move most work inside individual flats, and small-scale communal works, into the lighter-touch Category B.
If you do refurbishment or maintenance in occupied high-rises, that changes your classification logic. We will cover it properly closer to implementation.
The regulator is not the obstacle it was two years ago. But it is the critical path, its currency is documentation quality, and the applicants getting through fastest are the ones who staged the submission and kept a clean record from the start.
If you have a higher-risk building in design and the Gateway strategy has not been thought about as a programme question, that is precisely what we do.