This guide is written for solicitors, trainees and law students in England and Wales.
Where does Gateway 2 performance stand now?
Gateway 2 approval rates reached 82% across all higher-risk building categories in the 12 weeks to 1 August 2026, with the Building Safety Regulator’s median approval time for new buildings down to 22 weeks from 43 a year earlier. This tracker holds the current figures, the regulator’s targets to March 2027, and what the numbers mean for the assumptions written into development agreements.
The dataset behind every figure here is the BSR’s own building control transparency publication for the rolling 12-week period to 1 August 2026, released on 6 August, which is the source practitioners should cite in preference to any trade summary. The regulator publishes on a 12-week cycle, so this page carries a hard review date and the numbers below should be treated as a snapshot with a shelf life.
If you are drafting or renegotiating development agreements, funding conditions or longstop dates on a higher-risk building, the planning assumption has changed. A 22-week median is not the 43 weeks that most existing contracts were negotiated against, and the BSR’s own target takes it to 18 weeks by March 2027. That cuts both ways: clients who priced in delay may have room, and those who agreed generous longstops may face pressure to justify them.
Who this tracker is for
This tracker is for property, construction and finance lawyers advising on higher-risk building projects, whether negotiating development timetables, drafting conditions precedent in facility agreements, or explaining to an impatient client why the building control stage still cannot be promised inside the statutory 12-week window. It assumes familiarity with the gateway regime under the Building Safety Act 2022 and concentrates on the performance data rather than the underlying law.
What do the latest figures show?
Across the 12 weeks to 1 August 2026, the BSR made 349 building control decisions across all higher-risk building categories, approving 287, an overall national rate of 82%. The movement within the categories is where the drafting consequences sit, because a remediation scheme, a new tower and a hospital refurbishment now run on visibly different clocks.
| Category | Approval rate | Median approval time | Live applications |
|---|---|---|---|
| All categories | 82% (287 of 349 decisions) | varies by category | see below |
| New HRBs and conversions | 91% (93% in London) | 22 weeks (23 in London) | 131 applications, 30,421 units |
| Existing building remediation | 85% (92% in London) | 21 weeks for 2026 submissions; 34 weeks across older cases | 330 applications, 28,778 units |
| NHS applications | 84% (86% in London) | 24 weeks; 13 weeks for 2026 submissions | 36 active cases |
| Internal refurbishment (categories A and B) | 77% | 32 weeks; 16 weeks for 2026 submissions | 981 active cases |
The pattern inside those rows repays attention. In every category, applications submitted in 2026 are being determined dramatically faster than the caseload as a whole, which the regulator attributes to improved application quality and streamlined internal processes, and which means the medians will keep falling mechanically as older cases wash out. Remediation is the clearest example: 110 decisions in the period at an 85% approval rate, against an annual target of 65%, with the outstanding legacy applications from 2024 down to 13 from 42 at the start of the year.
New build volume tells the same story from a different angle. The BSR made 45 new build and conversion decisions in the period, approving projects representing 7,587 residential units, with London accounting for 27 of the 45 decisions and 25 approvals. For comparison, in the 12 weeks to August 2025 the approval rate stood at 39% and the median at 43 weeks, so the year-on-year improvement is a halving of time and a more than doubling of the approval rate, driven substantially by the Innovation Unit, which in its first year determined 102 applications and now runs a 91% approval rate with a 22-week median for non-complex cases.
What are the targets to March 2027?
The regulator’s published target for existing building remediation was an approval rate of 65% or better by the end of 2026, which the 85% figure already exceeds. On timescales, the BSR’s 2026 plan, as reported when it was set out earlier this year, commits to 18 weeks for non-complex Gateway 2 applications and 12 weeks for remediation applications by March 2027. Neither is the statutory clock: the legislation contemplates 12 weeks for new build applications and 8 for work to existing buildings, and some recent NHS approvals have landed at the statutory 8 weeks, but no category median is inside its statutory period yet, and drafting should not assume one will be soon.
What about Gateway 3?
The next constraint is already visible. The BSR has received 319 Gateway 3 applications, of which 235 are internal refurbishments, 47 are transitional cases inherited from failed building control bodies, and 23 are NHS internal works; it determined 29 in the last 12 weeks at a 72% approval rate and a 16-week median, with the quickest at 8 weeks. No new build project that passed through Gateway 2 under the new regime has yet reached Gateway 3, so the completion-stage data that occupation timetables really depend on does not exist, and any assumption written into an agreement about the pre-occupation stage is an extrapolation rather than a measurement. That gap closes over the next year as the 2025 and 2026 approvals build out.
What changed structurally in 2026?
Two structural moves sit behind the performance shift. In January 2026 the BSR became a standalone non-departmental public body sponsored by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, taken out of the Health and Safety Executive as a step towards a single construction regulator. And in April 2026 it introduced the external remediation plan, alongside updated guidance and account-managed engagement with applicants, since when external remediation performance has moved from a 47% approval rate and 43-week timescale to 85% and 34 weeks. The regulator has also scaled its capacity to 176 internal staff and 506 external specialists, including 221 registered building inspectors, and is processing 181 live major change requests with a 7-week median closure time for new build projects, one week above the statutory target.
A checklist before advising on a timetable
- Pull the current 12-week dataset from GOV.UK before giving any figure, because this regime moves quarter by quarter and a six-month-old number is now materially wrong.
- Match the category precisely: a new build, an external remediation scheme, an internal refurbishment and an NHS project carry different approval rates and different medians, and conflating them is the commonest error in the trade coverage.
- Distinguish the all-cases median from the 2026-submission median, and ask which one honestly applies to your client’s application.
- Check whether the application will be treated as complex, since the Innovation Unit’s 22-week median is expressly for non-complex cases and designation adds targeted resource but also time.
- Build longstop dates off the measured median with headroom, not off the statutory period or the March 2027 target, and state the assumption in the drafting so it can be revisited.
- Remember Gateway 3: an approval at Gateway 2 starts construction, and the pre-occupation stage has no new-build track record at all yet.
- Diarise the next BSR release, expected in late October 2026, against every live matter that priced in the old numbers.
Common mistakes
- Quoting the 82% headline for a category it does not describe; internal refurbishment sits at 77% and older remediation cases still run a 34-week median.
- Treating the statutory 12-week and 8-week periods as planning assumptions when no category median has reached them.
- Taking figures from trade reporting rather than the BSR dataset, which the regulator publishes precisely so the numbers can be checked.
- Assuming improvement is uniform when it is heavily weighted to 2026 submissions and to London, which took 57% or more of recent decision volume.
- Leaving a tracker like this one unread past its review date, since a stale number carries more false confidence than no number.
Official sources
The dataset is the BSR’s building control approval application data, May to July 2026, summarised on the regulator’s Making Buildings Safer data page, with the April changes set out in the external remediation plan announcement. Our news report on this release is at Gateway 2 approvals reach 82% as BSR median decision time halves, and the wider reform of the transaction side of the market is covered in our home buying reform analysis.
Date last updated: 10 August 2026. Scheduled review: on publication of the next 12-week BSR dataset, expected late October 2026.