In this article we cover:
- Stages of building a house in Ireland
- Why it’s taking so long today as compared to a decade ago
- Typical bottlenecks for one-off homes
- Other reasons for delays
The Central Bank’s latest Quarterly Bulletin finds that one-off houses completed so far in 2026 had a median journey from planning application to completion of around 44 to 50 months, or roughly four years.
That’s more than double the amount of time it took in 2016, according to The Long Road from Permission to Home: Non-commencement and Delivery Times in Irish Housing analysis (Box B) by Jonathan Rice, John Scally and Tom McKeon.
For people planning to build their own home, the findings highlight that getting planning permission is only one stage in what has become a considerably longer process.
The Central Bank examined project-level data covering the planning, commencement and completion stages of residential construction.
Its analysis found the increase in the time taken to deliver homes began before the Covid pandemic and continued afterwards.
For one-off houses specifically, the median duration from planning application to completion has increased to around 44 to 50 months for homes completed so far in 2026.
That compares with around 21 to 26 months for homes completing in 2016, depending on the type of residential construction.
The Central Bank describes the increase for one-off houses as approximately 2.5 times the duration recorded in 2017.
Planning decisions are not the culprit
For someone building a one-off house, the planning stage itself remains considerably shorter than the overall four-year-plus journey.
The Central Bank found that the median time taken to obtain a planning decision for a one-off house is generally around two to three months.
This means the increase in the overall delivery time cannot be explained by planning decision times alone.
The much bigger issue is what happens after planning permission is secured: how long it takes to get a project started and then how long construction takes to reach completion.
One-off houses are taking longer to break ground
The Central Bank found that, among one-off houses approved between 2016 and 2021, around 52 per cent had commenced construction within one year.
That increased to around 63 per cent within two years, but then rose only marginally over the following two and a half years, reaching about 70 per cent.
The time between planning approval and commencement has also increased.
For one-off houses, the median approval-to-commencement period increased from around six months in 2017 to around 10 months in 2026.
Selfbuild has been campaigning to waive the levy for self-builders.
Houses are also taking longer to build
The Central Bank also identified a substantial increase in the time spent between construction starting and the home being completed.
For one-off houses, the median construction-to-completion period increased from around 13 months to approximately 25 months.
The report notes several possible factors behind the increase, including shortages of skilled labour, delays in utility connections such as water, sewage and electricity, financing and construction costs, and other site-level factors.
However, the data does not allow the Central Bank to separate physical construction time from foundational or preparatory site work.
The report notes that the number of residential units that had commenced but were not yet complete increased from around 18,000 in mid-2016 to approximately 99,000 in mid-2025.
Over the same period, construction employment increased from around 119,000 to 190,000, meaning the number of units in progress per construction worker also rose substantially.
The analysis concluded planning permissions are not a reliable measure of future housing delivery on their own. Of the residential units granted permission between 2017 and 2020, around 25 to 32 per cent subsequently lapsed without construction starting.
