表停了 — 20 working days is not 20 days

Section 48 of the Building Act 2004 gives a consent authority 20 working days to grant or refuse a building consent. Section 48(2) stops that clock every time the authority asks the applicant for more information, and starts it again when the answer arrives.

And “working day” is defined in section 7. It excludes weekends and public holidays, the anniversary day of the province — and every day from 20 December to 10 January. That last clause is three weeks long, and almost nobody outside a council has it in their head.

So a consent lodged on 15 December and granted on 2 February used exactly twenty working days and took seven weeks. The council is right. The applicant is right. This page shows both numbers at once.

Nothing is uploaded. The arithmetic runs here for one request and nothing is written down.

Your consents

One row per consent: reference, lodged, decided, then any number of requested, answered pairs. A bare number in the fourth column is taken as working days on hold, which is the column most council exports have. Dates may be 2025-12-15, 15/12/2025 or 15 Dec 2025.

Anniversary day

One working day, which is five percent of the statutory clock — enough on its own to move a consent across the line.

The example sets are simulated. The calendar is not: public holidays are computed, Easter from the algorithm, Matariki from the schedule to the Act.

7.0 weeks, and 20 working days

On the council's clock this was on time: 20 of the statutory 20 working days. And it took 49 calendar days — 7.0 weeks — from lodgement to decision. Both numbers describe the same consent.

Where the time went

20working days with the clock running

0working days stopped, waiting on further information

29calendar days that were never working days at all

Twenty working days from 2025-12-15, with the requests that actually happened, ran out on 2026-02-02. With no requests at all it would have been 2026-02-02 — which is the honest answer to “when is it due”: it is not knowable when you lodge, because it moves every time the council asks you a question.

Consent by consent

Each bar is one consent, day by day from lodgement to decision. clock running stopped, waiting on the applicant weekend, public holiday, or 20 Dec – 10 Jan. The vertical rule is the day the statutory twenty ran out.

BC/2025/44712025-12-15 → 2026-02-02

20 working days on the clock·49 calendar days·7.0 weeks

The days this counted as closed

Every exclusion inside the span above, so the arithmetic can be checked against your own calendar instead of taken on trust. Weekends are left off the list; nobody needs to be told about Sunday.

2025-12-20 20 December – 10 January (Building Act s7)

What it does not know

It does not know whether the request was fair. A request for further information stops the clock whether it was necessary or not, and this page cannot tell the two apart. It can only say how much of the elapsed time went that way.

It does not know what a council counts as receipt. The statutory clock starts when the application is received, and what counts as received — lodged, vetted, accepted — is a decision made inside the council. A day or two there moves every number on this page.

Waitangi Day and Anzac Day are treated as excluded on both the day itself and its Monday observance when they fall at a weekend. That is at worst one day of headroom in your favour, and it is one day, and it is stated here rather than hidden.

Matariki is a table with an end. It has no rule, so the schedule to the Act lists it year by year to 2032. A span past that is counted without it, and this page says so when it happens rather than guessing a date.

d/m/yyyy is read the New Zealand way. There is nothing in “03/04/2026” to say which half is the month. A spreadsheet exported on a machine set to another country will be read wrong, and the fix is to use 2026-04-03.