How Long Does Submittal Review Take? Lead-Time Benchmarks

Where does the time go in a submittal cycle?

Pestana and Alves tracked each step of the submittal process on a single building project, using 139 submittals that all carried an 11-day planned lead time in the log.

Source: Pestana and Alves, Study of the Submittal Process Using Lean Production Principles, MISBE 2011 proceedings. Step times overlap, so they don't add exactly to the total.

Submittals spent longer waiting for the GC to distribute them than waiting for the GC to review them. That's handling time, and no amount of reviewer effort shortens it. Product data took about twice as long to distribute as shop drawings (13.8 days against 7.2), and submittals returned approved as noted came back about six days later than clean approvals.

The team's own expected lead time of 20 to 22 days was met in only 38% of cases. That's the number to take into a schedule review: the planned duration was off by a factor of three, and even the experienced guess was right barely a third of the time.

How often are submittals rejected or sent back?

Most submittals need at least one more pass. In a case study by Alves, Pestana, Gilbert, and Hamzeh in the ASCE Journal of Professional Issues in Engineering Education and Practice, only about a fifth of submittals were approved as submitted, and over a third had to be revised entirely.

Delivery method moves the rate. A 2016 University of Wisconsin-Madison study of project delivery performance normalized resubmittals by project cost:

Source: Ibrahim, Modeling, Benchmarking, and Maximizing Project Delivery Performance, M.S. thesis, University of Wisconsin-Madison (2016). On a $40 million design-bid-build job, the median works out to about 73 resubmittals, each one another review cycle.

Why do so many submittals get rejected?

A large share of rejections starts in the contract documents. A sub draws the shop drawing from the plans, the reviewer checks it against the spec, and if the two never agreed, the submittal fails no matter how carefully it was prepared.

Helonic's preconstruction risk findings put numbers on that upstream problem. About 6 in 10 packages that included specs had at least one conflict between the drawings and the project manual, and spec-to-drawing mismatches were about 16% of all flagged issues. Door hardware against the door schedule, finish specs against finish plans, and equipment listed in the spec but missing from the drawings came up most. More examples are in our guide to spec-to-drawing conflicts.

How should a schedule account for submittal time?

1. Use measured durations. Pull the median lead time by submittal type from your last two or three logs. The submittal log guide covers which fields to track.
2. Plan for one resubmittal on long-lead items. Switchgear, curtain wall, and elevators rarely clear on the first pass, and a second cycle can add two to three weeks.
3. Track distribution time separately. If handling time rivals review time, the fix is in the GC's process. See how a broken submittal log delays the schedule.
4. Clear spec and drawing conflicts before buyout. Each one left in the set is a likely rejection later.

If you're weighing tools, the submittal tracking software guide compares the options, and AI submittal review bottlenecks covers where automation helps the reviewer.

How does Helonic cut submittal rejections?

Helonic cross-references the project manual against the drawings before bid and flags contradictions with sheet and section locations, so they get resolved by addendum instead of discovered in a rejected shop drawing. During construction, Helonic's submittal review checks incoming shop drawings and product data against the spec sections, so the reviewer starts from a compliance matrix instead of a blank markup.

Submittal Review Time FAQ