Gateway 2, and what it
does to a programme.
Approval has to be granted before construction starts, and the wait has improved sharply: a median of 22 weeks at June 2026 against 43 a year earlier. What that means if you are not the applicant.
Published ·4 min read·Written by Unibuild
Gateway 2 is the Building Safety Regulator approval that must be granted before construction starts on a higher-risk building. Work cannot begin without it. The wait has improved sharply: a median of 22 weeks for new higher-risk buildings at June 2026, against 43 weeks a year earlier, with the rolling approval rate around 91%.
What it is
Under the Building Safety Act regime, higher-risk buildings pass through three gateways. Gateway 2 is the one that bites commercially: an application for building control approval made to the Building Safety Regulator, which must be granted before the construction phase can begin.
It is not a notification and it is not a formality. It is a permission, the Regulator can and does reject applications that do not contain enough information, and no amount of commercial pressure moves it. For anybody in the supply chain, the practical consequence is that a start date is not a start date until Gateway 2 is through.
What the wait actually is, as at June 2026
Figures below are from Building Safety Regulator published data and were checked on 20 August 2026. They are moving quickly, so check the current position rather than relying on these.
- Median approval time for new higher-risk buildings: 22 weeks at June 2026.
- A year earlier that median was 43 weeks, with an approval rate of around 39%.
- The 12-week rolling approval rate has risen to roughly 91%.
- Around 1,505 live building control applications sat with the Regulator at the end of June 2026, which is a working pipeline rather than a backlog that clears once.
The direction of travel is unambiguous and it is good news. It is also still a wait of roughly five months on a median case, which is a programme item rather than a detail.
Why you may have been told something much worse
Worth addressing directly, because a great deal of published commentary, and a fair amount of industry conversation, still describes this regime in terms of waits of 25 to 40 weeks and rejection rates around 70%.
Those figures were broadly accurate for the earlier period of the regime. They are now substantially out of date, and planning a programme or pricing a risk on them would produce the wrong answer in a way that costs money: over-allowing on a bid, or declining work on a basis that no longer holds.
Half the commentary on this subject describes a position that was true eighteen months ago. Check the current data before you price around it.
When you are not the applicant
Which, if you are a subcontractor, you almost never are. The application is made by the client or on their behalf, and the consequences land on you without your having any control over or visibility of the process.
Three specific exposures.
Your start date is not yours. Being told to hold availability for a date that depends on an approval nobody has yet received is a resourcing risk, and the cost of holding a gang for a date that moves is real and rarely compensated.
Design changes after approval are constrained. The regime restricts what can change after approval without going back, which affects how variations and value engineering work on these jobs. That is a different commercial environment from an ordinary project and it is worth understanding before pricing one.
Payment and programme knock on. A delayed start compresses everything downstream, and compression usually lands on the trades at the end of the sequence.
Planning around it
Four practical things, none of which requires you to be party to the application.
Ask, at tender, whether the building is higher-risk and whether Gateway 2 approval has been granted. A start date on an unapproved higher-risk building is provisional whatever the programme says.
Price the holding risk rather than absorbing it, or agree what happens to your costs if the date moves. Do not mobilise on a provisional date without something in writing about who carries the cost if it slips.
Keep your own records of dates you were given and dates that changed, because a compressed programme at the end is a claim about causation and causation is proved with contemporaneous records.
And check the current Regulator data rather than the anecdote, on each job. The numbers have moved twice in eighteen months and will move again.
Nothing about Gateway 2 is a software problem, and Unibuild plays no part in an application. What it holds is the evidence that decides who carries the cost when a date moves: site diaries and daily records with dates, the programme information you were given and when, correspondence against the job rather than in an inbox, and labour planned and recorded against dates you can produce later. A subcontractor arguing that a compressed programme was not of its making is making a contemporaneous records argument, which is the same argument as every other delay claim and is set out in getting paid for variations.
Where to start, on Monday
Take any job on your board that involves a residential building of significant height and ask the question directly: is this a higher-risk building, and has Gateway 2 been granted. If the answer is that approval is pending, your start date is an estimate.
Then decide what you will do about holding resource for it, and put that in writing before you are asked to hold anything.
How long does Building Safety Act Gateway 2 approval take?+
Is the Gateway 2 rejection rate still around 70%?+
Can construction start before Gateway 2 approval?+
What does Gateway 2 mean for a subcontractor who is not the applicant?+
How should I price work on a higher-risk building?+
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