Bill 28 received royal assent on May 14. It was introduced on April 2, ran through six weeks of legislative process, and its housing provisions do something Alberta municipalities have never been required to do before. They have to show the clock.
The Municipal Affairs and Housing Statutes Amendment Act, 2026 requires public reporting on development permit activity and timelines for every municipality above 15,000 in population. Not a report to the minister. Not a file kept internally in case somebody asks. Public reporting, on how long the permits actually take.
That single requirement is the most consequential thing in the bill, and it is worth explaining why.
Transparency is the enforcement mechanism
Most legislation that tries to speed up approvals works by imposing a penalty, a deadline, or an appeal route. Bill 28 does something different with this provision. It does not fine a slow city. It publishes the number.
Consider what that does in practice. Once every municipality above 15,000 residents reports the same metric, the numbers sit next to each other. A builder deciding where to put the next project can compare them. So can a councillor’s opponent, who is now free to ask on the record why the city next door issues permits in half the time.
Nobody has to be punished. The comparison does the work. Municipal permit performance stops being a matter of anecdote and complaint and becomes a published figure with a name attached to it.
What else the housing provisions do
Three other pieces matter to anyone building or buying.
The bill supports automated permitting tools and enables a framework for Automatic Yes approvals. That is the legislative footing under a program the province announced on January 28, 2025 and stood up with a program page that April. The Automatic Yes approach runs on three mechanisms. Codes of Practice, which set the rules in advance so an application either meets them or does not. Permit by Rule, which approves anything conforming to a defined standard without discretionary review. And a Shot Clock, which puts a hard time limit on a decision.
The province reported that nearly 20% of Alberta government permits showed improved average wait times under that work, several of them by more than 30 days. A month off a file is not a small thing when a project is carrying land, financing and a construction schedule against it.
The bill also exempts charter and independent schools from off-site levies and clarifies which costs are allowable under a levy at all. That second half is the sleeper. Off-site levies have expanded steadily as municipalities found new categories of cost to load into them, and the arithmetic lands in the price of every home in the subdivision. We have written about a surcharge before the first shovel and how it compounds. Defining what a levy may and may not cover is how that expansion gets bounded.
Finally, the bill allows the minister to establish community design codes through future regulation. That authority exists now. What it does will depend entirely on regulations that have not been written yet, and no honest reading of the bill can tell you more than that today.
What changes for a builder and a buyer
For a builder, the practical change is information. Until now, the only way to know how a municipality performs was to file there and find out, which is an expensive way to learn a lesson. Published timelines turn that into due diligence anyone can do before buying land.
For a buyer, the change is slower and more indirect, which is how most housing costs work. Approval delay is carried as interest, holding costs and staff time, and all of it is recovered in the sale price. Nobody itemizes it on a purchase agreement. Cut the delay and you cut a cost that never had a line of its own.
Scott Fash, CEO of BILD Alberta, said the bill “is paving the way for more efficient homebuilding across our province.” Note the tense. Paving the way. The legislation opens the road. It does not drive the truck.
The contrast worth noticing
Housing has been debated nationally for a decade in the language of targets, billions committed and units promised. Very little of that debate ever reached the counter where an application physically waits. Alberta has now legislated the boring part, which is measurement, and paired it with the 120-day approval timeline already in place.
The caution is straightforward. Reporting requirements only work if the reporting is consistent, comparable and hard to massage. If every municipality defines a permit differently, or starts the clock at a different moment, the published numbers become noise and the whole mechanism fails. The regulations will decide that, and they are not written.
What is settled is this. As of May 14, in every Alberta municipality with more than 15,000 residents, how long a development permit takes is a public number rather than a private one. That is a modest sentence in a long bill, and it will do more than most of what gets announced with a podium.
Once your municipality publishes its permit timeline, will you look it up before your next council vote?
