Realistic Las Vegas commercial TI timelines for office, Class A, and restaurant projects. What permits cost in weeks and where the time actually goes.
A tenant improvement build-out in Las Vegas is a stopwatch. Every week the space sits empty, a tenant is paying rent and not making revenue.
TI projects from 2,000 to 80,000 square feet all share the same arithmetic: the schedule kills more deals than the design does. Here is what a realistic timeline looks like in this market right now, and where the time actually goes.
The honest range
In Las Vegas in 2026, a Class B office TI under 5,000 sq ft runs 10 to 14 weeks from permit to certificate of occupancy. A Class A build-out at 8,000 to 15,000 sq ft is 16 to 22 weeks.
A first-generation restaurant or medical TI is 22 to 30 weeks. Anyone promising shorter without a clear reason is selling, not scheduling.
Where the weeks actually go
Owners assume “construction” is the long part. It is not. On a 12-week TI, construction is 7 of those weeks. The other 5 are permitting, design coordination, and material lead times. The fastest projects compress those upstream weeks, not the field weeks. Compressing the field is where quality goes to die.
| Phase | Class B 4,000 sq ft | Class A 12,000 sq ft | Restaurant 5,000 sq ft |
|---|---|---|---|
| Design and engineering | 2-3 weeks | 4-6 weeks | 5-7 weeks |
| Permitting (Clark County / City) | 3-5 weeks | 4-7 weeks | 6-10 weeks |
| Long-lead material orders | parallel | parallel | parallel |
| Demo and rough-ins | 2 weeks | 3-4 weeks | 3-4 weeks |
| Framing, MEP, drywall | 3-4 weeks | 5-7 weeks | 4-5 weeks |
| Finishes and FF&E | 2 weeks | 3-4 weeks | 3-4 weeks |
| Inspections and CO | 1 week | 1-2 weeks | 2-3 weeks |
| Total realistic | 10-14 weeks | 16-22 weeks | 22-30 weeks |
Las Vegas / Clark County, mid-2026. Assumes a tenant with executed lease and a landlord who is responsive on shell coordination.
The two killers: permitting and long-lead glass
Permits in Clark County and the City of Las Vegas are running 3 to 7 weeks for a TI in 2026, depending on department workload and the complexity of the change-of-use review.
The number one mistake we see is owners who let the architect submit incomplete drawings to “save a week.” That gets a comment letter that costs four. Submit complete on day one. Always.
The second time killer is glass and storefront. A custom storefront system runs 8 to 14 weeks lead time from order. Standard interior glass partitions are 6 to 10 weeks.
If the glass package is not locked by week two of the project, the punch list will sit for a month waiting on doors. Good GCs order glass before drywall starts. Late ones order it after.
What landlord delivery actually delivers
Read the lease carefully. “Vanilla shell” means different things to different landlords. Some include a finished ceiling grid, painted walls, restrooms, and an HVAC connection at the demising wall.
Others give you raw concrete and a stub-out. The difference is 4 to 6 weeks of schedule. Walk the space with the landlord and the GC before signing, and write the deliverables into an exhibit. Do not negotiate this in the field at week three.
- Confirm whether the existing HVAC tonnage actually matches the occupancy load.
- Test every existing electrical circuit. Surprises here add 1-2 weeks.
- Verify the fire-alarm and sprinkler systems are functional and have current inspection certs.
- Get a structural confirmation that the slab can carry the equipment loads (especially for restaurant or medical).
- Walk the roof and look at any roof-mounted units the landlord owns. Schedule slips often live up there.
Compressing the schedule, honestly
Some compression is real, some is theater. Real compression options: design-build delivery, which saves 3 to 5 weeks by overlapping design and permit. Early procurement of long-lead items, which saves 2 to 4 weeks if started week one.
Night-shift work for noisy phases, which saves 1 to 2 weeks on schedule though it changes the labor profile of those line items. Theater compression: “we just work faster.” Trades work as fast as the inspection schedule allows. Promises about field productivity rarely change anything.
The cheapest compression by far is starting the GC selection during lease negotiations, not after lease signing. Owners who do this routinely beat the schedule of owners who treat construction as a post-lease activity by 4 to 8 weeks. The math is simple. Permit drawings need landlord coordination, and that needs a GC.
Inspection sequencing is the real schedule
TI schedules in Clark County live or die on the inspection sequence. Underground rough comes before slab patch. Top-out plumbing and rough electrical happen in parallel before walls close, but each one needs its own approved inspection before drywall can hang. Ceiling grid then opens the path to fire-alarm and sprinkler trim, which gates final MEP.
A GC who reads the inspection card the way a project manager reads the schedule will book inspectors a week ahead, send pre-walk photos, and flag drawings that change between submittal and field. The GC who waits until Monday morning to call for a Tuesday inspection loses three days every time.
The shell is half the project nobody talks about
Class B and Class A buildings in Las Vegas vary widely in shell quality even inside the same submarket. The HVAC tonnage stamped on the rooftop unit may not match the actual occupancy load the new use will create. The restroom group may not meet the current code if the use is changing from office to medical.
The fire-sprinkler density may need to upgrade for high-pile storage or a commercial kitchen. These shell items are where TI schedules quietly burn weeks.
The pre-lease walk is when they get cataloged and assigned, in the lease exhibit, to either the landlord or the tenant. Catching them in the field at week three is the most expensive way to handle them.
Health-department and special-use review, where it adds up
Restaurant and medical TIs in Las Vegas carry a second permit track that office TIs do not. Restaurants need a Southern Nevada Health District plan review for the kitchen layout, the grease-trap sizing, and the ventilation hood, and that review runs in parallel with the building permit but on its own clock.
Medical TIs trigger an Occupational Safety and Health review for the patient-care areas and a state Bureau of Health Care Quality and Compliance review on the licensing side.
Each layer adds two to four weeks. The fix is to start each track on day one of design, not after the building permit comes back.
A general contractor who has cleared each of these reviews in the last 12 months knows which department reads drawings on Tuesday afternoons and which one needs a phone call before submittal. That institutional knowledge is the difference between a 14-week TI and an 18-week one.
Get the schedule right at lease signing
Most TI schedule pain is set in stone before construction starts. Lease signing without a GC at the table is the single most common cause of a 6-week-late opening. Pull a commercial general contractor into the space tour, the landlord negotiation, and the design kickoff. The GC catches schedule problems early, when they are cheap to fix.
JAG Development handles tenant improvement and ground-up commercial work across Las Vegas, with a permit-clean track record at Clark County and the City. If you want a commercial tenant improvement team that will run a real schedule from your lease draft, that is the conversation worth having early.
We also handle larger industrial construction contractor work for tilt-up and warehouse build-outs.
Our Las Vegas commercial construction team manages tenant improvement projects from permitting through final walkthrough.
Request a Consultation