Gateway 2 is recovering. Gateway 3 is where the next queue forms.

The number that tells the recovery story

For two years, Gateway 2 was the thing that broke programmes. By October 2025 the Building Safety Regulator's own chair was confirming average approval times of 43 weeks nationally and 48 weeks in London, against a statutory target of 12 weeks. On higher-risk schemes that was not a delay, it was a redesign trigger: developers pulled buildings below 18 metres to escape the regime, and contractors booked the turnover damage.

The 2026 data reads differently.

According to BSR data covering the 12 weeks to 30 May 2026, the regulator issued 358 Gateway 2 decisions with a 75% approval rate, with batched applications running at a median of 12 to 14 weeks and the Innovation Unit approving around 90% of its cases.

Source: BSR building control data, gov.uk. Verified 14 July 2026.

How the backlog broke

Not by accident. The regulator was pulled out of the HSE in June 2025, given new leadership and more than 100 additional staff, and handed new processes. A Fast Track Process and an Innovation Unit took on new-build applications. A batching pilot bundled applications to external specialist assessors under BSR oversight, and the effect on throughput was immediate: decision volumes rose from roughly 200 in the first quarter of 2025 to more than 700 in the final quarter. Staged applications were extended to single towers in December 2025, letting groundworks start while the superstructure was still in assessment. By spring 2026 the legacy new-build backlog had been cut to low single figures.

The full picture, with the milestones charted, is on the Gateway 2 timescales page.

Why the good news creates the next problem

A regime this sequential cannot fix one gateway without loading the next. Every one of those 2025 and 2026 approvals is a building that gets built and then has to be certified before anyone can occupy it. And the completion stage is starting from almost nothing.

As of early September 2025, only 16 new-build Gateway 3 applications had been submitted, and 9 completion certificates issued. That is not a sign of a healthy, low-demand stage. It is the calm before the schemes approved upstream arrive at completion all at once. The same pressures that jammed Gateway 2, evidence quality and assessor capacity, apply again at Gateway 3, and the volume is only going one way through 2026 and 2027.

The two dates that define autumn 2026

Two deadlines will concentrate minds between now and October.

• 30 September 2026: the second staircase mandate lands for new residential buildings over 18 metres, with transitional provisions for sufficiently progressed schemes.
• 1 October 2026: the Building Safety Levy comes into force. The BSR will not issue a Gateway 3 completion certificate where the levy is overdue, adding a payment gate to the evidence gate. A surge of Gateway 2 applications is widely expected before this date, which will make the wave feeding into Gateway 3 larger still.

What a contractor should do about it this quarter

Stop treating Gateway 3 as a handover formality and start treating it as an evidence programme that runs from Gateway 2. The regulator has named the four reasons completion applications stall: gaps in fire and structural safety documentation, weak change control records, discrepancies between as-built drawings and what was installed, and safety-system commissioning gaps. Every one is a construction-phase problem that is cheap to prevent and expensive to cure at handover. We break them down, with the fix for each, in why Gateway 3 applications stall.

The practical move is to make evidence capture contemporaneous. Records made at the time, by the people doing the work, with dates and authorship attached, are what the regulator trusts and what keeps the as-built record honest. The projects that will clear Gateway 3 quickly are the ones building that discipline in now, while their buildings are still going up, not the ones that will go looking for it when the occupation date is already fixed.