New Building Act and Faster Permits
As of 1 January 2026, the new Building Act is in force. In official announcements it has been emphasised that obtaining building permits should be significantly faster, with communication and monitoring of procedures through digital systems (eDozvola).
In practice, for years the most time was lost not on design, but on waiting for various statements: special conditions and connection conditions (electricity, water and sewerage, transport, municipal infrastructure, etc.). The new Act is drafted so that this part of the procedure becomes predictable: it introduces deadlines, accountability and, most importantly, clear consequences when deadlines expire.
The central novelty is in Article 48 of the Act. The public-law body is obliged within 30 days of receiving the invitation through eDozvola to determine the special conditions or connection conditions, or to discontinue the procedure by decision. This removes the “grey zone” in which a case could sit without real oversight and without the investor being able to plan the pace of the investment.
An even stronger acceleration lever is the rule on the authority’s inactivity. If the public-law body does not determine the conditions within the prescribed period and does not issue a decision discontinuing the procedure, it is deemed that the special conditions have been issued and that the building may be connected to the infrastructure, and after the expiry of the period eDozvola generates a notice of the determined conditions. With this solution, the so-called administrative silence is avoided.
The Act reduces the possibility that the process of determining conditions is dragged out by additional requests that in practice often stop a project.. A public-law body may not request the designer to pay an advance nor the costs of determining the conditions, and the conditions may not include an obligation for the investor to build particular parts of the infrastructure (for example a transformer station, water supply, and the like). This is important for investors because it reduces the risk that the procedure gets stuck on requirements that fall outside the scope of the administrative procedure itself.
All in all, acceleration comes from three directions: deadlines become binding, inactivity no longer blocks the progress of the case, and the digital trail through eDozvola reduces lost deliveries, repetitions and communication noise. That is why, in public statements, the Ministry sets an ambitious goal that the procedure for obtaining a building permit should not take longer than 30 days, especially for family houses.
For investors, this is not merely an administrative issue. Every week or month of uncertainty around the permit increases financing costs, delays contracting contractors and pushes back market entry. In land development this often spills over into other decisions — subdivision,
negotiations with buyers and tenants, and even whether the project will be realised within the planned time window.
The most common reasons for delays are not in the Act itself, but in the documentation: legal interest, ownership and co-ownership, access to the parcel, easements and encumbrances, compliance with the spatial plan, as well as consistency of the design documentation. If that is unclear, time is spent on supplements and corrections and then the advantage of deadlines can easily melt away.
That is why we recommend that investors carry out a short legal review before incurring major design costs: checking the land register status and legal interest, identifying access and easement risks, a basic compliance check against the plan, and setting a documentation and communication strategy in eDozvola. In practice, this is the fastest way to turn the “statutory acceleration” into a genuinely shorter path to a final and enforceable permit.
