A correction letter is not a rejection of your project. It is the reviewer telling you the review stopped at specific items and what has to change before it continues. Here is how to read one and what to send back.
"Revise and resubmit" is the standard outcome of a plan review that found problems. It shows up on building, mechanical, and energy-code reviews alike, worded differently by jurisdiction but meaning the same thing: the reviewer examined your construction documents against the adopted code, found one or more items that do not demonstrate compliance, and is holding the permit until you send back a plan set that fixes them. It is a normal step in permitting, not a verdict on the project. Most plan sets, even well-prepared ones, get at least one round of corrections.
The building official's review authority comes from the code itself. IRC 2021 R104.1 gives the building official the authority to enforce the code's provisions, which includes deciding whether submitted documents demonstrate compliance. R105.3 covers the application and examination step: the building official examines the application and the accompanying construction documents and either issues the permit or notes what is deficient and returns the application for correction. R106 sets out what construction documents have to show in the first place, which is the yardstick the reviewer is checking against.
When a reviewer marks an item as deficient, the review stops at that point rather than continuing all the way through every chapter. That matters because a second round of review is not guaranteed to be a once-over of just your fixes. Many reviewers re-check the whole submittal on resubmittal, since a change on one sheet can affect something on another. The practical result: a tight, complete response gets through faster than a partial one, because the reviewer is not just confirming the listed items, they are confirming the set is still consistent.
Turnaround on the second round varies by jurisdiction. Some departments commit to a shorter window for resubmittals than for a first review, since the scope is narrower. Others treat it as a new submittal that goes back into the same queue as first-time applications. Ask your building department directly what their resubmittal turnaround is, since this detail is set locally and changes your schedule more than almost anything else in the process.
Correction letters follow a loose but consistent format across most departments. Each comment typically has three parts: a comment number, a reference to the sheet or detail it applies to, and a reference to the code section the reviewer is citing. All three matter. The number is how you track which comments are answered and which are still open. The sheet reference tells you where on your drawings the reviewer is looking, which is not always where you would expect; a note on the floor plan can draw a comment about a section detail on a different sheet. The code section is the actual standard you have to meet, and it is worth reading the cited section yourself rather than guessing at what it requires from the comment text alone.
Comments are usually grouped by discipline: building, mechanical, energy, sometimes plumbing or electrical. Reading them in that order, rather than top to bottom by number, can make it easier to see which comments are related to the same underlying issue.
A few phrasings show up constantly across jurisdictions, and each one is asking for something slightly different:
A complete response has two parts. First, revised drawings with the changed areas clouded, delta-tagged, or otherwise marked so the reviewer can find what changed without re-reading the whole sheet. Second, a response letter that goes through the correction letter comment by comment, by number, and states in one or two sentences what changed and which sheet now shows it. Reviewers go through the response letter first in most cases, checking it against the comment list before they open the drawings, so a response letter that is easy to cross-reference against the original letter speeds up the second review.
Two patterns account for most second-round rejections. The first is answering in an email or a phone call instead of on the drawings. A reviewer can only approve what the construction documents show; a verbal or written explanation of a fix that never makes it onto a sheet does not satisfy R106's documentation requirement, no matter how clearly it was explained. The second is a partial response: addressing the comments that were easy to fix and skipping or glossing over the ones that required more work. Reviewers check every comment on the list, not just the ones that got answered, so an incomplete response usually reads as incomplete rather than as progress.
Some comments are not something the applicant or a general designer can answer directly. If a comment is asking for calculations outside prescriptive code tables, a stamped structural detail, or an HVAC load calculation, that is a sign the response needs an engineer, architect, or HVAC designer, not just a revised note. Sorting out which comments are which before you start revising saves a round trip.
If you have a correction letter in hand and want it walked comment by comment against your drawings before you revise anything, Tier 1 plan review does exactly that for $149: what each comment is asking for, which sheet it touches, and whether it needs a design professional.
Travis Smith, ICC-Certified Residential Plans Examiner
The Plans Examiner, Spokane, WA. Residential plan review and permit documents for all 50 states.