Maryland Early Vesting
In our work across Frederick, Montgomery, and Prince George’s Counties, one of the most common sources of delay and added cost on projects can be the updating of regulatory law. A project can spend two or three years moving through rezoning and preliminary plan approval, with financing lined up and everything ready to move forward, only to have the county adopt a new regulation along the way-- a stormwater update, a change to forest conservation requirements, a revision to the adequate public facilities ordinance -- and find the project has to be re-evaluated under a different set of rules than the ones it was designed around.
This kind of mid-process disruption is a recurring feature of how land development works in Maryland, and it’s one of the less-discussed contributors to the state’s shortage of roughly 96,000 housing units. The underlying issue has a name: late vesting.
What late vesting means
In Maryland, a project’s right to build under the rules that existed when it was approved doesn’t actually lock in until a building permit is issued and substantial construction is underway. In practice, this means a project can be years into the approval process — through rezoning, sketch plan, preliminary plan, and site plan — and still be subject to new requirements adopted at any point along the way.
A typical residential project takes three to five years to move through the full development plan chain. Regulatory changes happen constantly over that timeframe. The result is that both developers and local agencies are operating without a stable baseline — and that uncertainty has real costs.
Matt Leakan, AICP, CBM's Director of Planning, authored a detailed paper on this issue in June 2025 that walks through the full development approval chain. Our work on raising the issue and providing input to stakeholders and officials helped build momentum for the practical framework now moving through Annapolis — one that would make it meaningfully easier to implement the goals communities have already set out in their master plans
What early vesting would fix
The proposed solution is called early vesting, and it’s simpler than it sounds: the regulations in effect when a complete development application is accepted would be the regulations that apply to that project through the rest of its approval process.
The local jurisdiction retains full authority to approve or deny the project. The review process itself remains the same. What shifts is that the applicant has a stable set of rules to design around — the same rules at the end of the process as at the beginning.
There are reasonable guardrails built in. Health and safety regulations could still apply to pending projects. APFO approvals would still expire on schedule. Applicants couldn’t file and then sit on an application indefinitely — a three-year certainty period and a 30-day completeness review window would keep things moving.
Where things stand in Annapolis
Two bills in the 2026 General Assembly are aimed at moving Maryland from a late-vesting to an early-vesting framework.
SB 325, the Maryland Housing Certainty Act, is Governor Moore’s bill. It would establish early vesting at the point a complete application is accepted, and shift impact fee payment from building permit to certificate of occupancy, which reduces upfront project costs.
SB 267, the BAMBY Act (Building Affordably in My Back Yard), is the Maryland Association of Counties’ own pro-housing reform package. It also includes vesting provisions.
The most significant development is that MACo — the counties’ lobbying organization, and the entity that would administer these changes on the ground — has formally stated support for SB 325 with amendments. Both sides have found common ground on the core principle: the rules in place when an application is deemed complete should govern the project. The negotiation is about implementation details like how long the completeness review window should be, how multi-phase projects are handled, and how to prevent applications from sitting open indefinitely.
That reflects meaningful progress from 2025, when the predecessor bill did not advance in part because there hadn’t been sufficient time to work through the implementation questions. This session, the two sides have been in conversation since August. The groundwork for a workable bill is considerably further along than it was a year ago.
Why it matters
For stakeholders and communities across Frederick, Montgomery, and Prince George's Counties, early vesting would reduce one of the more costly aspects of the Maryland process. Projects could be financed more cleanly. Smaller infill projects that struggle to absorb regulatory risk could become more viable. And both applicants and reviewers would have a shared baseline to work from, removing uncertainty.
CBM works through this approval chain every day across all three counties. We’ve seen firsthand how mid-process regulatory changes affect what gets proposed, what gets financed, and what gets built. The current session is the closest Maryland has come to addressing this directly, and it's one we are following closely.
CBM Consulting, LLC is a land planning, civil engineering, landscape architecture, and surveying firm based in Frederick, Maryland, serving Frederick, Montgomery, and Prince George’s Counties. Matt Leakan, AICP, CBM’s Director of Planning, authored “Early Vesting… for Maryland” June 2025.