The short answer: A typical three-story, wood-framed garden apartment building of 24 to 48 units takes 8 to 14 weeks to frame from first wall to dry-in. Larger wrap and podium projects run four to eight months of framing, usually broken into building segments. The real driver isn't total square footage — it's your per-floor cycle time and how many crews the site can keep productive.
Rules of thumb by building type
- Garden-style, three stories, 24 units: 8 to 10 weeks with a full crew.
- Garden-style, three stories, 48 units: 10 to 14 weeks, assuming material keeps pace.
- Four or five stories over a podium deck: 12 to 18 weeks of wood framing after concrete turnover, plus whatever the podium itself takes.
- Corridor buildings — senior living, hotel-style: similar per-floor pace, but heavier interior wall counts and more blocking add roughly 10 to 20 percent. Our Rogers senior living project is a good example of that rhythm at scale.
The per-floor cycle is the whole game
Framing an apartment building is a loop: layout, walls, floor trusses or joists, sheath the deck, and repeat one level up. A full crew on a decent-sized building segment turns that loop in about two to three weeks per level. Roof trusses and sheathing add another one to two weeks at the top. Multiply the cycle by the number of levels, add the roof, add mobilization and cleanup, and you have the honest skeleton of a framing schedule. Everything else on the project is either helping that loop or fighting it.
What compresses the timeline
- Panelized walls. Plant-built panels can cut wall framing time by a third or more, though they demand earlier design decisions and dedicated crane time.
- Dedicated lifting equipment. A crew that waits on a shared crane or telehandler bleeds hours every single day.
- Material staged ahead. Lumber and trusses on site one full level before they're needed. Truss lead times run long enough that late orders wreck more schedules than weather does.
- Fast answers. Framing RFIs answered in a day keep a crew framing. RFIs answered in a week mean a crew working around the same problem twice.
What stretches it
- Winter. We're framing through it right now, and it works — but plan on 10 to 20 percent slower production in serious cold, plus the occasional lost day to wind and snow.
- Design changes mid-frame. A revised unit mix or a moved shaft during framing costs more time than it looks like on paper.
- Inspection sequencing. If deck or shear inspections gate the next level and the inspector comes twice a week, that's your cycle time now — not your crew's speed.
- Undersized crews. A crew that's right for a 24-unit building will crawl on a 60-unit one. Match manpower to the building, not to the budget line.
Building a schedule you can actually hold
Ask your framer for per-level durations, not one lump-sum bar on the Gantt chart. Tie truss and lumber deliveries to those levels. Confirm crane availability against the pick schedule, and build in weather contingency that matches the season you'll actually frame in. We walk through the full sequencing logic in our multi-family framing schedule guide, and if you're still in early budgeting, our ballpark estimate calculator will get you a starting number in a few minutes.
Have a building to frame this year? Send us the plans and we'll give you a real duration, level by level.