What Plan Reviewers Check on a Commercial Submittal
The short answer: A commercial plan reviewer works through a consistent set of priorities: life safety first (occupancy classification, occupant load, means of egress, fire protection), then accessibility (route, restrooms, clearances), then discipline coordination (structural, MEP), and throughout, completeness and correctness — required sheets present, drawings consistent with each other, the professional stamp in place, and the correct adopted code edition cited. They're checking that the design meets the codes the jurisdiction enforces and that the set is complete enough to review and build from. Most comments fall into a few buckets — egress/occupant-load errors, accessibility gaps, incompleteness, and code-edition mismatches — which means a structured self-check against those buckets before submittal catches the majority of what would otherwise come back.
The reviewer's priority order
Life safety — occupancy, occupant load, egress (count/width/separation/travel), fire-resistance and protection. This is checked first and hardest.
Discipline coordination — structural adequacy; MEP (loads, fixtures, ventilation) consistent with the architecture.
Completeness & correctness — all required sheets, internal consistency, title block and stamp, and the right code editions.
What "complete enough to review" means
Reviewers can't approve what they can't verify. Missing sheets, values referenced but not annotated, or drawings that contradict each other all generate comments — not because the design is wrong, but because it can't be confirmed.
Code edition correctness
A frequently missed item: citing or designing to a different edition than the jurisdiction has adopted. The reviewer enforces the adopted edition and local amendments; a wrong-edition citation is itself a comment.
Self-checking before submittal
Run your set against the reviewer's buckets: recompute occupant load and reconcile egress/fixtures to it; confirm accessibility in all required areas; verify completeness and stamp; confirm the editions. This is exactly the pre-review a tool or a fresh set of eyes provides. See also our TI checklist and common plan review comments.
Common review comments
Egress/occupant-load errors (the largest life-safety bucket).
Accessibility gaps.
Incomplete sets / missing or inconsistent information.