How often does the Boston ZBA deny appeals — and is a denial final?
Boston ZBA denials have collapsed: from a 2020–21 peak near one denial in five decided appeals, the denial rate fell to 2.6–3.6% in 2025 (decision-document corpus vs the City's tracker) — and a denial is rarely the end: about one in three denied parcels returns to the Board, and 84% of those return appeals are approved.
Across 9,954 decided Boston ZBA appeals with dates spanning 2013–2026, 1,231 — 12.4% — were denied. That all-time average hides the real story: the Board's denial rate has fallen steeply since 2021 and is now at the lowest level in the record.
Denial rate by decision year (share of decided appeals, decision-document corpus): 2014 15.7% · 2015 18.6% · 2016 15.1% · 2017 11.9% · 2018 8.3% · 2019 11.7% · 2020 20.7% · 2021 15.7% · 2022 13.6% · 2023 7.8% · 2024 6.7% · 2025 2.6% · 2026 2.1% (partial year, through July). An independent read of the City tracker's outcome codes on unique appeals shows the same shape — a 2020–21 peak of 16.7% and 19.7% falling to 3.6% in 2025 — so the collapse is not an artifact of either measurement. Recent-year figures may revise modestly as pending appeals resolve.
Increasingly, the 'no' that remains is a 'not yet'. The tracker separates outright denials from denials without prejudice, which let the applicant return sooner with a revised proposal. All-time, 61.8% of tracker-recorded denials are without prejudice; in 2023 through 2025 that share ran between 74% and 81% (2023: 80.7% of 57 denials; 2024: 74.2% of 66; 2025: 81.0% of 21).
A denial also does not poison the parcel. Of 875 denied cases carrying both a parcel join and a decision date, 300 — 34.3% — saw the same parcel return with a later decided appeal, a median of 438 days (about 14 months) after the denial. 84.0% of those return appeals were approved — essentially the 87.6% citywide base rate, meaning a prior denial on a parcel barely dents its future odds. Denials the decision documents mark 'without prejudice' return more often (42.4%) and succeed more often when they do (89.6% of returns).
Denials concentrate geographically. Toughest wards, all years: Ward 7 at 19.1% denied (of 607 decided), Ward 17 at 15.8%, Ward 18 at 15.3%, Ward 21 at 15.1%, Ward 6 at 14.5%. Most permissive: Ward 4 at 4.7% (of 322), Ward 5 at 7.0%, Ward 20 at 7.8% — roughly a fourfold spread across the city. By neighborhood (150+ decided cases): the North End (18.8%), South Boston (17.3%), Roxbury (15.1%) and Dorchester (14.6%) sit at the top; the South End (4.5%), West Roxbury (6.9%) and Charlestown (8.0%) at the bottom.
What gets denied differs by relief type. Among common relief requests, parking relief is denied most — 16.1% of 3,510 decided cases that sought it — followed by lot-area relief (15.9%), open-space relief (14.5%) and rear-setback relief (14.2%). Height relief is denied in 12.7% of cases; density relief least, at 9.1%. Conditional-use and FAR relief track just under the citywide average.
Two process signals stand out. Appeals the tracker records as deferred at least once were denied 25.2% of the time versus 11.6% for appeals never deferred. And cases where the decision text names an attorney were denied 5.8% of the time versus 13.6% without — an observed association, not a causal estimate: represented cases differ in kind, and the text-mined flag undercounts representation. These are probabilities, not verdicts.
Every slice behind these numbers is browsable in Verdwise's decision search, which links each case to its decision document and live City status: all denied cases at verdwise.com/research?outcome=denied — Ward 7 denials at verdwise.com/research?outcome=denied&ward=7 — parking denials at verdwise.com/research?relief=parking&outcome=denied.
Methodology and data: the source is the City of Boston's public ZBA record — OCR'd decision documents plus the Analyze Boston ZBA tracker, refreshed weekly. Raw export rows are deduplicated to 11,563 unique appeals (dash/no-dash twin case numbers merged on an alphanumeric key; contradictory parses arbitrated against tracker outcome codes), of which 9,954 carry a clean Approved/Denied outcome. Decision dates cover 2013–2026, with data through July 2026. The refile analysis covers the 7,541 decided cases with a parcel join and is parcel-level — a returning appeal on the same parcel is not always the same owner or project. Yearly rates use decision-document dates; the cross-check uses tracker final-decision dates on unique appeals; the two differ modestly on single years but agree on every trend stated here. All figures come from a reproducible analysis script over this public corpus.
Cite this: data from Verdwise (verdwise.com), Boston ZBA decision corpus, 2013–2026, retrieved July 2026. Reuse with attribution is welcome.