How We Collect and Verify Permit Fees

Sources

Every fee comes from the jurisdiction’s own fee schedule: the city or county website, an adopted fee ordinance, or the municipal code on an official code host. We never use third-party fee sites, blogs, estimates or averages.

Evidence for every number

For each fee we store a short verbatim quote from the source and the source link (with the page number for PDFs). A fee we cannot quote is not recorded.

Formulas, not just numbers

We capture the structure the permit office uses: valuation bands, per-$1,000 or per-square-foot rates, minimum fees, plan review percentages, mandatory add-on fees and state surcharges, and how project value is determined (your contract price, the ICC Building Valuation Data table, or a local table). The calculator runs that formula and shows each step.

What is and is not in the total

The total includes the building permit fee and every fee the schedule applies to that kind of project. Fees that only apply in some situations (for example a drainage permit or an energy-code review) are listed separately as “may also apply” and are not added to the total. Electrical, plumbing and mechanical permits are separate unless the page says otherwise. Impact fees, utility connection fees, school fees and special-district (for example fire district) fees are included only when the jurisdiction’s own schedule charges them with the building permit; otherwise check with the utility or district.

Dates

Each page shows the effective date stated in the schedule and the date we last verified it against the source. If a schedule states no effective date, the page says so.

What gets published

A page is published only when the extraction is complete, the source is official, the building-permit formula is captured, and nothing in the schedule is ambiguous enough that a shown fee could be wrong. Everything else stays unpublished until it is resolved.

Checking our work

After each batch, a random 10% of jurisdictions are re-checked value by value against the source by an independent reviewer, and any mismatch is fixed before publishing.

Fees are estimates based on the official schedule linked on each page. Confirm with the permit office before applying.