What this site is

The problem

Ask what a building permit costs and the honest answer is “it depends on your city, what you are building, and what it is worth”. The city knows. The city publishes a fee schedule. What almost never exists is an explanation that connects the two — what the number will be for a specific project, why it is that number, and where it came from.

Most of what ranks for that question is a range someone guessed, repeated across hundreds of pages with the city name swapped. That is not useful when you are deciding whether a project is viable, and it is not honest about how much the answer varies.

What we do instead

We read the official document, record what it says as structured rules, and calculate from those rules. Every result shows its arithmetic, every claim links to its source, and every page carries the date we last checked it. Where a jurisdiction publishes nothing, we say that rather than filling the gap with an approximation.

The methodology sets out the whole process, including what our estimates leave out.

What this site is not

• Not an official government service. We are an independent reference. No city, county or state agency operates, endorses or reviews this site.
• Not a quote. A calculated estimate is arithmetic applied to a published schedule. The permit office’s own calculation is the one that applies, and it wins every disagreement.
• Not legal, engineering or design advice. We can tell you what a fee schedule says. We cannot tell you whether your project complies, or what to submit.
• Not a lead-generation service. We do not sell your enquiry to contractors, and we do not take payment to rank a jurisdiction favourably.

How the content is produced

Pages are written and reviewed by a person against the record for that jurisdiction. Fee rules are entered as data, validated, and tested against the official document before a page is published. A page is only opened to search engines once it has the source, the verification date and something genuinely specific to say; until then it does not exist.

Calculations are deterministic. The same inputs and the same recorded rule set always produce the same result, and that result is reproducible by hand from the working shown on the page. There is no model, no prediction and no inference anywhere in the path from document to number.

Who maintains this site

PermitFees is maintained by an independent operator, publishing from the project’s own research record rather than on behalf of any agency or firm. Every page names what was read, when it was read, and which office publishes it, so you can check any figure against the authority that charges it — you never have to take ours on faith. More about the person behind the project on the About the author page.

The maintenance standard is the one the methodology describes: a figure is published only with a primary source and a verification date; schedules are re-checked at least quarterly and around fiscal-year starts; and anything the record does not show is left out rather than filled in. This site does not claim engineering, legal or code-official credentials, and nothing here substitutes for the permit office’s own calculation.

Corrections

Fee schedules change, sometimes mid-year and sometimes without a notice we would catch immediately. If you find a figure that no longer matches the document it cites — or a rule we have read wrongly — please tell us. Say which page and, if you have it, which document you are looking at. Corrections are recorded against the source so the history shows what changed and when.