How we source, check and calculate permit fees

What counts as a source

A published fact has exactly one primary source, and it has to be the authority that sets the fee. In practice that means one of these:

• The permit department’s own fee schedule, whether a web page or a PDF.
• The municipal or county code, including the ordinance that adopts it — often more authoritative than a summary page, and usually where the details live.
• A state agency schedule, where the state sets the fee or a surcharge.
• The jurisdiction’s own permit portal or calculator, when it itemises fees for a real application.

Third-party fee tables, contractor blogs and aggregator sites are not sources. We may use them to work out which cities are worth researching, but a number never reaches a page because another website said so.

Verification, and why every page carries a date

Each figure records who checked it, how, and when. “How” matters: reading the published PDF is a different quality of evidence from a phone call, and both are recorded as what they are. When a schedule and a staff answer disagree, both are kept and the disagreement is shown rather than quietly resolved in our favour.

Schedules are re-checked at least quarterly, and always around the start of a fiscal year, because that is when many jurisdictions reset their fees. When a page passes its review window it says so instead of pretending the number is current. When a schedule is replaced, the old rule is closed and a new one added — we never overwrite a fee and lose the record of what it used to be.

How a fee is actually calculated

Published schedules use a small number of patterns, and we model those patterns directly rather than importing anyone else’s estimate. Every component of a fee is one of these:

• Flat — a fixed amount, for example a $150 base permit fee.
• Percentage — a rate applied to project valuation or floor area.
• Marginal bands — a base amount plus different rates for different portions, the way income tax works.
• Bracket table — a fixed amount for any project falling in a valuation range.
• Per unit — a rate applied to dwelling units, fixtures, circuits or similar countable things.

A real permit fee is a set of these added together: the base permit fee, plus plan review, plus a technology charge, plus any state surcharge. Each one keeps its own conditions — residential or commercial, above or below a valuation threshold, new construction or alteration — and its own minimum or maximum.

That is why every result shows its working. If a component does not apply to your project, you see it listed as excluded with the reason, rather than absent and unexplained. The same engine powers the permit fee calculator, where you can enter your own project's numbers and watch the schedule produce an estimate from them.

Money and rounding

Amounts are calculated in whole cents using integer arithmetic, not floating point, and rounded once at the end of each component. Rates are stored exactly, as hundredths of a percent. Where a schedule says “per $1,000 or fraction thereof”, that rounding is applied as written, because it changes the answer.

The consequence is that our result should reconcile to the cent with the schedule for the inputs we were given. If it does not, that is a bug and we want to hear about it. Adjacent brackets are tested on both sides of every boundary for exactly this reason.

What we do not include

These come up often enough to name explicitly. Unless a page says otherwise, our estimate excludes:

• School, park and transportation impact fees levied per new dwelling.
• Utility and water connections, and sewer capacity charges.
• Fire, health or environmental permits issued by a different department.
• Fees that apply after review starts: revisions, re-inspections, extensions and expirations.
• Expedited or priority review surcharges.
• Professional costs — architects, engineers, and the time spent getting a plan through review.

These are not small. In some jurisdictions the impact fees on a new house exceed the permit fee several times over. Omitting them from the arithmetic is correct; omitting them from the page would not be, which is why every estimate lists what is missing.

What we deliberately do not do

• No estimates without a source. If a jurisdiction publishes nothing, the page says that.
• No borrowing rules between cities. Two Texas cities can price the same permit in completely different ways.
• No machine-generated numbers. Every calculation is a rule we read in a document and recorded. Nothing is inferred, approximated or extrapolated, because a permit fee is a deterministic published figure and treating it as a prediction would be a different and much worse product.
• No pages without something to say. A city page exists when we have the schedule and something true to say about it.

Keeping this honest

Nothing here is a substitute for the permit office’s own answer. Our estimate is arithmetic on a schedule; the invoice is the authority. Every page links to the document we used so you can check us, and every page tells you when we last did.

If you find a figure that has changed, or one that does not match what the department told you, send us the correction with the document you are looking at. Corrections are recorded against the source, not edited in silently.