New York
Buffalo, NY permit fees and requirements
Buffalo prices construction on two building sheets split by construction class — detached 1- and 2-family dwellings on one
everything else on the other — plus a trade schedule for electrical work that is either a flat fee or a price on square footage times an occupancy multiplier, and a plumbing price list where no valuation is a fee basis at all. A residential alteration is $5 for each $1,000 of cost above a $50 floor; a commercial one is $8 per $1,000 of mean construction cost rounded up to the next whole thousand, with plan review at $0.75 alongside it.
Permit costs we have worked out
Each page shows the fee components, the formula the jurisdiction uses, and a worked example you can follow by hand.
Estimate your potential Buffalo permit fee with our Building Permit Fee Calculator.
| Permit | Category | Last reviewed |
|---|---|---|
| Buffalo building permit cost | structural | 2026-09-25 |
| Buffalo electrical permit cost | electrical | 2026-09-25 |
| Buffalo plumbing permit cost | plumbing | 2026-09-25 |
Local context
What is specific to Buffalo
One department, three separate books. The Department of Permit & Inspection Services sits in City Hall and keeps each trade in its own division, and the fee documents say so twice over: the commercial sheet's header reads "Heating, Electrical, and Plumbing (M/E/P) permits and fees are separate", and the fee-schedule hub says from the other side that building permit fees do not include plumbing, electrical or heating work. The three pages on this site therefore price three permits that an applicant adds together, exactly as each sheet's own total adds its own lines.
The construction class is the switch that decides which building sheet answers — a fact rather than a guess, because the two sheets are different schedules rather than one schedule with a column split. The residential sheet has no valuation table at all: it bands new dwellings by floor area ($500 to $900 for a one-family, $1,000 for a two-family, $500 per townhouse unit) and prices alterations by cost at $5 per $1,000. The commercial sheet has no area bands: it takes a mean construction cost and charges $8 per $1,000 with $100 minimum, beside $0.75 per $1,000 of plan review with $75 minimum — and both of those rows round the cost up to a whole $1,000, because both print "or portion thereof" in the sheet's own words and in both of its worked examples.
Two documents in this research disagree and the disagreement is kept: the fee-schedule hub still prints "The fee changes are effective from July 29, 2014" while the PDFs it links are stamped EFFECTIVE 7/1/2025. The dated instruments win, and the stale sentence is recorded rather than deleted, because a reader who lands on the hub first deserves to know why the two do not match. The City Code itself could not be read from this environment — ecode360, which the City's own pages link for Chapters 103 and 175, answers 403 — so every figure comes from the Department's own sheets, which is what an applicant pays against anyway.
Valuation
How valuation is determined here
Three different bases, because the three schedules measure three different things — and one price list that measures none.
Commercial construction: mean construction cost. The sheet's method is printed as a formula: R × S × W = C, where R is the ICC table's rate for the use and construction type, S the City's scope-of-work factor (1 for a new building or addition, .7 for an addition or alteration to an existing building, .3 for interior build-out alone, and the others the sheet lists), and W the work area. The resulting cost C is what $0.75 and $8 per $1,000 are charged on, in whole thousands. For repairs and work on elements that are not part of the building the sheet says to use the contract amount instead — the same basis, a different number. This site takes the cost as an input; the area-times-rate derivation is the applicant's lookup.
Residential construction: the cost of the work, but only for additions, alterations and repairs — $5 per $1,000 with a $50 minimum, prorated, because that row never prints the round-up phrase. New residential dwellings are priced on floor area instead, in flat bands, and no cost figure moves them.
Electrical: square footage times an occupancy multiplier. In the area regime each charge is a rate per square foot multiplied by Schedule B's row for the occupancy — $0.0025 × SF × 1.5 for plan review in an assembly building, $0.0275 × SF × 1.28 for permit and inspection in an R-2 — each floored at $50. In the flat regime there is no basis at all: the job's kind decides the row.
Plumbing: no valuation is read anywhere. The page says why: the declared valuation "is used for record-keeping purposes and does not replace the required permit fees". Fixtures and linear feet are the only quantities the plumbing fees are made of.
Who to contact
The office that issues the permit, with the details we have verified. Confirm current hours before travelling.
What these fees do not include
The list is not a disclaimer: on a new house the fees left out can outweigh the permit fee several times over. Every entry here is stated on the permit page as well.
Not included in our estimates
These figures are Buffalo's own building, electrical and plumbing permit fees. They are not a project cost, and they exclude:
- Certificates. The commercial sheet prices a Conditional Certificate at $200, a residential certificate at $50, and commercial certificates at $300, $600 and $900 by floor-area band. They are charged for a certificate rather than for a permit, quoted on the page and not computed here.
- The ICC area-times-rate derivation. The commercial per-thousand charges compute from the mean construction cost you supply; producing that cost from an occupancy, a construction type, a scope factor and a work area is the applicant's own calculation against the table, and this site does not run it.
- Mixed-use apportionment on electrical permits. Schedule A's instructions total each use separately and multiply each by its own Schedule B row, common areas at their floor's principal use. One occupancy and one area are collected here, so a mixed-use building's per-use totals are the applicant's to add.
- Heating and mechanical permits. The Department's pages kept no separate heating fee sheet on this pass — the commercial header names heating among the separate trades, and no sheet for it was found. Its fees are not in any total on this site.
- The ePermits convenience fee. Online filing through ePermits notes a convenience fee on card payments; it is the payment channel's charge rather than a fee on any sheet transcribed here.
- License fees, rental registration and returned-check charges. None of them is permitting, and none is charged.
- The stale date on the hub. The fee-schedule page's "effective July 29, 2014" sentence contradicts the PDFs it links; the sheets' EFFECTIVE 7/1/2025 stamps are the dates used, and the disagreement is recorded rather than smoothed over.
Official sources for this jurisdiction
The documents these figures are transcribed from. Where a source contradicts itself we keep both readings and say so on the permit page.
- Fee schedule (PDF)CityPrimary source
Read 2026-09-25 as the Department's own four-page PDF, every page printed "EFFECTIVE 7/1/2025". Page 1 is the fee schedule: $50 application, $0.75 per $1,000 plan review "or portion thereof" with a $75 minimum, $8 per $1,000 permit with a $100 minimum, twelve flat fees, the demolition rows including the $1,500 no-permit penalty, the certificate prices and the use permit. Page 2 is the ICC Building Valuation Data Table (February 2023) with the City's own scope-of-work factors; pages 3 and 4 are two worked examples — $32,792.50 on a $3,741,600 new building and $8,377.50 on a $945,496 alteration — both of which this jurisdiction's tests reproduce cent for cent. The sheet opens with the Charter's exemption clause and keeps the trades out: "Heating, Electrical, and Plumbing (M/E/P) permits and fees are separate."
- Fee schedule (PDF)CityPrimary source
City of Buffalo — Building Permit Fee Schedule, Residential: Detached 1- & 2-Family Dwellings
Read 2026-09-25 as the Department's own one-page PDF, printed "EFFECTIVE 7/1/2025" at the foot of the sheet. Transcribed in full: the $25 application fee, the 20% plan review with its $25 minimum and its note that it includes M/E/P review fees, the four one-family area bands with the $1,000 two-family and $500-per-unit townhouse rows, the $5-per-$1,000 cost row with its $50 minimum, the eight flat fees, the two demolition rows and the three use permits, and the sheet's own total line. The extraction needed the PDF's content-stream coordinates: a stray "65" sits mid-page in a different font, away from every value column, and is a layout artifact of the header block rather than a fee — all real values sit at one x-coordinate, and the application fee row reads $25.
- City websiteCity
City of Buffalo — Department of Permit & Inspection Services, division pages
Read 2026-09-25, together with the Permits page (/719/Permits) and the Electrical division page (/499/Electrical). The division pages are where the trade split is operated — each trade has its own division, contact and process — and where online filing is offered through ePermits, whose page notes a convenience fee for card payments. The department contact facts on this site (address, main line, plumbing room) come from these pages and from the fee sheets' own letterheads.
- Fee schedule (PDF)CityPrimary source
Read 2026-09-25. The URL is served as a Word file rather than a PDF — its type was checked with `file` rather than assumed — and was unzipped and read from its document XML; the file's metadata dates it 2017-05-31, and the schedule itself prints no date. Both regimes are transcribed from it: the flat schedule's "APPLICATION FEE of $50 PLUS one of the following" with its five rows and its $5-per-termination low-voltage plus, and Schedule A's three area charges (application $50; plan review $50 or $0.0025 × SF × multiplier; permit and inspection $50 or $0.0275 × SF × multiplier; plus $25 a meter and $3.00 a solar panel) with Schedule B's occupancy multipliers — including its three blank rows, I-2, I-3 and I-4, which print no multiplier and are modelled by no rate.
- City websiteCity
City of Buffalo — Fee Schedule hub page
Read 2026-09-25 as the index that links the sheets. The hub carries a stale sentence — "The fee changes are effective from July 29, 2014" — while both building PDFs it links are printed EFFECTIVE 7/1/2025. The PDFs are the dated instruments and they win; the disagreement is recorded rather than resolved in favour of the newer-looking page copy. The page also states the split this jurisdiction is built on: "Building Permit fees … does not include plumbing, electrical, or heating work."
- City websiteCityPrimary source
City of Buffalo — Plumbing Permit Fee Schedule
Read 2026-09-25 as the Department's own plain-text page, which says of itself that it "provides a plain-text summary of the Plumbing Permit fees". Every figure on the plumbing page comes from it: the $50 application, the $100 plan review when plans are required, the $12 residential fixture and the $50-first/$20-additional commercial fixture rows with the page's own fixture list, the underground piping lines ($60 for the first 100 feet, then $20 or $55 per additional 100 by pipe size), the $75 reinspection, the note that the declared valuation "is used for record-keeping purposes and does not replace the required permit fees", the requirement that applications be signed by a Licensed Master Plumber, and the page's own total. The page carries no effective date; it is read as current because the Department publishes it as its live fee page.
- Fee schedule (PDF)City
ICC Building Valuation Data, February 2023 — the mean-cost table the commercial sheet points to
Read 2026-09-25: the mean construction rate table the commercial sheet instructs applicants to use — rate by use/occupancy and construction type, times the City's own scope-of-work factor, times the work area, equals the mean construction cost that the $0.75 and $8 per-$1,000 charges are computed from. The City republishes the ICC's February 2023 table on its own document centre. This jurisdiction takes the resulting cost as an input; the area-times-rate derivation itself is a 300-cell lookup this engine does not model as one rule, and the pages say so (reading c).