North Carolina
Durham, NC permit fees and requirements
Durham prices a new house by gross square footage — eight brackets from $146.00 to $810.00 — and commercial work by construction contract value in five bands carrying a per-thousand increment, with plan review published as a second column beside every row. The trades are priced by the count of the thing permitted: outlets and fixtures as $21.00 for the first ten and $0.83 each after that, house service by ampacity, plumbing by scope and fixture count. The technology surcharge is already inside every amount, because the schedule says so on its own face.
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 Durham permit fee with our Building Permit Fee Calculator.
| Permit | Category | Last reviewed |
|---|---|---|
| Durham building permit cost | structural | 2026-09-25 |
| Durham electrical permit cost | electrical | 2026-09-25 |
| Durham plumbing permit cost | plumbing | 2026-09-25 |
Local context
What is specific to Durham
One department covers all of it. The City-County Building & Safety Department issues permits, plans reviews and inspections for the City *and* the County of Durham under one set of schedules — so unlike Wake County beside Raleigh, there is no second authority whose fees a reader might be about to pay instead. Its own page states the scope in a single sentence, and the address and telephone number on this page are the ones printed there.
The four schedules are dated on their faces: `(Effective 7/1/18--Includes Technology Surcharge)`. That header is the source of two facts this page relies on. It gives the effective date without any inference from a previous version, and it says the technology surcharge has already been folded into each amount — which is the exact counterpart of Raleigh, 12 miles away, where a 4% technology surcharge is printed as its own row and charged last against the fees. A reader comparing the two cities will otherwise assume one of the numbers is missing the surcharge, and neither is.
Durham is also the counterexample to Raleigh on the fee itself. Raleigh takes a percentage of a valuation the City calculates for you, from the national Building Valuation Data adjusted 12.4% down; Durham asks for the gross area of the house or the construction contract, and the schedule says in terms that nonresidential cost is the contract "unless a reason is identified to base cost on other information". Neither is a rounding of the other: the same project priced both ways comes out as different numbers from different documents, which is why the pages here never carry a figure across from Raleigh's.
Valuation
How valuation is determined here
Valuation is only one of three bases Durham uses, and not the one a new house is priced from. A new one- or two-family dwelling is priced from gross square footage in eight flat brackets, so a bigger house steps to the next bracket rather than growing with its value. Multi-family is priced per dwelling unit. Renovations, additions and nonresidential construction are priced from construction contract value, in bands that add a per-thousand increment over a threshold — $7.80 over $5,000, then $6.60 over $50,000, $4.32 over $100,000 and $1.25 over $500,000. Nothing in these schedules publishes a valuation table for the City to derive a figure from, so the pages take the area, the contract and the counts the applicant supplies and say which one each figure came from.
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 pages price Schedules A to F of the building schedule, the priced rows of the electrical and plumbing schedules, the plan review column and the paper-application surcharge. They exclude:
- The technology surcharge as a separate line, because the schedules say it is already included in the published amounts. There is no surcharge rule in this payload, and adding one would charge it twice.
- Electrical Schedule D — motors and generators: a $18.00 minimum charge, $3.22 per motor, and $0.62 per horsepower applied against total horsepower. Three lines with two variables, and the schedule never says whether the minimum includes the first motor or replaces it; the page names all three amounts instead.
- The rest of the electrical device rows — disposals, dryers and dishwashers, electric heat, unit heaters, furnaces and "all other devices … each $10.90" — priced per item, with each amount named.
- Feeders and transformers: priced by the ampacity of the feeder, which is a second amperage figure the schedule does not ask this calculator for.
- Re-reviews, re-inspections and after-hours work: 2nd re-review $200.00, each after $300.00; re-inspections $100.00, $200.00 and $300.00 by count; after-hours inspection $125.00 per hour with a two-hour minimum; Enhanced Plan Review $600.00 per hour. Every one of these is a fee for a second encounter with the Department, not for the permit.
- The building schedule's administrative rows: work begun without a permit (double fee), voiding a permit (15% of permit cost), duplicate placard $5.00, change of address/PIN/PID $10.00 per trade, re-stamping plans $20.00 per plan, partial occupancy $200.00, stocking permit $100.00, floodplain permits $150.00 and $500.00, change of impervious surface $250.00, and Schedules G, H and I in full.
- The mechanical permit, published as a fourth schedule and not priced: no page of this site prices mechanical work in any jurisdiction.
- The $50.00 trip charge for water or sewer work needing more than two inspector trips, and the City Impact Fee Ordinance, which the Fee Schedules page publishes as a separate document.
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.
- City websiteCityPrimary source
City of Durham — Fee Schedules
Read 2026-09-25. The page that publishes the four permit schedules above and nothing else besides the City Impact Fee Ordinance — which is why the four PDFs can be called the City's current schedules: they are the ones this index links on the day the research was done.
- Fee schedule (PDF)CityPrimary source
Durham City-County Building & Safety Department — Building Permit Fee Schedule
Read 2026-09-25, 1,127,925 bytes, sha256 beginning `84dc8a02035d810f`, linked from the City's Fee Schedules page. Five pages, Schedules A through I. Its own header states `(Effective 7/1/18--Includes Technology Surcharge)`, which is where both the effective date and the absence of a separate surcharge rule come from. Extracted with `pdftotext -raw` and re-read with `-layout`, because Schedule C and Schedule D print their plan review column out of line with the permit column and only the layout pass shows which amount belongs to which.
- Fee schedule (PDF)CityPrimary source
Durham City-County Building & Safety Department — Electrical Permit Fee Schedule
Read 2026-09-25, 1,084,801 bytes, sha256 beginning `10763b17d1426cc4`. Four pages, Schedules A to H, plus the paper-application surcharge notice that heads every trade schedule. The three floors — $65.00 minimum permit, $100.00 residential and $150.00 commercial for a permit requiring a rough-in inspection — are all on this document, and they are stated per permit rather than per row.
- Fee schedule (PDF)CityPrimary source
Durham City-County Building & Safety Department — Mechanical Permit Fee Schedule
Read 2026-09-25, 1,060,244 bytes, sha256 beginning `cc11b8ca62d5f703`. Published beside the other three and cited here for completeness. No page of this site prices a mechanical permit in any jurisdiction, so this source is named on Durham's pages as the schedule that exists and is not computed, rather than left out as though it did not exist.
- Fee schedule (PDF)CityPrimary source
Durham City-County Building & Safety Department — Plumbing Permit Fee Schedule
Read 2026-09-25, 1,060,919 bytes, sha256 beginning `fc4f685508fa5b60`. Three pages, Schedules A to G plus two notes. Note 1 is about inspector trips, not fees; the second note defines the schedule's own three Type Application options — New Construction, Addition, Replacement — which is the vocabulary the plumbing page asks a reader to choose from.