Dallas, TX
Dallas plumbing permit cost
Like the other trades, plumbing in Dallas has no permit fee in the City's published schedule:
no fixture rate, no water heater rate, no per-connection rate, and no occurrence of the word "plumbing" in its ten pages. What the schedule does contain is a $25 document handling fee for a stand-alone trade review — which tells us a plumbing permit is handled as its own document — and the Minimum Inspection Fee Schedule that prices a trade inspection from the number of trades on the job. A plumbing permit's costs are those, not a fixture count.
How this fee is calculated
These are the components the schedule defines for this permit, as they applied on 2026-09-28. A component only applies to your project if its conditions match — read that column before assuming a figure. Want a figure for your own project? Estimate this fee with the permit fee calculator.
| Component | Formula | Applies when | Range |
|---|---|---|---|
| Minimum inspection feeInspection fee | $125.00 per trade | Each trade on the permit | max $1,125.00 |
| Technology permit feeTechnology fee | $15.00 flat fee | Every permit of this type | — |
A real permit fee is these components added together. The department’s final calculation is the one that applies — this is the schedule it will be based on.
A worked example
Follow the arithmetic by hand. Every line is produced by the engine from the rules above, so the total cannot drift away from the schedule behind it.
Worked example
A bathroom remodel that is inspected as two trades — plumbing and electrical — which is the case the trade-count schedule is written for.
| Input | Value |
|---|---|
| Occupancy class | Residential |
| Type of work | Remodel |
| Number of trades | 2 |
Example total
$265.00
An estimate, not an official fee. It is calculated from the published fee schedule as it applied on 2026-09-28. The permit office’s own calculation is the one that applies, and your project may fall under rules this schedule does not describe.
Fee schedule as of 2026-09-28Rules applied 2Rules considered 3
| Component | How it is calculated | Amount |
|---|---|---|
Technology permit feeTechnology feeS1 line item, restated unchanged by S3 Sec. 303.5.29 — $15 for each application, permit, plan or other construction document submitted through the land management system.Show the working
| $15.00 flat fee | $15.00 |
Minimum inspection feeInspection feeS1 Minimum Inspection Fee Schedule — $125 per trade for one to eight trades, $1,125 for nine or more. Charged on the permit alongside the table fee, as S2's worksheets show it.Show the working
| $125.00 per trade | $250.00 |
| Total | $265.00 |
Fees that do not apply here
Listed so you can see what was considered and left out, rather than wondering whether something is missing. A rule can also be left out because it is not published for this permit at all, and that is stated where it matters.
- Plan review fee — Rule status is "draft".
Assumptions
- Calculated from 2 fee rules in effect on 2026-09-28.
- Amounts are rounded to the nearest cent, once, at the end of each component.
Two trades are $250 in the City's Minimum Inspection Fee Schedule. The fixture count is deliberately absent: Dallas publishes no per-fixture rate, so entering one would produce a figure the schedule does not support. Whether a plumbing permit filed on its own attracts this minimum, rather than the job's permit carrying it once, is not stated in either official document; this page is marked for review until that is confirmed.
What is different in Dallas
The mechanism is the same one that applies to every trade in Dallas, and the reason it matters for plumbing is that a plumbing job is usually where trades accumulate. A bathroom remodel is plumbing plus electrical, which is two trades: $250. Add mechanical work and it is three: $375. The fee tracks how many trades the job is inspected for, not how many fixtures, water heaters or gas connections are installed — the schedule publishes no rate for any of those.
The two figures that do attach to the work are document and event fees: $25 for handling a stand-alone trade review, and $75 for a reinspection if the work fails and has to be inspected again. Altering or concealing work without a permit is $200 per trade.
What this figure does not include
Impact fees, utility connections and other departments’ permits are the usual omissions, and in some jurisdictions they are larger than the permit fee itself.
Not included in these figures
There is no plumbing permit fee to include, because Dallas does not publish one. What is calculated here is the inspection fee the schedule attaches to a permit's number of trades, plus the technology fee, which the City charges per document submitted.
Not included, and not estimable from the documents read:
- Whether a permit filed for plumbing alone carries the trade-count minimum, or whether the minimum is charged once on the construction permit covering the job. Neither the fee schedule nor the City's estimate worksheet states it, so it is recorded as an open question and this page is marked for review.
- Per-item charges of any kind. There are no fixture, water heater, gas connection, sewer or grease interceptor rates in the schedule.
- Document handling fees other than the $25 stand-alone trade review, including $25 for a minor commercial plan review and $100 per trade added or substituted.
- The $75 reinspection, the $125 per trade additional inspection service, $125 an hour with a $300 minimum after hours, and the $250 same-day inspection.
- Work without a permit investigation ($100 an hour per trade) and unauthorized concealment ($200 per trade).
- Backflow prevention tester registration, fire protection, health department and utility fees, which are separate line items in the same schedule.
What you need before applying
- Stand-alone trade reviewMay be required
The schedule prices a $25 document handling fee for a stand-alone trade review, which is how a trade permit filed on its own is handled. It is the closest thing the schedule has to a line item for a trade permit, and it is a document fee rather than a permit fee.
Common questions
How much is a Dallas plumbing permit?
The City's published fee schedule does not give plumbing a permit fee, so there is no published figure for one. What it does publish is a $25 document handling fee for a stand-alone trade review and a minimum inspection fee that is charged by the number of trades on the job: $125 for one trade, $250 for two, up to $1,125 at nine or more.
Are plumbing fixtures charged individually?
Not in Dallas. The schedule has no fixture, water heater, gas or sewer rate — searching its ten pages for plumbing, sewer and water heater returns nothing. Cities that publish per-fixture plumbing schedules, such as Houston, work the opposite way, which is why the two cannot be compared line by line.
Does a bathroom remodel cost more than a plumbing-only job?
If the remodel is inspected as plumbing plus electrical, it is more: the inspection fee is charged by trade count, so two trades are $250 against $125 for one. The schedule prices the number of trades, not the amount of pipe or the number of fixtures.
Does a plumbing permit need to be filed separately?
The schedule prices a $25 document handling fee for a stand-alone trade review, so a trade permit filed on its own is handled as its own document. Whether filing it that way changes the inspection fee is exactly the question the City's documents do not answer, and this page does not guess at it.
Source and verification
The documents behind every figure on this page, with the dates that make them checkable.
- OrdinanceCityPrimary source
Ordinance 25-0638, amending Chapter 52 Section 303
Effective 15 April 2025. Amends Table B-I (alterations or repairs), the technology permit fee (restated unchanged at $15), the Q-Team review caps, the mover's licence and non-premise sign fees, and REMOVES the postage and handling fee and the inspection scheduling fee that the May 2024 schedule still prints. Read from the scanned document's text layer; the table itself is legible enough to confirm that the row the schedule misprints as "$500,000,001 - 10,000,000" is "$5,000,001 - 10,000,000".
- Official calculatorCityPrimary source
PDV Fee Estimate Worksheet Examples
The department's own estimator, with five worked examples (new single-family dwelling, residential remodel, new commercial office building, commercial tenant finish-out, multi-family complex). Its arithmetic is what resolves the commercial table's upper brackets, which the printed schedule omits, and it is the source of the plan-review discrepancy: it computes $0.046 per sq ft where the schedule prints $0.46. Earliest capture 2025-10-16. Used arithmetically, never copied: the estimate on every page is computed by this site's engine from the published rates.
- Fee schedule (PDF)CityPrimary source
Ten pages, effective 1 May 2024, adopted by Ordinance 32676. Carries the City's own disclaimer: "the fees listed in this schedule are for informational purposes only and are subject to change. Final permit fees will be calculated at the time of submittal". Retrieved from the Internet Archive raw snapshot of 2025-11-29 (sha256 90cb9d4a7087803fd5034146611a968caa28dd8ce71d9e4fa7bcda99a492b117) because dallascityhall.com did not respond from this environment; text extracted with pdftotext -layout and -raw. A later capture can be compared against that hash.
Verification
Last verified against the official source in Sep 2026.