Original data
What it costs to permit foundation work in 118 US cities
Permit fees are public, but they live in 105 separate municipal documents, and the housing-cost research that needs them still estimates permitting costs from builder surveys instead. So we read the published fee schedule for 118 cities across 22 states, one at a time, and had a second pass try to disprove each one before it went in. Here is what we found, with a link to the source for every city.
Only 11 of 118 cities charge a flat fee to permit foundation work.
In 103 of them (87%), the permit fee is priced off your project: its declared value, a cost bracket, or its square footage. The bigger the repair, the bigger the permit bill, before a single contractor has quoted you. And 2 cities publish no fee schedule at all.
Planning a repair?The permit is rarely the small flat fee people assume. In most cities it scales with the job, so a larger foundation or waterproofing project carries a larger permit fee on top of the contractor's price. Find your city in the table below before you set a budget.
Writing about permitting? This is the fee actually on the books in 118cities, each traced to the jurisdiction's own schedule, where the usual sources give you a national average from a builder survey and leave the local number to "call your building department."
How cities price a permit
| Basis | What it means | Cities | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| Project valuation | A rate applied to your declared project value, so the fee grows with the job. | 53 | 45% |
| Tiered by cost | A bracket table keyed to project cost. | 47 | 40% |
| Flat fee | A fixed amount for the work type, whatever the job costs. | 11 | 9% |
| Per square foot | Priced on the square footage involved. | 3 | 3% |
| Mixed | More than one rule applies, with no single dominant basis. | 2 | 2% |
| Not published | The authority is real and confirmed, but publishes no fee schedule. | 2 | 2% |
The cities that publish nothing
These have a real, confirmed permit authority, but no public fee schedule. The fee is set by council resolution or quoted at the counter, so a homeowner cannot find out what a permit costs before applying.
- Waterloo, IA · Building Inspections Department
- Worcester, MA · Inspectional Services Department, Building and Zoning Division
Methodology
Each city was researched against its own published fee schedule, then independently re-checked by a second pass whose job was to disprove the first. A city only appears here if that second pass could read the primary source and confirm both the department name and the fee rule.
Cities were dropped rather than guessed. Where a fee schedule sat behind a host that blocks automated access, or where figures could not be traced to the city's own document, the city was excluded. Third-party permit sites and cost aggregators were never used as a source. Archived copies were rejected too, because a snapshot cannot establish what is in force today.
Fee schedules are reissued, so every row carries the date it was checked. These are the rules as published, not quotes: your actual fee depends on your declared project value and scope. This report covers 118 cities in 22 states and 105 distinct permit authorities. It does not claim to be a national sample.
We are not the only people collecting this. Several sites publish municipal permit fees at wider coverage than 118 cities. What we have not found is one that says who compiled it, how, or what it excluded, which is the part that lets you decide whether to trust a number. That is why the method is on this page and every row links to the document it came from. Check us against the source, not against our word.
Free to cite or reproduce with a link to this page.
Every city, with its source
118 cities, 22 states. Each links to the authority and the fee schedule it was read from.
Using this data
Every figure links to the document it came from and the method is set out above, so it stands on its own. Cite this page. Per-market cuts and the underlying records are available on request.
Per-city detail, including what each city's schedule actually says, is on the city pages linked in the table above. Start at all locations.