Which Cities Changed Their Permit Fees in 2026? 30 Cities Compared

Short answer: most big cities repriced permits this year, but almost none say by how much. Of the 30 largest U.S. cities we cover, 18 have a residential fee schedule, ordinance or fee table that took effect between December 21, 2025 and October 1, 2026. Only four of those publish the direction of the change on the documents our pages cite: Seattle raised construction permit fees 18 percent, Sacramento raised its technology surcharge from 8 to 10 percent and added a $132 Planning intake fee, Portland's 2026 schedules are higher than the city's own published sample, and San Jose added a $211 processing line to counter-filed permits. Chicago is the one city with a documented cut, halving its fence fee. Ten cities are charging a schedule dated 2025 or earlier, and two (Long Beach and Albuquerque) adopted a change the city had not posted when their pages were written. We read each city's fee schedule, the ordinance or resolution behind it and the permit pages that apply it, and recorded the schedule in force, its effective date, what the city says changed and the surcharges stacked on every permit.

Every row links to the city page that quotes the rule, so you can read the source language yourself. The table sorts by any column.

What the comparison shows

Eighteen cities repriced permits for 2026, in two waves

Six schedules took effect around the new year: New York's amended Administrative Code fee table on December 21, 2025 (Local Law 128 of 2024), Pittsburgh's PLI schedule and Seattle's Fee Subtitle on January 1, Indianapolis's switch from valuation to flat fees on January 5, Phoenix's Appendix A.2 on January 20 and Miami's Ordinance 14439 on January 22; Chicago's 2026 Revenue Ordinance was adopted December 19, 2025, Houston's 2026 schedule is in force and Milwaukee's DNS schedule is dated March 6, 2026. A second wave came with the fiscal year: Charlotte's County fee ordinance, Cincinnati's FY2027 schedule, Tucson's FY27 schedule and San Jose's FY2026-27 resolution on July 1, then San Francisco's DBI tables and Sacramento's CDD-0245 on July 12. The fall brought San Antonio's FY 2027 revision in September and, on October 1, Fort Worth's Fee Ordinance 26-28781, Long Beach's new Master Fee and Charges Schedule and Philadelphia's PG_012 Rev 7.2026, which changed nothing but the reinstatement fee.

Only five cities say which way the number moved

Portland, Sacramento, San Jose, Seattle publish an increase in the documents our pages cite. Seattle's is the clearest: SDCI raised construction permit fees 18 percent on January 1, 2026, and its own 500 sq ft DADU example is $3,453, up 18.7 percent from 2025. Sacramento raised the technology surcharge on every valuation permit from 8 to 10 percent of permit plus plan review on July 12, 2026 and added a $132 Planning intake fee, while leaving its flat Table B.1 lines where they were in July 2025. Portland's 2026 schedules are higher than the ADU sample the city still publishes. San Jose's FY2026-27 resolution added a $211 permit processing line to fence, reroof, kitchen, bath and fixture permits filed at the counter. The one documented decrease is Chicago, where the 2026 Revenue Ordinance cut the fee for a non-masonry fence up to 6 feet from $150 to $75, though the same ordinance set a $602 minimum on every plan-based permit and indexed the stand-alone table to CPI from 2027. The other 13 new schedules state the new rates and nothing about the old ones.

Ten cities are charging a schedule older than 2026

Baltimore, Dallas, Jacksonville, Kansas City, Los Angeles, Louisville, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, San Diego, St. Louis have no 2026 change on record. Some are recent: Dallas's schedule took effect July 1, 2025 and Philadelphia's October 2026 summary repeats the rows in force since January 2025. Some are not: Louisville's LMCO 150.096 was last revised February 6, 2024, Baltimore's fees sit inside the 2024 code itself, and Kansas City's valuation table matches the fee-estimator script the city published in 2016. Four of the ten (Los Angeles, San Diego, Jacksonville, Minneapolis) and St. Louis publish fee tables with no date at all, so a reader cannot tell when they last moved.

The add-ons are where the bill grows

Twenty-two of the 30 cities add a fixed fee or a percentage to every permit, four more add one only to certain permits (Chicago's online review fee and plan deposit, Phoenix's pool surcharge, San Diego's plan-review fee, San Jose's counter processing line), and the headline fee rarely includes any of it. The percentage stacks: Cincinnati's five surcharges add about $11 per $100 (3% technology, 1% training, 1% financial recovery, 5% planning, 1% state); Portland adds Oregon's 12 percent state surcharge; Sacramento adds 10 percent technology plus four valuation-based fees; San Antonio two 4 percent surcharges; Seattle 5 percent plus $6.50; Baltimore a 5 percent permit tax; Milwaukee 1.6 percent; Florida's two cities 1 percent plus 1.5 percent; Miami a solid-waste surcharge of $0.22 per $100 on top. The flat stacks: Fort Worth $33.08 + $16.87 on every permit, Houston $33.56 plus 25 percent plan review, Dallas $125 per trade inspected plus $15, Cincinnati $49, Long Beach $115 processing, Miami $40 application, Baltimore $25, St. Louis $25, Pittsburgh $4.50 + $5 + $2, Philadelphia $3 + $4.50, San Diego's $737 General Plan Maintenance Fee on anything plan-reviewed. Four cities list no add-on at all on the permits we track: New York (the PE or RA's fee is the real cost), Indianapolis (flat fees with the application fee inside), Louisville and Kansas City.

Texas prices by the square foot because state law says so

Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth and San Antonio all price residential permits by square footage, per trade or at a flat rate rather than on construction value, because Texas HB 852 and Local Government Code 214.907 bar valuation-based residential fees. That is why a Dallas fence has no fee line of its own (the pages apply the $181 alteration base), why Fort Worth charges $119 per trade and $61.01 for a shed up to 175 sq ft, and why a San Antonio reroof is $28.75 whatever the roof costs. Everywhere else in the table the building permit is a function of job value, with the city setting the value from its own tables in Phoenix, Seattle, Sacramento, Long Beach and Los Angeles rather than from the contract.

Where the city's own documents disagree

St. Louis's codified Ordinance 70795 still prints $6 per $1,000 with a $15 minimum while the Building Division charges $25 plus $10 per $1,000, and no amending ordinance was found. San Antonio's City Code §10-38 still prints valuation-based fees although the adopted FY 2027 schedule is flat; the pages follow the schedule under §10-10(b). Miami's code prints the residential rate as "0.50" with no percent sign; the pages read it as half a percent because the commercial rate in the same subsection says "one percent". Tucson's Residential Permits page quotes a $135.59 reconnect fee that the FY27 schedule lists at $150. Charlotte's Zoning Use Permit is the FY2025 figure because the FY2026 sheet could not be reached. Long Beach's new schedule took effect October 1, 2026 before the city posted it, so its ten pages carry the old figures and say so, and Albuquerque's July 1, 2026 switch to the 2021 ICC valuation table had not reached the handout its pages cite. Each city page states the discrepancy; the table flags those rows rather than picking a side.

Method

The 30 cities are the ones whose BuildPermitGuide pages have been rewritten from primary sources as of October 2026: the city's current fee schedule, the ordinance or resolution that adopted it, its valuation tables where fees are value-based, and the permit pages and bulletins that apply them, each fetched and quoted on the ten project pages for that city. A city counts as having a new 2026 schedule only when the document itself carries an effective or revision date on or after December 21, 2025; a city counts as a documented increase only when its own documents state that fees rose. Where a page could not state the prior rates, the row says so rather than inferring a direction. Add-on fees are those the city applies to every residential permit, as listed on the schedule or the city's own worked examples. Nothing in this table is estimated from another city's rules, and where a city's documents disagree the row carries a flag instead of a resolution. Each city page carries the date its sources were last verified, and the change log records when a cited fee schedule changes.

Frequently asked questions

The city pages behind this table

Each page quotes the code section, exempt-work list and fee schedule it relies on and records the date they were last verified.

• Albuquerque, NM
• Baltimore, MD
• Charlotte, NC
• Chicago, IL
• Cincinnati, OH
• Dallas, TX
• Fort Worth, TX
• Houston, TX
• Indianapolis, IN
• Jacksonville, FL
• Kansas City, MO
• Long Beach, CA
• Los Angeles, CA
• Louisville, KY
• Miami, FL
• Milwaukee, WI
• Minneapolis, MN
• New York, NY
• Philadelphia, PA
• Phoenix, AZ
• Pittsburgh, PA
• Portland, OR
• Sacramento, CA
• San Antonio, TX
• San Diego, CA
• San Francisco, CA
• San Jose, CA
• Seattle, WA
• St. Louis, MO
• Tucson, AZ

Related: How much does a building permit cost? · Permit fee change log · Fence permit rules compared · Shed size exemptions compared · ADU rules compared · Open data exports