▸ Free Tool · No Signup
Estimate permit costs from real published 2026 fee schedules. No more eyeballing or calling city hall. Pick your city, plug your scope, get the breakdown.
▸ Cities & Counties
11▸ Indexed Fees
459▸ Cost To Use
$0▸ Pick Your City Or County
Each card opens a per-city page with the calculator, downloadable permit forms, and design-standards reference.
▸ 51 Civil Fees Indexed
building · other · subdivision · impact_fee
▸ 41 Civil Fees Indexed
utilities_water · building · inspection · other
▸ 60 Civil Fees Indexed
building · other · utilities_general · impact_fee
▸ 61 Civil Fees Indexed
building · utilities_general · utilities_water · other
▸ 46 Civil Fees Indexed
utilities_general · building · subdivision · row_construction
▸ 33 Civil Fees Indexed
building · utilities_general · impact_fee · other
▸ 8 Civil Fees Indexed
building · impact_fee · other · row_construction
▸ 26 Civil Fees Indexed
building · civil_drainage · other · subdivision
▸ 75 Civil Fees Indexed
utility_extension · row · floodplain · water_sewer
▸ 49 Civil Fees Indexed
plat · review · water_sewer · impact
▸ 9 Civil Fees Indexed
plat · review · impact
▸ Coming Soon · 1 New Jurisdiction Per Week
We add jurisdictions based on demand — Dallas, Austin, your county, anywhere in Texas. Tell us which one matters for your next bid and we'll email you the moment its fee schedule goes live.
▸ Popular requests — tap to fill
▸ Why This Exists
On a typical $1M Houston-metro civil bid, permit costs run $5,000–$15,000. On a $5M MUD job, $15K–$40K. Contractors who eyeball this number lose 1-3% of margin either way — bigger than most other pricing nuances on a bid.
No estimating tool surfaces this. RSMeans averages national rates. HCSS HeavyBid makes you type it in. Cost books don't have city-specific permit data. So contractors guess, call city hall, or skip it.
Caliche is the only Texas civil platform with real published fee schedules baked into the bid pricer. This calculator is the free version. The full version lives inside the platform — auto-detects your bid's jurisdiction and adds permits to your total.
▸ Frequently Asked
Yes. Every fee in the calculator is extracted directly from each city's or county's official 2026 fee schedule PDF — the same document a permit clerk uses to quote you. We list the source documents on every per-city page so you can verify the exact PDF and effective date.
Texas cities typically adjust permit fees annually, usually in January or October when budgets reset. We re-scrape source PDFs quarterly and any time a city announces a rate change. Per-city pages show the effective date of the schedule currently in the calculator.
It indexes Houston's civil-relevant permit fees from the City-Wide Fee Schedule — subdivision plat, water & wastewater impact (including the per-service-unit fee), floodplain development, utility-system extensions, and right-of-way. Building/residential and billing fees are intentionally excluded — this is a civil bid tool. The calculator always shows exactly which fees are in the total.
Municipal Utility Districts (MUDs) charge connection fees and service availability charges that are not city building permits. Those fees live in TCEQ filings, not city fee schedules, and we're building a separate MUD data layer to surface them properly. For now, if a MUD project also crosses into a city (League City, Pearland, Manvel, etc.), use that city's calculator and check with the MUD directly for connection/SAC charges.
For the fees we have indexed and the scope inputs you provide, totals are exact — we apply each fee's actual formula (tiered, percentage, per-linear-foot, etc.) to your numbers. The calculator tells you when a fee needs scope you haven't entered yet ("2 fees need more scope to apply"), so you always know what's in the total and what isn't.
Yes, when the city publishes them in the fee schedule. Water/wastewater impact fees, roadway impact fees, and parkland dedication fees are surfaced separately and only apply when you provide the relevant inputs (water meter size for impact fees, dwelling units for parkland dedication).
RSMeans averages national permit rates, which lose all city-level specificity. HCSS HeavyBid lets you type permit fees in manually but doesn't maintain a fee schedule library. Cost books generally avoid permit data because it changes per-jurisdiction and per-year. Caliche is the only Texas civil platform with real published fee schedules baked into the bid pricer.
No. The calculator is fully free, no signup required. Caliche's paid platform layers on auto-detection (it identifies your bid's jurisdiction from the project name and adds permits to your bid total automatically), but the calculator itself is a free public tool.