Scottsdale Building Permit and Impact Fees for a New Home: What You Actually Pay

A new home in Scottsdale comes with two separate buckets of city money. First, building permit fees pay for plan review and inspections. Second, development fees (often called impact fees) pay for the water, sewer, and other infrastructure your home will use. This page gives you the real FY2025-26 numbers from the city's official schedule, so you can put a line item in your budget instead of guessing.

How Scottsdale calculates the permit fee

Scottsdale prices a new-home permit by square footage, not by construction value. That is different from most Arizona cities, which run permit fees off a valuation table. The city's FY2025-26 Single Family Residential schedule, adopted under Resolution 13391 and effective July 1, 2025, charges a custom home like this:

Single Family Custom - Base fee $195. Livable area with A/C $0.94 sq. ft. Covered area (non A/C) $0.54 sq. ft. Certificate of Occupancy $379. GIS fee $363. Lowest Floor Certificate Review $237.

So the base fee is a flat $195. The living-area rate is $0.94 for every square foot that is air conditioned. The covered-area rate is $0.54 for every square foot of garage, covered patio, or other roofed space that is not air conditioned. On top of that you pay a one-time Certificate of Occupancy charge of $379. That is the document the city issues when the home is approved to live in. You also pay a GIS fee of $363 for mapping, and a $237 floor-certificate review where flood elevation applies.

Take a real example. Say you build a 3,000 square foot air-conditioned home with a 600 square foot garage and a 400 square foot covered patio. That is 1,000 square feet of non-A/C space. The math is: $195 base, plus 3,000 x $0.94 = $2,820, plus 1,000 x $0.54 = $540, plus $379 and $363. That comes to about $4,297 in building-permit charges. Trade permits for electrical, plumbing, mechanical, pool, and walls add to that, because the schedule states it is not all-inclusive.

The development (impact) fees are billed separately

The permit fee above does not include impact fees . Those are charges a city collects on new construction to pay for the public infrastructure that growth requires. Arizona lets cities charge them under A.R.S. 9-463.05. In Scottsdale they are published as Water and Wastewater Development Fees in a separate 2025 report. They are charged by meter size, not square footage. A standard single-family home on a typical residential meter pays a water development fee plus a wastewater (sewer) development fee. These are usually the largest city charge on the whole project, often several thousand dollars each. They are set in their own report that updates each year, so pull the live figure for your meter size from the city's water rates-and-fees page.

This is the high-cost wrinkle people miss. The square-foot permit fee is predictable and modest. The water and wastewater development fees can dwarf it. Confirm the current fee schedule with the city before you budget. Both the permit rates and the development fees are reset by city resolution and can change every fiscal year.

When these fees come into play

• Build-on-your-lot. Your designer submits through the Scottsdale SPUR portal, and the city invoices the square-foot permit fee at application. Development fees are typically collected later, tied to your water meter and connection.
• Custom vs. standard plan. The schedule has separate lines for a Single Family Custom home and a Single Family Standard Plan (a repeated builder plan), and the standard plan adds a 15% admin site-review fee. Make sure your home is billed on the right line.
• Garages and covered patios. Because covered non-A/C area is billed at $0.54 per square foot, a big garage or deep covered patio raises the permit fee. It is a real number, not a rounding error, on a large home.

What this means for you

Budget the permit fee and the development fees as two different things, because they hit at different times and the development fees are far larger. For the permit, get an accurate square-footage count split between A/C living area and covered non-A/C area, since that split drives the bill. For the development fees, ask the city for the current water and wastewater amounts for your meter size, since those reset yearly.

This entry sits in the Scottsdale building-codes module alongside Scottsdale Residential Building Permit Requirements , which covers what you submit, and Scottsdale Adopted Building Codes , which covers the standards your plans are checked against. For how these costs compare across the metro, see how much a building permit costs in Arizona .

Source

The per-square-foot rates and flat charges above are reproduced from the City of Scottsdale's official FY2025-26 Single Family Residential permit fee schedule (Resolution 13391), a public record: Permit Fee Schedule, SFR on scottsdaleaz.gov . The separate water and wastewater development fees are published in the 2025 Water and Wastewater Development Fees Report .

These fees change by city resolution, often every fiscal year. Confirm the current schedule with Scottsdale Planning and Development and the Water Department before you rely on any number here for a budget.