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What a Bellevue building permit costs
What the city charges to permit a new house or a small shop, and the 2027 increases the Council is scheduled to adopt on 17 November.
Building a house, opening a shop or adding on in Bellevue starts with permit fees paid to the city, for plan review and for the inspections that follow. On the city's own examples, the fees for a new single-family house come to $24,606 and for a small commercial project $8,705.
A new house pays about $24,600 in permit fees
The city prices each example at a construction value: $717,000 for the house, $250,000 for the commercial project. A bigger or more complicated project pays more.
| City's example | 2026 fees | Proposed 2027 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| New single-family house$717,000 to build | $24,606 | $26,154 | +6.3% +$1,548 |
| Minor commercial project$250,000 to build | $8,705 | $9,246 | +6.2% +$541 |
The fees pay for the city's reviewers and inspectors
Permit fees go into the city's Development Services Fund. It pays the salaries, benefits, offices and technology of the staff who review plans and inspect the work. From 2027 the city runs it as an enterprise fund, a separate account meant to pay its own way rather than draw on taxes.
Whoever applies for the permit pays: the owner, or a builder or developer working for them. The Council's principle is that "applicants should pay for the services they receive." No city document says who bears the cost in the end, such as whether it passes into a home's price or rent. Projects that are entirely affordable housing are the exception: the budget sets aside $1.05 million of general-fund money to refund their permit fees.
The fund plans to spend more than it takes in
Washington law lets a city charge applicants "reasonable fees" to cover its cost of processing applications and reviewing and inspecting plans (RCW 82.02.020). Bellevue's own policy is full cost recovery: fees are set to cover the work, including overhead.
Even with the increases, the fund's plan runs short: it spends about $3.3 million more than it takes in during 2027, and $3.8 million more in 2028.
The gap comes out of reserves, which fall from $80.1 million to $73.0 million over the two years. The one falling fastest is a reserve the city labels a rate offset, run down to $2.1 million by 2031. The reserves are large by design. Policy keeps two years of core staffing in hand, so reviews carry on through a slow year in construction without leaning on the general budget.
No audit or study we found says Bellevue's fees exceed its costs. The Council also wants fees "regionally competitive", but the budget publishes no comparison with Redmond or Kirkland, and we haven't found one.
Why the fees are going up
Each way of charging moves differently in the proposal. The hourly rates rise about 9.5%, from the city's yearly internal cost-of-service study. The budget says the costs behind them rose faster than inflation: staffing, overhead, technology and a new pay plan for staff outside the unions. Fees on construction value rise 3.8%, the rate of the CPI-W inflation index, and the table of building costs behind them moves to 2026 prices, so a project's value goes up too. A typical bill mixes the two, which is why the examples land near 6%.
Flat fees are reset each year from the average hours each kind of permit takes, and several jump by a third or more. The city doesn't say why. The higher hourly rate can account for only part of jumps that size, so the average hours probably rose too, but the packet doesn't separate the two.
Hourly review rates would rise about 9.5%
| Review | 2026 per hour | Proposed 2027 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Land use | $304 | $333 | +9.5% +$29 |
| Transportation, review and inspection | $264 | $289 | +9.5% +$25 |
| Utilities, review and inspection | $216 | $236 | +9.3% +$20 |
| Fire, review and inspection | $227 | $248 | +9.3% +$21 |
A small grading review would nearly double
| Flat fee | 2026 | Proposed 2027 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Clearing and grading review, minor project | $75 | $136 | +81.3% +$61 |
| Clearing and grading review, demolition | $145 | $211 | +45.5% +$66 |
| Fire sprinkler inspection, house with up to 50 heads | $341 | $496 | +45.5% +$155 |
| Clearing and grading review, new house | $220 | $302 | +37.3% +$82 |
| Storm drain connection review | $648 | $826 | +27.5% +$178 |
| Transportation inspection, new house | $1,453 | $1,734 | +19.3% +$281 |
One fee is new. From 1 February 2027, a master sign plan, the sign package for a multi-tenant building, adds $434 in transportation review and $72 in right-of-way review when the work needs it.
Fewer projects are applying, and big ones wait more than a year
Fees are one cost of building here; time is another. Before filing, an owner can ask the city what a site allows, in a predevelopment conference. Those requests have climbed, from 174 in 2010 to 309 in 2025. Development applications, the filings that start a project, peaked at 108 in 2018 and fell to 35 in 2025, the fewest of any full year in the city's online record. That is nearly nine requests for every application, against 2.4 in 2018.
More owners ask what they could build; fewer apply
The biggest projects wait longest. From application to approval, a master development plan, the first approval for a large site, took a median 507 days. Design review took 333 days, a new house 129 and a shop's tenant improvement 29.
This doesn't say why applications fell. Borrowing costs rose sharply from 2022, which would slow filing in any city, and whether Bellevue fell faster than its neighbours isn't measured here.
The Council decides with the budget on 17 November
The fee proposal went to the Council with its budget. The Council asked questions and deliberated on 3 November; the materials for that session don't mention the fees. It gives staff its direction on 10 November, and the city lists a development-services fee ordinance among the legislation for adoption, tentatively on 17 November. This page will update with what the Council adopts.
How this was checked
Checks against this finding
Sources read 31 October 2026; the schedule and the budget's fund and policy pages read 4 November. The example bills come from slide 22 of the city's development-services budget presentation; the hourly rates, flat fees and the 3.8% adjustment come from Attachment A, the fee summary; the dates come from the 20 October budget memo. The percentages in the hourly table are calculated from the rates and match the city's slide.
The examples aren't itemized. They are the city's illustrations, not bills anyone paid, and the slide gives only totals. So the split between hourly, value-based and flat charges in each example isn't published, and the explanation of why the totals rise about 6% is an inference from the two charging methods, not the city's own breakdown. Actual review hours vary by project, and a project that needs more of them pays more.
What the examples may leave out. The slide doesn't say whether its examples include impact fees, utility connections or water meters, none of which is part of this fee summary. The summary says water meter installation fees will change to cover the city's costs, without amounts.
The fund's figures are a plan. They come from the preliminary budget's fund table, which doesn't split income by source: alongside review and inspection fees it counts developer contributions, fines and interest. The fund also pays for code enforcement and long-range planning. The cost study behind the hourly rates isn't published, and the department's budget carries a $5.8 million general-fund line the book doesn't explain.
Proposed, not adopted. The Council can change any of these before it votes. The dates are in the budget memo, the city's roundup of the final budget hearing and slide 5 of the 3 November deliberations presentation, which marks adoption as tentative. No ordinance text is posted yet, and the minutes of 3 November weren't out when this was checked on 4 November. The full current fee schedule (Ordinance 6879) wasn't compared line by line; current rates come from the proposal's own baseline.
The application counts. They come from a sweep of Bellevue's permit portal on 29 August 2026: 421,526 permits on 762 streets, applied 2000 to 2026. Four one-day windows returned more than the portal's result cap and are missing. "Development application" means master development plan, design review, preliminary SEPA, variance, EIS, rezone, conditional use, land use approval amendment, planned unit development, preliminary plat and short plat; the city files sound, exemption and temporary-use permits under the same codes, and counting them would make the fall look shallower. The portal doesn't link a request to the application it led to, so the two counts are not a conversion rate: one project can ask several times and file once, or never. The days are each permit type's median from application to issue. This section began as a page of its own in August; its correction is on the corrections page.
Where this started. Plat's transcripts of the Council's budget sessions raised the question; every figure here comes from the written materials.
Sources (13)
Sources
Read on 31 October 2026, the schedule again on 4 November.
- Budget presentation, development services, slides 21–22: proposed hourly rates and the example fees.
- Attachment A, proposed fee-schedule summary: hourly rates, flat fees, the 3.8% building adjustment and the valuation table.
- 20 October budget memo: the 3, 10 and 17 November schedule.
- Legistar item 26-586: the Council item carrying the fee and budget material.
- Preliminary 2027–28 budget, page 22: development-services costs and the reasons given for the hourly rates.
- Preliminary 2027–28 budget, page 29: the Development Services Fund's revenue, spending and reserves; pages 305 and 307, the cost-recovery and reserve policies; page 361, what the fund pays for. Read 4 November.
- 20 October budget memo, page 5: the Council's fee principles and the general-fund subsidy for affordable housing.
- Council questions and responses: the $1.05 million affordable-housing fee refund.
- RCW 82.02.020: the state limit on permit fees. Read 4 November.
- City: permit fees and payment: hourly billing and the current fee ordinance.
- 3 November deliberations presentation, slide 5: the development-services fee ordinance among the adoption legislation.
- Bellevue permit search: predevelopment requests, development applications and days to issue. Swept 29 August.
- City: budget calendar: 17 November adoption.
Photo credits
- Downtown Bellevue from Somerset on 12 February 2022: SounderBruce, 2022, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Updates and corrections.
Updated 5 Nov 2026. Adds how many projects apply to build and how long approval takes, from an earlier page folded into this one.
This page takes in an earlier one, “More parties are asking, fewer are filing”, which was corrected. What changed
