California development fees range from $12,000 to $157,000 per unit — and until 2025, developers had no way to know the total cost before committing to a project

In California, a developer building a single-family home can face between $21,000 and $157,000 in government-imposed development fees before a single nail is driven. Multifamily projects face $12,000 to $75,000 per apartment unit. These fees — impact fees, connection fees, school fees, park fees, traffic mitigation fees, affordable housing in-lieu fees — are levied by multiple agencies (city, county, school district, water district, fire district) with no single point of coordination. In Fremont and Irvine, fees represent 18% of the median home price. A Terner Center study of seven California cities documented that fees and exactions can add up to 18% of total development cost. The financial pain is compounded by uncertainty. Until AB 1820 took effect on January 1, 2025, there was no legal requirement for agencies to provide developers with an upfront estimate of total fees and exactions before project approval. A developer could spend 12-18 months and hundreds of thousands of dollars on design, environmental review, and permitting only to discover at the building permit stage that fees had been increased or that an obscure special district was imposing an additional charge. This made pro formas unreliable, caused projects to collapse after significant investment, and systematically deterred smaller developers and nonprofit housing builders who could not absorb the risk. Fees persist and grow because each imposing agency views its fee in isolation — the school district needs schools, the parks department needs parks, the water district needs pipes — and none is responsible for the cumulative impact on housing cost. Fee studies are conducted by consultants hired by the imposing agency, creating an inherent incentive to justify the maximum defensible fee. There is no independent body that evaluates whether the total fee burden across all agencies is proportionate to the infrastructure actually needed. AB 1820 now requires fee estimates, but the underlying fragmentation — dozens of independent taxing authorities layering charges onto each unit of housing — remains structurally unchanged.