The Permit Counter Worksheet.
When your permit application goes across the counter, three things happen in about fifteen minutes. Someone checks whether the package is complete. Someone tells you what it costs. Someone signs it. Each one can come back on you months later.
Use this worksheet in the weeks before you submit. It builds your fee budget line by line, splits it into the two payments you will actually make, and walks you through the one signature that matters most.
Documents from as many as eight consultants. Your submittal date is set by the slowest one.
Calculated from the city’s valuation, not your contract. Paid in two installments, weeks apart.
Whose name carries the accountability for the work. Of the three, this is the one that matters most.
I show up where homeowners usually get surprised at the permit counter. Fill in what you know now and leave the rest blank — blanks are useful, because they tell you exactly what to ask when you call your building department. Everything here is an estimate until the city confirms it.
Who is building your submittal — and are they engaged?
Your architect does not produce the structural drawings, the energy calculations, or the soils report. Those are separate disciplines, separate licenses, and separate schedules. Mark each one. Engaged means under contract with a delivery date — not “we’ll get somebody.”
Planning approval documents belong in this package too, if your project went through planning review. Your submittal date is set by whichever of these parties is the slowest — not by the average one.
An incomplete application does not get reviewed slowly. In a lot of places it does not get accepted at all — the intake person checks your package against a list, and if something is missing you are not in the queue. You are standing in the lobby.
Your permit fee budget, line by line.
Permit fees run off project valuation, not your contract price. Your city uses a published valuation table — project type, construction type, square footage — and if your contract number comes in below what the table produces, many jurisdictions use theirs. Enter the best valuation you have. Once you have called the city, replace the estimates with their numbers.
Before anyone has reviewed anything.
Four to twelve weeks later, sometimes longer. Usually the large one.
Enter a valuation to begin.
Two numbers, two dates. Once you have both, the permit is a line item instead of a surprise.
The city is not calling your contractor a liar. It is protecting against a system where anyone could understate a project and pay smaller fees, so it sets a floor. The fee pays for reviewers reading your drawings and inspectors visiting your site for the next year — work driven by the size and complexity of the building, not by the deal you negotiated. A great price from your contractor may not lower your permit fee at all.
Call your building department before you submit.
This is public information and they are not hiding it. It is often published online, but hardly anyone calls, so most people find out at the counter. Check each question as you ask it and write the answer underneath.
One call, weeks ahead, converts a surprise into a line item.
Homeowners rarely get stalled because they cannot afford the permit. They get stalled because the second payment lands in a week when the money was already set aside for something else, and nobody told them it was coming. You are not designing your project around this number. You are making sure it does not ambush the rest of your budget.
Whose name carries the accountability?
Every permit has a responsible party — the person accountable to the city for the work being done correctly and legally. If you hired a licensed contractor, that should be your contractor. You are listed as the property owner. He is listed as the contractor. That is the default, and it is the protective position.
What is being proposed is that you take on, personally, the responsibility your contractor is supposed to carry. Not share it — take it. Have this conversation plainly and without accusation. There may be an answer you can live with. A contractor who cannot or will not pull a permit in his own name is telling you something about his license, his insurance, or his willingness to be accountable.
This is the one part of the permit counter you cannot fix later. Money surprises are recoverable. A signature is not.
The disclosure typically states that permits are not required to be signed by property owners unless the owner is responsible for the construction and is not hiring a licensed contractor to take that responsibility. Many go further and say you may protect yourself from financial risk by having the permit filed in your licensed contractor’s name. That is a government form, at the moment of signature, advising you not to sign it.
Signing it can make you the responsible party of record, liable for injuries to workers your homeowner’s policy may not cover, responsible for verifying every worker’s license and workers’ comp, exposed to unpaid labor and material claims, possibly subject to employer tax obligations, and liable to later owners for latent defects — exposure that can outlive your ownership of the house. You sign it under penalty of perjury. Forms vary by state; read yours. This worksheet is not legal advice.
Who goes to the counter — and who should be in the room.
Every building department takes applications in differently. The answer to Question 6 above tells you which kind of event your submittal will be, and that decides who should be there.
Someone checks the application, takes the fee, and you are done.
A delivery person with a checkbook. You can handle this yourself.
A staff member reviews your materials while you stand there. Questions come up in real time.
Have your design professional there. Attend yourself — you will learn a lot.
Plans reviewed in front of you, usually for smaller residential remodels.
Your design professional should run it. Questions will be technical.
Efficient with a quality application. Without one, your plans disappear into the queue.
Your design professional submits — with you listed as a contact.
Being a contact on the submittal is the difference between knowing where your project stands and calling somebody to ask.
If your city does a live review, go. Every building department has a personality — what it is strict about, what it waves through, what it always asks for. None of that is written down. You pick it up by standing in that room, and if you own this house for a long time, that hour keeps paying off.