What it costs in government fees to build a home in Weld County, Colorado
Every impact fee, water and sewer connection charge, and building permit for a new
single-family detached home in unincorporated Weld County — itemized, sourced, and dated.
Total government fees$30,158Single-family detached, 2,000 sq ft finished, 4BR, on a platted lot in the unincorporated county — water and sewer from whichever special district serves the parcel. Ranges from $12,658 (a lot on private well and septic, the dominant pattern in central and eastern Weld)
to $135,958 (a lot classed 5/8 inch Standard by Little Thompson, paying full cash-in-lieu of water rights, plus septic).
What this specific number is.
Little Thompson Water District tap in a platted subdivision where the developer already dedicated water rights and installed the meter pit, plus septic. It is one point inside a 10.7× range — $12,658 to $135,958
for the identical house on different lots in the same county. This range is the same house on DIFFERENT LOTS, not the same lot priced two ways. Three things change across it: whether the parcel has district water at all, which tap class the district assigns the lot, and whether the developer already dedicated raw water rights. Holding the lot fixed, only the third applies — and that alone is a 3.1x swing on the tap. In
Colorado the question "what does it cost here" has no single answer until you name the parcel and its
service district, so read the range as the real answer and the headline as one worked example.
Check the utility provider before you rely on thisWater is the single largest variable here and it is never the county. Three independent rural water districts serve unincorporated Weld. The modeled case is a Little Thompson Inside Use Single Family tap where the developer already dedicated raw water rights and installed the meter pit: $17,600, or 63% of the stack. Holding that same tap class and removing only the developer dedication takes it to $54,650 — a 3.1x swing on one footnote in the plat. The county's full range is far wider than that, but only because tap class itself changes with the lot.
Impact & mobility fees
Fee
Amount
Road Impact Fee — all new single family dwellings
Eff. Jan 1, 2026 · Ch. 20 · sourceRose from $3,567 in 2025.
$3,794.00
County Facilities Impact Fee — all new single family dwellings
Eff. Jan 1, 2026 · Ch. 20 · source
$1,636.00
Drainage Fee
Eff. Jan 1, 2026 · Ch. 20 · source⚠ $0.22 per impervious square foot, and impervious area INCLUDES the adjacent street right-of-way up to the centerline. That makes it parcel-specific — the working band is $528 to $1,300.
$748.00
Subtotal
$6,178
Water & sewer — Little Thompson Water District
Fee
Amount
Plant Investment Fee — Little Thompson, inside-use single family
Eff. Apr 17, 2026 · source⚠ Cash-in-lieu of water rights is $33,750 to $148,500 depending on tap class and is $0 only if the developer already dedicated. Cash-in-lieu is priced at $135,000 per acre-foot.
$15,900.00
Residential OWTS permit — new (septic)
Eff. Feb 26, 2025 · sourceSeptic is the realistic wastewater default across most of unincorporated Weld.
$1,500.00
Water Resource fee — Little Thompson
Eff. Apr 17, 2026 · source
$1,000.00
Installation — developer already installed service line and meter pit
Eff. Apr 17, 2026 · source$4,000 if the developer did not.
$700.00
Subtotal
$19,100
Building permits, surcharges & other
Fee
Amount
Building Permit Fee
Eff. Jan 1, 2026 · source⚠ Valuation from a nine-column table by construction class. R-3 spans $215.90 (Type IA) to $169.09 (Type VB). Reading the leftmost column overstates valuation by 28%. Wood frame is Type VB. Garage, basement and deck price separately and additively.
$2,700.00
Major Plan Review — new single family dwelling
Eff. Jan 1, 2026 · source70% of the building fee — was 65% in 2025.
$1,890.00
Access permit — residential
Eff. Jan 1, 2026 · source
$200.00
Electrical permit — residential, 1,501 to 2,000 sq ft
Eff. Jan 1, 2026 · sourceBased on enclosed living area. Weld issues its own electrical permits rather than deferring to the State Electrical Board.
$90.00
Subtotal
$4,880
Water provider
Tap class is driven by lot size and use class, NOT nominal meter diameter. A spec sheet saying '3/4 inch meter' maps to the wrong row in two of these three districts.
District
Fee
Private well and septic
$1,600
Little Thompson, developer dedicated water
$17,600
North Weld County 50% tap
$62,690
North Weld County full standard tap
$99,440
Little Thompson 5/8 inch Standard, full cash-in-lieu
$123,400
Fees Weld County does not charge
Verified absent, so you don't go looking for them.
NO CONSTRUCTION USE TAX and no county sales tax. Verified three ways: Weld is absent from the Colorado Department of Revenue's state-collected county tax table entirely; the fee schedule contains no tax line; the permit application has no valuation-based tax field. Under state law a county may levy use tax only with voter approval, and Weld never has. Municipalities inside Weld do levy it — Greeley 4.11%, Erie 3.50%, Windsor 3.65% — which is why the unincorporated boundary matters more in Colorado than in Florida.
No Colorado equivalent of the Florida state surcharges.
No county park, school or fire fee — fire is a separate protection district.
No separate plumbing or mechanical permit for a new home — bundled into the building permit.
No separate certificate of occupancy fee and no address assignment fee in the schedule.
What we could not verify
These are reported as gaps rather than estimated. The total above is a floor.
Fire protection district impact fees exist and gate the permit — the county's required Fire District Notification form has a checkbox reading 'Fire Impact Fees Required' and 'must be paid prior to issuance' — but no district publishes the amount. Roughly 20 independent fire districts serve unincorporated Weld.
Central Weld County Water District publishes only an illustrative raw water price of $60,000 per acre-foot; the actual charge is Colorado-Big Thompson market value at time of purchase, which is not published
Central Weld's schedule is an image filename dated October 2024 with a fee stamped effective 2022 and allotments effective 2020 — materially older than the other two districts
North Weld's meter installation without an existing curb stop is listed only as 'Current Cost to District'
Plumbing and mechanical bundling is inferred from the application form structure and a prior-year code preamble, not an explicit 2026 statement
Why this number is easy to get wrong
Meter-size labels do not mean meter size. Both Central Weld and Little Thompson publish rows literally labeled '3/4-inch' — at Central Weld that is a 1.5 EQR tap, and at Little Thompson '3/4-inch Estate' is $187,500 against $54,650 for an ordinary single-family tap. In Colorado, tap class is driven by lot size and use class, not nominal diameter. Up to a 3.4x error.
Developer-already-paid footnotes invert the answer, within a single tap class. Little Thompson's Inside Use Single Family tap is $54,650 at full price; footnotes 1 and 2 drop it to $17,600 when the developer dedicated the water rights and installed the meter pit. In a platted subdivision they usually apply, and nothing on the rate table itself tells you whether they do.
North Weld's raw water fee is market-indexed and reset at board meetings, and a July 2026 amended schedule superseded the January 2026 one mid-year.
The county's own HTML fee page is stale and contradicts its current PDF — the page says drainage $0.21 and plan review 65%; the January 2026 PDF says $0.22 and 70%.
Central Weld's entire fee table is published as an image behind a signed URL present only in an og:image attribute. Text extraction returns literally nothing.
Central Weld's schedule contains a pink column headed 'EX: If Market Value = $60,000 per Acre Foot' that reads exactly like a rate column. It is an illustration, not a charge.
This page models one house. 2,000 sq ft, single-family detached,
Private well and septic.
If you're underwriting an actual project — a unit mix, a different district, a CO date that might slip
past a scheduled increase — we compute that stack for you.
Need a county we haven't published? That's the main thing we do.from $290What we compile, and what it costs →
How to use this. Every figure is transcribed from an official
Weld County, service-district or Colorado Revised Statutes document, linked inline, with its effective date.
No third-party legal-code mirrors were used — in testing, one returned impact fees off by 2.4×. Water and
sewer is 63% of this stack. Built for screening and pro-forma work; confirm with the county and
the district before you sign anything.