The Seattle City Council recently adopted the 2025 budget, including legislation that implements SDCI fee changes in 2025.
On January 1, 2025, SDCI implemented an inflationary increase of 6.5% to most fees. These fee increases changed SDCI’s base hourly rate to $274 per hour, and changed the Land Use hourly rate to $467 per hour.
The boiler and conveyance annual inspection programs need to hire additional staff to maintain current performance on annual inspections, and require fee increases beyond the 6.5% inflationary increase. Boiler annual inspection fees increased 16.5% and conveyance annual inspection fees increased 14% for 2025.
Finally, Fee Subtitle table D-1, that sets building permit fees, increased in 2025 to account for post-pandemic development trends of building construction. For 2025, construction permit fees increased by an average of 12%, with larger value projects seeing fee increases of 19%.
New Director’s Rules, the building valuation data (BVD) table, and other fee-related information will be available on our website by the end of January.