Bellevue, WA sets a flat $290 re-roof permit fee (Ordinance 6879)

Bellevue, Washington adopted Ordinance 6879 on November 18, 2025, setting its 2026 development services fee schedule. Effective January 1, 2026, a standard re-roof permit in Bellevue carries a flat $290 issuance fee instead of a valuation-based charge. The ordinance covers building, electrical, land use, fire, and utility permit fees citywide and replaced the prior fee ordinance, No. 6817.

Why a flat fee is the part that matters

The dollar amount is less interesting than the pricing method. Most jurisdictions charge for a roof permit as a percentage of what the job is worth, which means the homeowner cannot know the fee until the contractor has priced the work, and a more expensive roof costs more to permit even though the permit office does exactly the same amount of work either way.

A flat fee removes that. In Bellevue the number is now $290 whether the roof costs $9,000 or $30,000, and it is knowable before anyone quotes the job.

What the neighbours do

Washington is an unusually good place to see how differently this question gets answered, because the jurisdictions we cover in the state do not agree on any part of it.

Two of them do not charge at all, because they do not require a permit. Seattle requires none for a straight re-roof on a one or two family home that does not change the building envelope, and King County records the same answer. Snohomish County exempts a like-for-like re-roof limited to two layers with no sheathing removal, and prices anything beyond that from its valuation table.

Among the ones that do charge, the methods diverge again. Tacoma bills a re-roof outside its tear-off exemption as a remodel at 2.81 percent of ICC building valuation, with a $180 minimum. Pierce County works from a valuation table starting at $69. Clark County charges $220 plus a $94 issuance fee plus a $6.50 state building code fee, which is a flat structure arrived at by a different route.

So a homeowner replacing the same roof pays nothing in Seattle, $290 in Bellevue, and a number they cannot calculate in advance in Tacoma.

Where $290 sits nationally

Flat re-roof fees in our data span more than an order of magnitude. San Antonio charges $25. Fort Wayne charges $60, Grand Rapids $66, and Philadelphia $69. Bellevue’s $290 sits well above those. Aurora, Colorado charges $350, Chicago charges $450 where a permit is required at all, and Santa Clara County charges $479.20 for a composition or built-up roof and $639.60 for wood, tile or metal.

None of that makes $290 unreasonable. Development services fees are set to recover the cost of running an inspection program in a specific labour market, and Bellevue’s is an expensive one. It does mean that a fee quoted from a national article is close to worthless.

The wider point about roofs

Roofing is the project type where jurisdictions least resemble each other. Of the 137 jurisdictions we cover, only 6 require no roof permit at all. 71 make it conditional on the scope or size of the work and 58 require one outright. The condition is rarely the same condition: some measure layers, some measure the share of the roof area being touched, some turn on whether sheathing comes off, and Florida’s turn on the value of the job.

If you are replacing a roof, the fee schedule is the second thing to check. The first is whether your jurisdiction wants a permit at all.