Metro Nashville posts a current codes fee schedule, replacing the 2010 sheet

Metro Nashville’s Department of Codes and Building Safety posted a current Codes Fee Schedule to nashville.gov in December 2025 (the file’s server timestamp reads December 3, 2025), replacing a fee sheet that had been the department’s public reference since April 22, 2010. The new schedule sets the residential building permit fee at a flat $5.00 per $1,000 of construction valuation, plus a $25 zoning examination fee and a 10 percent codes technology fee, in place of the old tiered scale that started at $28.85 for the first $2,000 of valuation. The dollar figures trace back to a 2022 Metro Council ordinance (BL2022-1215).

A fee sheet fifteen years out of date is its own story

The interesting fact here is the gap. Nashville’s published reference sat unchanged from April 2010 to December 2025 while the city roughly reinvented itself, and the dollar figures in the new schedule trace to a Council ordinance passed in 2022, three years before the schedule reflecting it appeared.

That is worth naming because it is the failure mode this site runs into constantly. A department’s published page is not always its current practice, and the date on a PDF is not the date the rule changed. We record the date we read a source rather than the date it was written, precisely because the second one is so often unknowable.

What Nashville charges now

Residential building work is $5.00 per $1,000 of valuation, plus $25 for zoning examination, plus 10 percent codes technology on the valuation fee. That covers decks, patios and pools, which Metro bills as residential building permits.

The trade permits work differently and are worth knowing separately. Electrical is a $75 minimum per permit with itemised add-ons for circuits, panels, services and appliances under Metro Code 16.20.250. Gas and mechanical is a $75 minimum plus $32 per 100,000 Btuh of heating or cooling capacity under 16.16.400. Plumbing is a $75 minimum plus $11 per fixture under 16.12.220. Pools attract both a building permit and a plumbing permit, because Metro classifies a pool as a plumbing fixture.

Two things Nashville does not charge for at all

Nashville requires no permit to replace a fence. It requires none to replace a roof either, unless the work goes beyond normal maintenance, which Metro draws at repairs covering more than 33 percent of the roof area.

Both of those are unusual, and the contrast inside Tennessee is stark. Memphis takes the opposite position on both: Joint Ordinance 569, effective April 1, 2025, replaced items 1 and 2 of the model code’s exempt-work list with the word “Reserved”, which means sheds and fences in Memphis always need a permit. Two cities in one state, working from the same state adoption, arriving at opposite answers on the two most common backyard projects.

Williamson County, immediately south of Nashville, matches Nashville on roofing and requires no permit for it.

The practical read

If you are pricing a project in Nashville, the valuation is the whole fee. There is no meaningful fixed component to plan around, so a contractor’s number drives the permit cost directly, and the 10 percent technology fee compounds on top of it.

And if you are working anywhere else in Tennessee, do not carry a Nashville answer across the county line. On fences and sheds it is wrong in Memphis, and the state code is not what settles it.