By Kjel Jones — independent custom-home researcher for Ashton and the Henry’s Fork corridor. Not a builder and not a general contractor. Licensed Idaho real estate agent, LPT Realty.

Published 2026-09-08

The last fee schedule Fremont County adopted is dated 2005. This is all of it.

What this page is, and the date that governs every figure on it

Fremont County has adopted exactly one building-permit fee schedule by ordinance in the past two decades, and this page prints it in full. Every figure below comes from Ordinance No. 2005-02, adopted by the Board of County Commissioners in 2005. It repealed and re-enacted the county’s previous building ordinance, No. 2002-05, and replaced the fee schedule with the one below.

Read the date first, because it governs everything that follows. Nothing the county has published since 2005 confirms, replaces or even cites this schedule. The department’s current paperwork — every form it revised in 2026 — prints no building-fee amount at all. So what you are reading is what the county last adopted by ordinance, not a claim about what a permit costs today. We wrote separately about why the county publishes no current figure; this page is the older schedule itself, reproduced so you can see exactly what to check and exactly what to ask.

Applicants shall pay permit and plan review fees in amounts established by the following schedule.

— Fremont County, Idaho, Ordinance No. 2005-02, the fee schedule section. Scanned ordinance PDF, fremontcountyid.gov, retrieved 7 September 2026

The schedule has three moving parts, and they run in order:

• A valuation chart that prices each kind of space by the square foot.
• A bracket ladder that turns the total valuation into the permit fee.
• Plan review percentages and an hourly rate, stacked on top.

Step one — the valuation chart: $55.00 a square foot, in 2005 figures

The ordinance does not read the fee off your construction contract. It builds a valuation from your square footage, at rates that differ by what the space is — which is why the same house with a 900-square-foot garage attached values differently than one without.

The chart prints two rate columns side by side, headed, in the county’s own words, “Sq. Ft. x Amt.” under an Actual Value column and “Valuation Sq. Ft. x Amt” under a Valuation column. The fee ladder in the next section keys off total valuation. Here is the chart as adopted, rates in dollars per square foot:

Three lines of the chart need footnotes of their own:

• The row printed “Attached or detached (Circle one)” carries $16.00, but the scan does not preserve enough of its label to say with certainty what structure it prices beyond the circling instruction — it is printed here exactly as the county printed it.
• The foundation line asks for an estimated bid rather than a rate, and only under a manufactured home.
• Manufactured homes otherwise pay flat fees rather than square-foot rates: $200.00 for a triple or double-wide, $60.00 for a single-wide.

Under the chart, the ordinance prints a note that matters more than any single rate on it:

The amount per square feet is subject to change with the Building Standard Guide.

— note printed beneath the Valuation Chart, Ordinance No. 2005-02, retrieved 7 September 2026

In other words, the county’s own schedule warns that its per-square-foot amounts move with the valuation guide the schedule was built from. That sentence is twenty-one years old, the guide it references has been revised many times since, and no revised amount has ever appeared in a county ordinance that we can find. That is the gap a telephone call closes.

Step two — the fee ladder: $19.00 to $4,487.00

Once a total valuation is built, the permit fee is read off a bracket table. Each bracket charges a base amount for the valuation up to its floor, then a fixed rate for every increment above it — so the fee climbs smoothly inside a bracket and jumps at the edges. As adopted:

Follow the arithmetic on a worked example, using nothing but the table above — a 1,000-square-foot house:

1. Value it: 1,000 × $78.35 = $78,350.00 total valuation.
2. Find the bracket: $50,001 to $100,000, charging $515.00 for the first $50,000 plus $5.50 per additional $1,000 or fraction.
3. Count the increments: $28,350 above the floor is 29 of them, so the permit fee is $515.00 + 29 × $5.50 = $674.50.

Every number in that chain comes from the schedule as printed; if the county’s rates have moved since 2005, every line moves with them. A modern corridor house makes the point faster: at 2005 rates, 2,400 square feet of living space alone values at $188,040 — into the sixth bracket, a fee of $795.00 plus 89 × $4.50 = $1,195.50 before plan review.

A note on the text itself. The county posts this ordinance as a scanned fax with a machine-readable text layer. On the $500,001 to $1,000,000 row, that text layer misreads the base as “for the first $1,000,000.00”; the scanned page itself plainly reads “for the first $500,000.00,” and that is what we print. The same page image resolved one damaged word in the plan-review sentence below. Every other figure was checked between two independent extraction modes and against the page images.

Plan review: thirty percent, and the sixty-five percent case

Plans are reviewed before the permit is issued, and that review is charged as a percentage of the building permit fee rather than a flat charge:

• Residential plan review is 30 percent of the total building permit fee, for valuations of up to $100,000.
• Commercial plan review is 50 percent of the total building permit fee for in-the-office review, and 65 percent if the plans need to be sent out of the office for review.

Two sentences in the ordinance deserve verbatim weight. Plan review fees are non-refundable and due when plans are submitted — before the permit, before any inspection, granted or not. And “all permits required under this Ordinance require fees to be paid prior to a permit being issued.”

Notice what the residential line does not say. It caps its 30 percent at $100,000 of valuation and says nothing about anything above it — and at 2005 rates, a house over 1,277 square feet of living space crosses $100,000 on valuation alone. Whether a larger house pays 30 percent regardless, or slides into the commercial percentages, is answered nowhere in the ordinance. It belongs on your list of questions for the department.

The $42.00 hour, and the four ways it is charged

Alongside the schedule the ordinance sets an hourly rate — $42.00 per hour — and lists what lands on it:

1. Inspections outside normal business hours, with a minimum charge of two hours.
2. Re-inspections, assessed under Section 108.8 of the adopted building code.
3. Inspections for which no fee is specifically indicated, minimum charge half an hour.
4. Additional plan review required by changes, additions or revisions to plans, minimum charge half an hour.

A fifth line charges actual costs when the county uses outside consultants for plan checking or inspections. The footnotes are broader than they look: the hourly figure is stated as a floor — “or the total hourly cost to the jurisdiction, whichever is the greatest” — and actual costs are defined to include administrative and overhead costs. Budget the $42.00 hour as a minimum, not a quote.

Why nobody can call this current — including us

Here is the check this schedule has never had. The county revised three forms in 2026:

• The Pre-Construction Check List, revised 17 April 2026.
• The Excavation & Grading application, revised 16 March 2026.
• The Agricultural Structure application, revised 13 March 2026.

Every fee amount those forms print is a Planning-side fee, and each still matches the county’s separate 2011 Planning fee schedule where the two overlap — the corroboration story is on our earlier page. Not one of them prints a building-permit amount. The 2005 building schedule has never been matched against anything, by any form, in any year.

What the 2026 checklist does say is revealing in a quiet way: that building permit fees are based on square footage and the type of construction, and that a deposit is due at submittal, with no amount given. That is a description of the mechanism this 2005 chart implements — square footage, by type of construction — with the amounts stripped out. The mechanism appears to have survived; the amounts are anyone’s guess until the county states them.

So the honest framing, one more time: every figure on this page is what Fremont County last adopted by ordinance, in 2005. The one call that settles it is Fremont County Building, at the courthouse, 151 W 1st North, St. Anthony, (208) 624-7200.

1. Ask whether Ordinance 2005-02’s fee schedule is still in force, or whether a later resolution replaced it.
2. Ask for the current per-square-foot valuation rates — the ordinance itself said those amounts change with the valuation guide.
3. Ask what plan-review percentage applies to a house above $100,000 of valuation.
4. Ask the deposit amount due at submittal, which no published form states.
5. Ask what the hourly rate is now, and which work lands on it.

What the schedule is still worth, even dated

Even if every amount has moved, the schedule settles three practical questions:

• How the fee is built — square footage by construction type, then a bracket, then a percentage. That is the structure to get numbers against, and the county’s 2026 checklist still describes it.
• The order of magnitude — at 2005 rates, permit plus plan review on an ordinary house ran to four figures. A revision moves the digits, not the order of magnitude.
• What a builder’s bid should state — an amount for permit and plan review, or an allowance with a number, as covered in how to read the allowances and exclusions, rather than the word “permits” with nothing behind it.

For the paperwork path itself, start with the permit path step by step.

Common questions

What is the last fee schedule Fremont County adopted for building permits?

Ordinance No. 2005-02, adopted in 2005. It values construction per square foot by type, reads the permit fee off a bracket ladder from $19.00 to $4,487.00, adds plan review as a percentage of the permit fee, and sets a $42.00 hourly rate for certain inspections and reviews. No later county ordinance or published schedule replaces it, as far as any published record shows.

Is the 2005 schedule still what the county charges?

Unknown, and this page does not claim it is. Nothing the county has published since 2005 confirms or replaces the schedule, and every form the county revised in 2026 prints no building-fee amount anywhere. Fremont County Building, (208) 624-7200, can answer it in one call: ask whether the Ordinance 2005-02 fee schedule is still in force.

How is a house valued under the schedule?

Per square foot, by what the space is. Living space carried an actual-value rate of $55.00 per square foot and a valuation rate of $78.35; room additions with plumbing matched living space, additions without plumbing were $25.00, garages and shops $20.00, basements $16.00 whether finished or not, porches, carports and decks $15.00, and sheds and barns $13.00. The fee ladder keys off total valuation.

What would the permit fee be on a $150,000 valuation?

By the 2005 table, $1,020.00. The $100,001 to $500,000 bracket charges $795.00 for the first $100,000 plus $4.50 per additional $1,000 or fraction, and $50,000 above the floor is exactly 50 increments. Plan review would be charged on top as a percentage of that fee. That is 2005 arithmetic, not a quote.

What does plan review cost?

A percentage of the building permit fee: 30 percent for residential, for valuations up to $100,000, and 50 percent for commercial reviewed in the office, rising to 65 percent if plans must be sent out for review. Plan review fees are non-refundable and are due when plans are submitted. The residential percentage above $100,000 of valuation is not stated in the ordinance.

What is the $42.00 per hour for?

Four things: inspections outside normal business hours (minimum two hours), re-inspections under Section 108.8, inspections with no fee specifically indicated (minimum half an hour), and additional plan review caused by changes, additions or revisions to plans (minimum half an hour). Outside consultants are charged at actual costs. The ordinance states the hourly figure as a floor: whichever is greatest, that rate or the county's total hourly cost.

What does the county charge for a manufactured home?

Flat fees rather than square-foot rates: $200.00 for a triple or double-wide and $60.00 for a single-wide under the 2005 schedule, plus a foundation line that asks for the estimated bid where a foundation is placed under a manufactured home. Placement is separately subject to the county's zoning rules.

Why print a fee schedule this old at all?

Because it is the only one. The county's Planning-side fee schedule prices zoning permits but writes plus Building Permit without an amount, and no county form revised in 2026 prints a building-fee figure. Printing the last adopted schedule, clearly dated, shows exactly what the fee mechanism is and exactly which amounts need confirming by telephone.

What should I ask the county before budgeting permit costs?

Five things: whether the Ordinance 2005-02 schedule is still in force; the current per-square-foot valuation rates; the plan-review percentage for a house above $100,000 of valuation; the deposit due at submittal; and the current hourly rate. Write the answers down with the date and the name of who gave them.