Walk into a builder's sales office in Mountain House and compare the base price on a new floor plan to a five-year-old resale of the same square footage two streets over. The gap is bigger than new paint and updated cabinets can explain. Part of that gap has a name, and it shows up on a fee schedule most buyers never see until escrow: the City of Mountain House's own building permit fees, published for fiscal year 2025-2026.
That schedule exists because Mountain House is no longer the community services district it was for sixteen years. On July 1, 2024, it became California's newest incorporated city, the first new city in the state since Jurupa Valley in 2011. That change in governance is the reason new construction here now carries a fee stack that didn't exist in its current form when the community was still leaning on San Joaquin County for land-use decisions.
What incorporation actually moved
For most of Mountain House's history, the Mountain House Community Services District handled infrastructure and services, but land planning, zoning, and permitting ran through the county. Council Member Matt Disko, then a CSD board member, made the practical case for incorporation ahead of the March 2024 vote: "We have a local planning department who can issue rezoning and building permits."
That's not a small administrative shuffle. It means every new-construction permit in Mountain House now runs through the city's own Community Development Department, and every fee attached to that permit is set, collected, and adjusted by the city council rather than the county board of supervisors. The city's building fee schedule is the direct result: an itemized list of what a builder pays, per home, before a single stud goes up.
The math a base price doesn't show you
The city's 2025-2026 fee schedule breaks residential permits out by density category, with several fees scaled to a home's living area and lot size. Run the numbers for a typical 2,500 square foot single-family home on a 6,000 square foot lot in the Low Density category, and here's what stacks up:
| Fee | Amount |
|---|---|
| Traffic Impact Fee (TIF) | $20,856 |
| Community Facilities Fee (CFF) | $24,990 |
| County Facilities Fee | $3,774 |
| Regional Traffic Impact Fee (RTIF), $2.13/sq ft living area | $5,325 |
| Flat Rate Water | $1,408 |
| Affordable Housing Fee, living area ($0.67/sq ft) | $1,675 |
| Affordable Housing Fee, lot area ($0.09/sq ft) | $540 |
| NPDES Point Source Fee | $726 |
| Encroachment Permit Fee | $129 |
| Solar Fee | $50 |
| Processing Fee | $50 |
| Total | ≈ $59,523 |
That's close to $60,000 in government fees baked into a new home before land cost, materials, labor, or builder margin enter the picture. None of it applies to a resale. A buyer purchasing an existing home that was permitted five or ten years ago isn't retroactively covering today's fee schedule. A buyer purchasing new construction is, whether or not the sales office breaks it out that way on the price sheet.
This is worth sitting with if you're the kind of buyer weighing a new build against a comparable resale in an established Mountain House village. The per-square-foot premium on new construction isn't purely a story about granite versus quartz. A meaningful slice of it is a line item set by city ordinance, and it moved from county administration to city administration less than two years ago.
Supply is not as scarce as the price tag suggests
There's a second number in the city's own planning data that matters just as much for how you read Mountain House pricing. As of the city's building permit summary dated April 2025, 9,045 residential permits had been issued toward the community's planned buildout, with 8,467 finaled. That left roughly 7,755 primary units still to be permitted before Mountain House reaches its planned total of around 16,000 dwelling units.
That's not a market running low on room. It's a master-planned community roughly halfway to its ceiling, with thousands of permits still ahead of it in neighborhoods like The Lakes at Mountain House, where builder Rurka Homes is currently bringing new inventory to market and where a tenth school, Pombo Elementary, is set to open. If you're pricing a new build today partly on the assumption that Mountain House is running out of land, the permit pipeline says otherwise. More product is coming, and it will carry its own version of this same fee schedule, adjusted for whatever the city sets for that fiscal year.
What the resale market is doing in the meantime
None of this happens in isolation from the resale side. Over the three months ending in August 2026, homes in Mountain House sold at a median of $864,000, down roughly 3.4 percent from the same period a year earlier, with the average home taking about 35 days to go pending compared to 24 days the year before. That's a market cooling modestly on the resale side at the same time new construction carries a fixed, city-mandated cost floor that isn't cooling with it. When a builder's base price barely moves while resale comps soften, the fee stack is one reason those two curves aren't tracking together.
The negotiating question this actually raises
If you're comparing a new build to a resale in Mountain House, the useful question isn't "which one is nicer." It's "how much of this new-construction price is fixed by the city, and how much is the builder's own margin." Traffic Impact Fees, Community Facilities Fees, and the Regional Traffic Impact Fee aren't negotiable. They're set by the city and paid regardless of which builder you're working with. Builder margin, lot premiums, and upgrade packages are a different conversation, and that's where there's actual room to ask questions before you sign.
It's also worth asking your builder for the permit-level fee breakdown directly. The city publishes its fee schedule, and a builder who can walk you through exactly what's fixed cost versus what's markup is giving you real information. One who can't, or won't, is asking you to trust a number you can't independently check.
A few common questions
Did incorporation raise these fees, or would they exist anyway? Several of these fees, including the special taxes that fund a meaningful share of the city's budget, existed under the community services district structure before 2024. What changed is who sets and administers them now. The city council controls this schedule going forward, not the county board of supervisors.
Do these fees apply to buyers of existing homes? No. These are building permit fees tied to new construction. A resale transaction doesn't trigger them. They're relevant to you as a comparison point, not as a cost you'd pay when buying an existing home.
Will the fee schedule change next fiscal year? It's published annually by the city, so yes, expect adjustments. The numbers above reflect the FY2025-2026 schedule specifically. If you're comparing builder pricing across two different years, confirm which fee schedule was in effect when the base price was set.
Is this the same thing as a Mello-Roos or CFD tax? No. Special taxes and Community Facilities Districts are separate ongoing annual assessments that show up on a property tax bill for the life of the bond. The fees above are one-time development fees paid at the permit stage, before the home is built.
Comparing a new build to a resale in Mountain House means comparing two different cost structures, not just two different finish packages. If you want help pricing out what a specific floor plan or resale comp actually costs once every fee and assessment is on the table, Just 1 Real Estate can walk through the numbers with you. Schedule a free consultation and we'll help you see past the base price to what you're actually paying.
