San Francisco Construction Estimating Services

Most companies selling San Francisco construction estimating services price your job off a national average, then hand you a permit allowance they made up.

Here’s the number they made up. San Francisco’s Department of Building Inspection publishes it: a building permit runs 3 to 4.5% of construction cost. On a million-and-a-half-dollar job that’s forty-six to seventy thousand dollars. Not a line item you round. A line item you either have or you’re short.

And here’s the part that catches people who’ve built everywhere else. DBI decides the valuation, not you. The city runs its own cost schedule by occupancy — residential at $272 a square foot, restaurant and bar between $322 and $477 — and that’s the number your fee gets calculated on. You can price the job perfectly and still be wrong about the permit, because the city isn’t using your number.

So if you carry your own valuation into a San Francisco permit line, you’re going to be off — not because your estimate was bad, but because the fee was never calculated off your estimate in the first place.

1. There are two departments in front of you, and sometimes three.

Since January 2024, most San Francisco building permits need a Planning Approval Letter before DBI will take them. Over-the-counter permits are the exception, and the over-the-counter list is narrow — tenant improvements, some B-occupancy remodels, power door operators. Everything else goes to in-house review.

Then the Fire Department is its own plan-check desk with its own clock. Simple over-the-counter work is an hour or less. Expedited is seven days, billed at overtime rates.

If you build your schedule around one department, you’re going to miss a gate you never knew existed, and it won’t be the one you were watching.

2. Nine cities, nine building departments.

Of the twelve jobs on this page, two are inside the City and County of San Francisco. The rest are Daly City, San Mateo, Oakland, Albany, Livermore, Walnut Creek, Danville and Santa Rosa.

That’s five counties. Nine separate building departments, nine fee schedules, nine sets of local amendments. A Bay Area bid that assumes one process across the water is a bid with a hole in it, and the hole is usually in the schedule.

3. Impact fees are per square foot, and they moved this year.

New San Francisco rates took effect 1 January 2026. The Inclusionary Housing fee runs $249.66 per square foot of gross floor area. Transportation is $11.86 per gross square foot residential, $27.63 non-residential.

Those apply to the work they apply to — but if you’re pricing anything with size in San Francisco and nobody has raised the subject, that’s not a conservative estimate. That’s an incomplete one.

4. Accessibility upgrades have a dollar trigger, and it’s a state number.

When you alter an existing building, California requires the path of travel to be brought up to code, unless doing so would cost more than a disproportionate share of the job. That threshold is $209,208 for 2026.

Worth being precise here, because plenty of pages get it wrong: that’s a statewide California rule, not a San Francisco one. It isn’t a local quirk. It’s just a number that binds a good few of the renovations we price out here, and it belongs in the estimate before it turns up in a plan check comment.

This is the part nobody else on page one can show you.

Twelve Bay Area projects. $7,971,529 in total construction value. Real addresses, real zip codes, and you can open the estimates and read them line by line.

The full projects:

• Daly City — 94014 — $1.8M
• 554 27th Ave Residence — San Francisco, 94121 — $1.5M
• 3201 Beaumont ADU — Oakland, 94602 — $972K
• Pomona Ave — Albany, 94706 — $692K

The retail and restaurant build-outs:

• Circle K — Walnut Creek, 94597 — $1M
• Off the Charts TI — Santa Rosa, 95403 — $296K
• Chipotle Livermore — 94551 — $113K
• Journeys 272 Livermore — 94551 — $67K

And the tenant improvements and renovations:

• 27 Pomona Street Renovation — San Francisco, 94124 — $609K
• 5944 Claremont Ave — Oakland, 94618 — $522K
• 3925 Pasadena Dr — San Mateo, 94403 — $225K
• Danville Vet Expansion — 94526 — $96K

Click any one of them. You’ll get the actual estimate — supervision by the week, concrete by the cubic yard, sub markup on every line that gets subbed out. The only thing we took out is the date it was issued.

I’ll be straight with you about the shape of this. Two of those twelve are inside the city itself, about $2.15 million of the total. The rest is the wider Bay Area. I’d rather tell you that than let you assume otherwise and find out from the zip codes. What it actually means is that we’ve worked across nine building departments out here instead of one, which is the harder skill and the one that matters when your job is in Oakland and your last one was in Daly City.

In the city, 94121 is the Richmond — the Outer Richmond running west to Ocean Beach, Geary and Clement and Balboa, the streetcar blocks built after 1906. That’s the 27th Ave residence.

94124 is Bayview–Hunters Point, which is a different city in every way that affects a bid. Third Street, Silver Terrace, India Basin, the old industrial and PDR ground around the shipyard and the produce market. Pomona Street sits in Silver Terrace. Same city as the Richmond, same permit counter, completely different building stock.

Down the Peninsula: Daly City 94014 — Hillside, Bayshore, Crocker. San Mateo 94403, the Hillsdale area.

Across the bay: Oakland 94602, the Dimond District under Joaquin Miller Park. Oakland 94618, Rockridge and Upper Rockridge along the Claremont corridor. Albany 94706.

And out east: Walnut Creek 94597 off Ygnacio Valley Road, Danville 94526 in the San Ramon Valley, Livermore 94551 out by the wine country.

If you want a cost estimator who has actually pulled numbers in the department that’s reviewing your job, that’s the list — and every one of those is a real estimate you can open on this page.

You might be a general contractor bidding your first job across the bridge. You might be a sub who keeps losing work because your number lands late. You might be a developer who’s tired of getting a range instead of a price.

Since 2016 we’ve estimated over $12 billion in projects. We’ve worked with over 3,500 contractors nationwide. I run a coaching program of 400 contractors, so I get to see what’s actually working and what isn’t — not theory, what closes.

If you send us plans, you get a real estimate. Not a range. Not a per-square-foot guess. A number you can hand to an owner and defend line by line.

That’s it. Send us the plans and let’s price it.