San Jose Construction Estimating Services

Most estimating companies price your San Jose job off a national average and hope nobody checks.

Here’s what they miss. San Jose charges a construction tax when your permit issues. Commercial, it’s 3% of the building valuation. Not a flat fee. Not a few hundred dollars. Three percent. On a million dollar job that’s thirty thousand dollars, due before anybody swings a hammer.

If that line isn’t in your bid, you’re not low. You’re short.

And the city bills by the hour on top of it. Plan review runs $325 an hour. Permit issuance $211. Building inspection $315. Need it expedited or after hours? $315 becomes $472. Fire plan check is a separate $407.

So when somebody hands you a number for a San Jose job and there’s no line for any of that, ask them what they think a permit costs. Watch what happens.

1. Plan review is measured in rounds, not days.

The city publishes its own timeframes in working days. A new commercial building is 25 days for the first round and 13 for every round after. Miscellaneous commercial is 10 and 5. An alteration without structural calcs is 10 and 5. New single-family is 20 and 10.

Read those numbers again. The second one is the one that gets you. Every comment loop is another 5 to 13 working days, and nobody gets through in one round. If you bid a San Jose TI on a two-week permit assumption, you’re going to be explaining a schedule you never actually had.

2. Half the county isn’t San Jose.

Of the thirteen jobs we’ve priced up there, five are inside the City of San Jose. The rest are Palo Alto, Milpitas, Saratoga, Campbell, Santa Clara and Cupertino. Seven jurisdictions.

They’re not interchangeable. Santa Clara runs its own ladder — 40 business days and 20 on a large new building, 30 and 15 complex, 20 and 10 standard, 10 and 5 minor, and 1 to 3 days over the counter. Palo Alto enforces an energy reach code San Jose doesn’t have at all: on permits filed since October 2024, offices have to beat the state energy standard by 10%, restaurants by 12%, and you need a Certified Energy Analyst to sign it.

A bid that assumes one process across Santa Clara County is a bid with a hole in it.

3. School fees are per square foot, and the number you find isn’t the whole number.

East Side Union High School District charges $1.36 a square foot on residential and $0.22 on commercial. That’s real money on anything with size to it.

It’s also only the high school district’s share. A K-8 district fee normally stacks on top. So if somebody quotes you “the school fee” as one number, they’ve given you part of it.

4. The zip code doesn’t tell you who has jurisdiction.

We priced a Starbucks in 95127. Only about a third of that zip is actually the City of San Jose — the rest is East Foothills, Alum Rock and unincorporated county.

Same zip. Different building department. Different fees, different review clock. If you price a 95127 job as a City of San Jose job, you’re going to find that out at plan check, and by then the number’s already gone to the owner.

Nobody catches that on a map. You catch it by checking the parcel, and you check it before you price, not after.

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

Thirteen Santa Clara County projects. $8,090,710 in total construction value, with $3,032,032 of that inside San Jose proper. Real addresses, real zip codes, and you can open the estimates and read them line by line.

The full projects:

• RH Palo Alto — 94304 — $1.6M
• Riverview V ADU Conversion — San Jose, 95110 — $1.5M
• Milpitas Daycare — 95035 — $1.3M
• West Valley College — Saratoga, 95070 — $1.3M

The retail and restaurant build-outs:

• Pollo Campero San Jose — 95122 — $367K
• Birayaniz Take-Out — Milpitas, 95035 — $209K
• Barnes & Noble Cupertino — 95014 — $153K
• Starbucks 9280 — San Jose, 95127 — $32K

And the tenant improvements and renovations:

• 1245 E Santa Clara — San Jose, 95116 — $1M
• Santa Clara County Library, Annex Building — Campbell, 95008 — $326K
• GoodVets Santa Clara — 95051 — $189K
• BMO San Jose — 95124 — $124K

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.

Thirty-one thousand dollars to a million and a half, same shop. A daycare, a community college, a public library annex, a bank branch, a vet clinic, an ADU conversion and four restaurants. Anybody quoting you a price per square foot across that range is guessing, and you’re the one who finds out.

I’ll be straight with you about the size of it. Santa Clara County is a smaller book for us than Los Angeles, where we’ve priced 43 jobs inside the city alone. Eight million dollars across thirteen projects is what it is. But it’s thirteen real jobs in seven real cities, and you can check every number on this page.

You might be a general contractor bidding your first job in a city you’ve never pulled a permit in. 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.