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Credits: the money most builders leave on the table

If you built it, dedicated it, or will pay for it twice, most state acts require the fee to come down. Almost nobody asks.

Construction credits

All but a handful of the general enabling acts require a credit or reimbursement when a developer makes an in-kind contribution: dedicating land, building improvements, or oversizing a facility for the benefit of others.

South Carolina's act puts the principle plainly, saying a developer may not be required to pay more than a proportionate share, nor to oversize facilities for others without fair compensation or reimbursement.

The practical failure is timing. Credits are granted against a fee that has not been paid yet. Once the check clears, you are asking for a refund instead of a credit, and that is a much slower conversation.

Revenue credits

A majority of state acts also require the calculation to account for the future taxes and fees your development will pay toward the same facilities, so that new construction is not charged twice for the same road.

Georgia's act gives more direction than most, requiring fees to be net of the present value of revenues that new growth will generate, based on historical funding patterns. Texas takes a blunter route: a city may skip the credit calculation entirely by cutting the fee in half.

California is the standout exception. Revenue credits are generally not provided there.

Past credits

A small group of states requires credit for revenues generated before the property was developed, usually property taxes paid on vacant land that went toward the same category of facility. Hawaii, Illinois, Utah, Virginia, Washington and West Virginia are the acts that reach backward this way.

If you have held raw land in one of those states for years, this is worth raising specifically.

How to ask

Put it in writing before assessment, cite the section of your state's act, attach the documentation of what you built or dedicated, and ask for the credit determination in writing.

If the answer is no, ask which provision of the act supports the denial. That single question resolves a surprising share of these.

Keep going

How to find the actual number for your parcelNobody publishes a national table of what you will pay, because there isn't one. Here is the sequence that gets you a real number in about two hours.Sheetz v. County of El Dorado, and what it actually changedIn 2024 the Supreme Court removed the shield that legislatively adopted impact fees had enjoyed. Then, in 2025, the fee survived anyway. Both halves matter.The three cases every fee argument runs throughEssential nexus, rough proportionality, and the rule that money counts. Twenty minutes here will make every conversation with a permit desk shorter.
Read this before you rely on anything here. Impact Fee Map describes who is legally allowed to charge new construction, for what, and what a fee payer's rights are under state law. It does not publish fee amounts for any city, county or district, and it never will, because no source keeps thirty-nine thousand local schedules current and a stale number is worse than none. This is not legal advice, not a fee quote and not a substitute for the adopted fee schedule of the bodies with jurisdiction over your parcel. Statutes change; verify against the current text and confirm every figure in writing with the agency that will bill you.