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The three cases every fee argument runs through

Essential nexus, rough proportionality, and the rule that money counts. Twenty minutes here will make every conversation with a permit desk shorter.

Nollan: the essential nexus

A permit condition has to actually address the problem the development causes. If the government's stated interest is protecting a public view, it cannot demand a lateral beach easement that does nothing for the view. That link, between the interest and the condition, is the essential nexus.

Applied to fees: a road fee has to be about roads, and about roads your project will burden.

Dolan: rough proportionality

Beyond the link, the size has to fit. The government must make some individualized determination that the condition is roughly proportional in both nature and extent to the impact of the proposed development.

Rough is a real word in that sentence. Nobody expects mathematical precision. But a fee that charges a two-bedroom cottage the same as a six-bedroom house, on a schedule with no gradation, is inviting the question.

Koontz: money is not a loophole

A government cannot escape those tests by demanding money instead of land. Monetary exactions imposed as a condition of a permit are subject to the same scrutiny.

That case is why the fee in Sheetz was analyzed as an exaction in the first place.

Sheetz: legislation is not a loophole either

The last door closed in 2024. A fee adopted through legislation is not categorically exempt from these tests. See the dedicated guide for what that did and did not settle.

How the state acts absorbed all this

Most state enabling acts were written after these cases and encode the same ideas in statutory language: proportionate share, reasonable relationship, necessitated by and attributable to. Utah's act even used the phrase roughly proportionate long before Sheetz.

That matters because a statutory argument is much cheaper to make than a constitutional one. If the act says the fee cannot exceed a proportionate share, you can raise that with staff, in a hearing, or in a letter, without ever framing it as a takings claim.

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.Impact fee, tap fee, system development charge: the difference that costs moneyThey are collected at the same window, on the same day, from the same check. They come from different law, and only one of them is usually protected by your state's act.
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.