DENVER, September 26 — The story begins with a single hypothetical house: 2,000 square feet, a vacant 7,000-square-foot lot, the same structure in every case. Build it in Colorado Springs and the taxes, fees and permitting costs stacked on top come to $24,295. Build the identical house in Boulder and that same stack reaches $101,616.
That more-than-four-fold gap is the finding at the heart of a report released Wednesday by the Common Sense Institute, titled “The Cost of Homebuilding in Colorado Cities: How the Regulatory Environment Impacts the Price of New Homes.” CSI ran the numbers across 16 Colorado cities and arrived at a 16-city average of $51,732 per home. Denver lands almost exactly at the cohort’s median.
Its $47,376 fee stack ranks ninth of the 16 cities — a result that follows CSI’s earlier national comparison of Denver to 12 peer cities, and an August 2026 report that found the city’s homebuilding fees significantly higher than those in the peer group, Portland among them.
Water and sewer drive the bill
Water and sewer system development charges are the largest single cost component in nearly every city examined, and the report finds they track growth pressure and water-rights costs more than city size. The Front Range suburbs carry the heaviest load. Thornton’s combined water and sewer fees of $57,203 are the highest in the cohort and make up nearly three-quarters of its total $79,503 fee stack.
Aurora and Centennial sit alongside Thornton among the most expensive. Impact fees tell a different geographic story.
Largely absent from Denver’s own fee schedule, they are a substantial cost in mid-sized Front Range cities such as Greeley, Windsor, Loveland, Berthoud and Johnstown. Mandatory affordable housing fees are rare statewide, appearing in only Denver and Boulder among the 16 cities examined.
The clock as a cost
Money is only part of it. Denver takes an average of 210 days to review a major residential development plan — more than ten times the cohort’s ex-Denver median of 20 days. CSI puts the carrying cost of that delay at roughly $1,750 per month.
And the burden does not fall evenly against home prices. Castle Rock’s fees equal 19% of its median home price, the highest ratio in the cohort.
Boulder, despite carrying the largest dollar fee stack, sees that burden shrink to 9% of its $1.1 million median price. What the fees appear to suppress is volume. The seven cheapest-to-build-in cities permitted an average of 13.9 housing units per 1,000 residents, compared with 3.1 units per 1,000 residents in the seven most expensive — a 4.5-fold difference.
The report cautions that its findings do not suggest every fee is improper, or that eliminating fees alone would make housing affordable. Policy decisions, it concludes, materially shape the market in which housing is financed and built.
CSI frames local policy through four governing forces: capacity, time, risk and voters. The backdrop is stark. Since 2010, the value of a typical single-family home in Colorado has risen 151%, while median household income has grown just 77%.
Colorado ranked 50th in CSI’s most recent Housing Competitiveness Index, and U.S. News & World Report ranked the state 47th for housing affordability in 2026. The March 2026 NAHB/Wells Fargo Housing Market Index estimates that government regulation during development and construction accounts for a national average of 26.4% of the final price of a new single-family home.
What to watch next is whether any of the 16 cities move on the two levers the report isolates — the water and sewer charges that dominate the stack, and the review timelines that quietly add to it. Denver’s 210-day plan review is the outlier the cohort will be measured against.
