Verified against the city’s published rules · page updated October 21, 2026 · rules change — confirm with the city before applying
McKinney tells you clearly which household jobs need a plumbing permit. It is much less clear about what one costs, and it says nothing at all about whether you can pull one yourself. Those are not oversights we are guessing at. The city’s own fee schedule prints two different plumbing fee structures on facing sheets, and the word homeowner does not appear anywhere in the chapter of the code that governs construction.
Everything below is from McKinney’s own pages, its own fee schedule, its own permit packet and its own codified ordinances, read on 29 September 2026.
Building Inspections, part of Development Services, issues residential plumbing permits in McKinney.
The counter is at 401 E. Virginia St., McKinney, TX 75069. The number is 469-617-4800. Hours are Monday to Friday, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Applications and inspections run through the city’s Citizen Self-Service portal. McKinney also publishes a Development Navigation Assistant, which it describes as a way to “Create an account, answer questions about your project and receive a custom step-by-step guide to permitting your project.”
One thing to read before you pay anything. McKinney’s Building Inspections page carries a standing fraud notice: the city has been told of “fraudulent spam emails targeting applicants with unauthorized invoices”, says legitimate invoices are “only issued and accessible through the Citizen Self Service Portal”, and states that it “does not require an ‘Application Approval Fee’ to be paid for a permit to be issued.” If an invoice reaches you by email, it did not come from the city. The wider version of that problem is on how to tell if a plumber is overcharging or scamming you.
McKinney is in Collin County, the same county as Plano, and inside the city limits this is a city matter from application to final inspection. The county position is set out on Texas plumbing permits and is not restated here.
McKinney publishes both halves, which not every city we have read does, and the dividing line is whether you are altering pipe.
The city’s Home Repairs & Permit Information page has a section headed “Repairs that require permits” and another headed “Work that does not require permits”. The first is organized by job rather than by trade, and it names the plumbing-adjacent ones a homeowner meets: Water Heater, Gas / Meter Inspection, Foundation, Alteration. Each one carries the search term to type into the city’s Citizen Self-Service portal rather than a rule, which is a practical way to publish it and not a legal one.
The second section is the useful half, because it is where the line actually falls. Under the heading “Plumbing”, McKinney lists three jobs and only three:
Repairing minor leaks, as long as the removal, replacement, or relocation of piping is not required
Unclogging drains and sewers
Replacing toilets, faucets, and other fixtures in the same location without altering the pipes
Read those conditions carefully, because each one carries a limit that is easy to drop. A minor leak repair is exempt only while no pipe has to come out, go in or move. A fixture swap is exempt only in the same location and only without altering the pipes. Move the fixture or touch the pipe and you are outside the exemption in both cases.
Elsewhere in the same section McKinney exempts finish work, listing painting, papering, tiling, carpeting and flooring, cabinets, countertops and similar finish work, and on the gas side it exempts “Replacing non-permanent components, such as kitchen appliances”.
Behind both lists sits the ordinance. Section 122-4 of the code puts it in the broadest terms the city has: “It shall be unlawful for any person to erect, move, add to, or structurally alter, or to cause to be erected, moved, added to, or structurally altered, or to permit any person to erect, move, add to, or structurally alter, any building or other structure within the city limits without first having procured a permit to do so from the city.”
McKinney’s exempt list sits close to the five jobs state law carves out at Section 1301.551(c), close enough that the differences matter. Both reach a faucet, a water closet and a leak. The state’s list also names the replacement of ballcocks or water control valves and the replacement of garbage disposals, which McKinney’s does not; McKinney adds unclogging drains and sewers, and attaches the same-location, no-pipe-alteration and no-piping-removed conditions the statute does not. What that subsection does and does not do is set out in full on Texas plumbing permits.
We could not find a single McKinney document that addresses a homeowner holding a permit, and the one sentence that bears on it points the other way.
The Contractor Registration page says: “Licensed contractors must register with the City of McKinney before a permit can be issued.”
Read literally that is a rule about registration, not a ban on owners, and we are not going to stretch it into one. But it is the closest thing McKinney publishes to an answer, and it faces away from the homeowner.
We looked hard before writing that. On 29 September 2026 we read the Home Repairs, Building Inspections, Contractor Registration and Fee Schedule pages; the Residential Addition / Alteration Guide, a nine-sheet packet the city marks EFFECTIVE: OCTOBER 1, 2025; and the whole of Chapter 122 of the Code of Ordinances, where the word homeowner does not occur once. A site search for a homeowner permit returns fence permits, alarm permits and accessory dwelling units.
Compare that with the neighbors. Plano’s counter handout has carried a homeowner exception since at least 2016 and its ordinance now carries the same sentence. Dallas publishes a Homeowner’s Exemption from Registration form. San Antonio names homeowners in its ordinance. Those are on Plano, Dallas and San Antonio. McKinney publishes nothing equivalent, and until it does the only reliable way to find out is to call Building Inspections on 469-617-4800 and ask.
A plumbing contractor must register with McKinney before a permit issues, and the city charges nothing for it.
The requirement is one sentence: “Licensed contractors must register with the City of McKinney before a permit can be issued.” For a plumbing or mechanical license holder the city asks for two things, a “Texas Responsible Master Plumber or Mechanical License” and “State picture identification (e.g., Texas driver’s license)”. The registration tracks the state license rather than a city anniversary: “Licenses are renewable on the expiration date specified on the state license.”
The fee line reads “No registration fee”, for electrical contractors, master-only electrical license holders and plumbing and mechanical license holders alike.
That is not discretion. Section 1301.551(g) says a person required to obtain a plumbing permit “is not required to pay a plumbing registration fee or administrative fee in a municipality or any other political subdivision”, and subsection (h) is what lets the city require the registration in the first place. McKinney has taken (h) and complied with (g).
If a McKinney registration fee is ever quoted to you for plumbing work, that is the subsection to point at. Fort Worth is the city in this set where the published position and the ordinance do not line up on exactly that point.
McKinney’s permit fee schedule states a flat $40.00 plumbing permit fee on one sheet and a $25.00 minimum plus $2.50 per fixture on the next, and nothing in the document says which is current.
Here is what each sheet carries.
Sheet 3, under the heading “Other Inspections and Fees”, gives a set of flat residential figures:
| Item | Fee |
|---|---|
| Plumbing Permit Fee | $40.00 |
| Residential Water Heater Permits | $40.00 |
| Mechanical Permit Fee | $40.00 |
| Electrical Permit Fee | $40.00 |
| Residential Foundation Repair Permits | $75.00 |
| Plan Review Fee, residential | $100.00 |
| Reinspection, first | $50.00 |
| Reinspection, second | $75.00 |
| Reinspection, third or more | $100.00 |
The document labels the three reinspection lines “Reinspection fees per hour*”, and its asterisk reads “Or the total hourly cost to the jurisdiction, whichever is the greatest.” So each figure is a floor, not a flat price.
Sheet 4, headed “Plumbing, Mechanical, and Electrical Permit Fees Table”, does something different. It sets a plumbing minimum fee of $25.00 and then charges per fixture: $2.50 each for a water closet, a heater, a lavatory, a kitchen sink, a bathtub, a shower, a floor drain, a washing machine, a disposal, a dish washer and a water service, with a separate $10.00 line for a private sewage disposal system.
Two structures. One document. No date on it anywhere, no revision marking and no ordinance number, so the fee schedule itself cannot tell you which sheet supersedes which. Sheet 4 also prints a different city address in its header, 221 N. Tennessee rather than the Building Inspections counter at 401 E. Virginia St. The document does not say why.
The city does date one of the two, somewhere else. Its Residential Builder’s Packet, a 51-page compilation in the same forms list, reprints the flat schedule on fee pages marked “Effective October 1, 2025” – “Plumbing Permit Fee $40.00”, “Residential Water Heater Permits $40.00”, and the same escalating reinspection ladder of $50, $75 and $100. The $25 minimum plus $2.50-per-fixture table appears nowhere in those 51 pages.
That is the best evidence available that the flat figures are the current ones. It is still not the city saying so, and the packet is a compilation carrying three different effective dates across its sheets, so treat it as a strong hint rather than an answer.
And the document is not the governing text in any event. Its own sheet 2 says “The schedule of fees for the various permits shall be as specified in appendix A of the Code of Ordinances which may be amended from time to time by ordinance”, and section 122-33 of the code says the same for the per-fixture plumbing charge. We could not read Appendix A on 29 September 2026: the direct link returned Content Not Found and the code’s own front page served an archived supplement.
So this page states no single McKinney plumbing permit fee. Ask the counter, get the answer against your specific job, and if you can, get it in writing.
The city announced the 2024 code cycle on 1 October 2025, and its codified chapter still sets out the 2021 editions.
The Building Inspections page is unambiguous about the announcement: “On October 1, 2025, the City Council approved the adoption of the following codes with amendments”, followed by nine 2024-edition codes, the International Plumbing Code among them. The page adds one more that is not the city’s doing at all: “The 2026 National Electrical Code is in effect by State law as of September 1, 2026.”
The codified chapter has not caught up. Sections 122-25 and 122-31 still adopt the 2021 International Residential Code and the 2021 International Plumbing Code, each under a note reading “Amended by Ordinance No. 2025-08-068”. That is the adopting ordinance flagged against text that has not yet been rewritten around it, which is how a code supplement normally lags a council vote.
Neither document is wrong. They are a supplement apart, and the council vote is the operative one. It is worth knowing which is which if a plan reviewer and a printed code appear to disagree, and it puts McKinney a cycle ahead of Denton, alongside Plano.
Inspections are requested through Citizen Self-Service, and the city expects the general contractor to request them.
McKinney puts it plainly: “Inspection for work done on permitted projects should be requested by the general contractor”, and “All inspections must be scheduled through Citizen Self-Service.”
Cancellations have a clock on them. Call 469-617-4800 before 9 a.m. to cancel with a permit technician; after 9 a.m. you have to reach your inspector directly. The city also asks for cancellations in the rain for foundation, ground plumbing, flatwork and pool inspections, and says what happens if you do not: “If the contractor does not call to cancel the inspection, a red tag will be issued if the site is deemed too wet by the inspector and a $50 re-inspection fee will be issued.”
We do not state a McKinney plumbing permit fee, because the city’s own schedule gives two and dates neither. We do not say whether a homeowner may hold a permit, because McKinney publishes nothing on it either way. We have not read Appendix A of the Code of Ordinances, which is the document both the schedule and section 122-33 say actually governs the fees, because we could not locate it in the published code on the day we looked.
All three of those gaps close with one phone call to 469-617-4800, and we would rather tell you which call to make than print a figure we cannot stand behind.
Every figure on this page comes from one of the documents below, each published by the body that sets, measures or administers the thing it describes. We record the document’s own date and the date we read it, because published pages change without notice.
| Source | Document date | We read it |
|---|---|---|
| City of McKinney — Home Repairs & Permit Information | undated city web page | 2026-09-29 |
| City of McKinney — Building Inspections (department page, adopted codes, contacts, fraud notice) | undated city web page; states the 2024 code adoption of 1 October 2025 | 2026-09-29 |
| City of McKinney — Contractor Registration | undated city web page | 2026-09-29 |
| City of McKinney — Fee Schedule (Building Inspections landing page, address and hours) | undated city web page | 2026-10-08 (the landing page itself carries no figures; the schedule it links was read in full as raw PDF text on this date and its figures confirmed) |
| City of McKinney — Permit Fee Schedule for New Construction, Remodels, and Repairs (PDF, five sheets) | no date, revision marking or ordinance number is printed anywhere on the document | 2026-10-08 (all five pages read as raw PDF text; ‘Residential Water Heater Permits $40.00’ and ‘Plumbing Permit Fee $40.00’ confirmed. The file carries no date on its face; its PDF metadata gives a creation date of 10 December 2009.) |
| City of McKinney — Residential Addition / Alteration Guide (Residential Alterations/Additions Packet) | the cover prints EFFECTIVE: OCTOBER 1, 2025 | 2026-09-29 (read in full for any homeowner or owner-occupant provision; there is none) |
| McKinney, Texas Code of Ordinances, Chapter 122 Construction Regulations, Article II Building Codes (secs. 122-4, 122-25, 122-26, 122-31, 122-32, 122-33) | the codified text sets out the 2021 code editions; each adopting section carries the note ‘Amended by Ordinance No. 2025-08-068’ | 2026-09-29 (the whole chapter read; the word ‘homeowner’ appears nowhere in it) |
| Texas Occupations Code ch. 1301, Sec. 1301.551 Municipal Plumbing Ordinances and Permits | current online codification | 2026-09-29 (subsections (a) through (j) read; tcss.legis.texas.gov is the fetchable host, per claude/texas-statutes-host-change-2026-09-20.md) |
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