Replacing a water heater needs a plumbing permit nearly everywhere in Texas. What it costs is a different question in every city, and the answer is not on any one page.
So we read sixteen cities’ current fee documents and priced one job in all of them: a residential water heater replacement. One job, because it is the single most-permitted plumbing job in the state and the only one every schedule prices the same way. Across those sixteen the range is $40.00 to $146.41. A seventeenth, Dallas, prints two tables that could both apply to the job, at $175.00 and $181.00, and does not say which one does.
Every figure below came off that city’s own fee document on the date in the last column. None of it came from our own city guides.
| City | Cost | What the document prices it as | Instrument and its date | Read |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| McKinney | $40.00 | “Residential Water Heater Permits” | Undated; PDF created 10 Dec 2009 | 8 Oct 2026 |
| Brownsville | $42.50 | $40.00 to issue + “Water heater and/or vent, each” $2.50 | Code §18-659; last substantive amendments 1992 and 1997 | 8 Oct 2026 |
| Denton | $50.00 | “MEP Flat Fee (i.e. Service Update, Water Heater, Mechanical)” | Ordinance 26-1576, effective 1 Oct 2026 | 8 Oct 2026 |
| Killeen | $60.00 | “Plumbing (Includes Water Heater Replacement)” $50 + $10 tech fee | FY 2027 schedule, effective 1 Oct 2026 | 8 Oct 2026 |
| Frisco | $60.42 | $50.00 to issue + “each water heater and/or vent” $7.00, +6% | Schedule effective 1 Oct 2026; Ord. 2026-05-40 | 8 Oct 2026 |
| McAllen | $63.60 | Base fee $39.60 + “Water heater” $24.00 | Effective 1 Oct 2016, updated Nov 2019 | 8 Oct 2026 |
| Irving | $65.00 | “Plumbing single trade … water heaters, and similar plumbing work” | FY26-27 amendments; Inspections section effective 1 Nov 2026 | 9 Oct 2026 |
| Austin | $74.05 | “Residential Change-Out Program Permits - HVAC (first system)” | FY 2026-27, effective 1 Oct 2026 | 8 Oct 2026 |
| Lubbock | $75.00 | “Commercial or Residential Water Heater” | FY 2025-26; period ended 30 Sep 2026 | 7 Oct 2026 |
| Mesquite | $75.00 | “Plumbing (includes water heater replacement)” | Residential Fee Schedule 2026-2027, rev. 09/26 | 8 Oct 2026 |
| Waco | $83.00 | $60 admin + $15 tech + $8 per fixture incl. “Hot Water Heater” | Undated | 8 Oct 2026 |
| Plano | $85.00 | “SIMPLE TRADE PERMITS (MEP) each”, Residential | Ordinance 2025-11-4, effective 2 Jan 2026 | 8 Oct 2026 |
| Fort Worth | $119.00 | One-trade “RESIDENTIAL REMODEL” minimum permit fee | Ordinance 26-28781, effective 1 Oct 2026 | 8 Oct 2026 |
| Arlington | $120.00 | Base permit fee $100.00 + “Water heater, first water heater” $20.00 | Resolution 26-288, effective 1 Oct 2026 | 9 Oct 2026 |
| El Paso | $123.76 + tech | Plumbing base fee $110 + “Gas Water Heater” $13.76 | FY 2024 Schedule C | 8 Oct 2026 |
| Corpus Christi | $146.41 | Plumbing “Minimum Permit Fee” | FY 2026; period ended 30 Sep 2026 | 8 Oct 2026 |
| Dallas | $175.00 min or $181.00 | Table B-I, alterations or repairs “(Includes Standalone Trade Permits)”, $175 minimum; Table B-II, single-family alterations, “$181 per dwelling unit” | July 2025 schedule | 17 Oct 2026 |
Three and a half times. That is the spread between McKinney and Corpus Christi for the same job, before Dallas’s higher reading stretches it further, and neither city is an outlier on size, region or cost of living. It is just what their documents say.
Four cities add a fee on top, and only one of them is in the headline figure. Killeen adds a flat $10 “Tech / Application Fee” to every asterisked permit, and its plumbing line is asterisked, so $50 is really $60. Frisco adds a non-refundable 6% technology fee to the base fee of any permit processed through its software, under Ordinance 2026-05-40, which takes $57.00 to $60.42. Waco charges a $60 “Plumbing & Irrigation Administration Fee” and a separate $15 “Technology Fee - Plumbing & Irrigation” before it charges $8 for the fixture. El Paso adds a technology fee in tiers we could not price. If you are comparing cities, compare the all-in number, not the line that looks like the permit.
Two of these schedules had already expired when we read them. Lubbock’s states its own period as 1 October 2025 to 30 September 2026, and on 7 October it was still the only fee schedule the city’s Forms & Fee Schedule page linked. Corpus Christi’s FY 2026 schedule says “effective fees from October 1, 2025 to September 30, 2026” and is still the document at the city’s own URL. Both are the current published figures, in the sense that nothing newer is published, and both are a budget cycle out of date. Ask before you write the cheque.
Two are old enough to be a different kind of problem. Brownsville’s figures sit in an ordinance whose last substantive amendments are from 1992 and 1997, which is why a water heater line reads $2.50. McKinney’s document carries no date at all; its file was created in December 2009. These are the oldest in the set, and the risk runs the opposite way to a stale schedule that overcharges: what the counter charges today may simply not be what the document says.
Fort Worth prices the same job two ways and does not reconcile them. Its residential remodel table sets a minimum of $119.00 for a one-trade project. Its Schedule of Plumbing Fees separately prices a “First Fixture or Appliance” at $10.34. A permit application fee of $33.08 applies to all permit types in a third table. We have put the $119.00 one-trade minimum in the table because that is the structure a residential water heater falls into, and we are not going to invent an arithmetic total out of three tables that do not refer to each other.
Austin’s water heater permit is filed under HVAC. The line is “Residential Change-Out Program Permits - HVAC (first system)”, and the note directly beneath it reads “Includes: Water Heaters, replacement of backflow devices, irrigation systems, water yard lines and sewer yard lines”. Austin’s standalone “Plumbing Base Fee” on the same schedule is $220.47, and that is the whole-house plumbing permit for new work, not the price of swapping a tank.
Dallas’s July 2025 fee schedule prints a $175.00 minimum for standalone trade permits and, beside it, $181.00 per dwelling unit for single-family alterations, without saying which a house water heater falls under.
This page first said Dallas published no plumbing price at all. That was wrong, and we corrected it on 17 October 2026. The figures are on the last pages of the Permit Fee Schedule effective 1 July 2025, which the city’s own Fees page links as its “Fee Guide”. Table B-I prices “Alterations or Repairs Permit Fee” by value of work, notes “(Includes Standalone Trade Permits)” and says “Minimum permit fee is $175”. Table B-II, beside it, prices alterations or repairs of single-family and duplex structures at “$181 per dwelling unit”, plus “$100 for additional trades”.
A water heater swap on a house is a standalone trade permit, which points to Table B-I. It is also an alteration or repair of a single-family structure, which points to Table B-II. The schedule does not settle it, so we are not going to either. Budget $181.00, and ask Dallas on 214-948-4480 which table your permit will be priced from.
The schedule’s own disclaimer also applies: the fees “are for informational purposes only and are subject to change. Final permit fees will be calculated at the time of submittal based on the specifics of each project”.
Texas law says a plumber who must pull a permit does not pay a city registration fee, though a few cities’ documents still print one. Which cities print what, read from each city’s own documents, is on can a Texas city charge a plumber a registration fee?
Honesty about coverage is the point of a table like this.
El Paso is in the table, but off its FY 2024 schedule rather than its current one. The FY 2027 Schedule C is an 88-page file with no usable text layer, so the current figures could not be read at all. Treat its row as the oldest in the table, not as today’s price.
Garland and San Antonio. We did not locate their current fee documents at drafting. That is a statement about this page, not about those cities: do not read it as “they publish no price.”
Two cities that were on this list when the page first went up are now in the table. Arlington’s schedule needed a different reader, because the city’s site blocks the one this project normally uses; the figures were checked against the three we had already recorded from it and matched. Irving was simply a mistake on our side, and the correction is worth knowing if you are looking for Irving’s fees yourself: the Fees + Forms page in the building department still links the FY24-25 schedule as “Permit Fees”, two fiscal years out of date, while Finance publishes the FY27 schedule on its Rates + Fees page. The plumbing figure is $65 in both, so nobody has been misquoted, but the department’s own link is not the current document.
Three things, in order.
Price the job, not the permit. The permit is one line on an invoice that will also carry the plumber’s labor and the tank. Our read of what the work itself costs is on what a plumber charges in Texas.
Check the figure against the document’s own date before you rely on it. Every row above carries one for that reason. Two had expired, two are from the 1990s and 2009, and one is from 2016.
And settle whether the job needs a permit before you worry about the price, because that is a different question with a different answer in each city. The statewide picture is on Texas plumbing permits, the water heater answer specifically is on do you need a permit to replace a water heater in Texas?, and what happens if you skip one is on skipping a plumbing permit in Texas.
If a city has charged you something different from what is above, we want to know. The figure is only as good as the document, and the documents change.
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 Arlington – Planning and Development Services Fee Schedule, Resolution No. 26-288 | ‘Planning and Development Services Fee Schedule Effective October 1, 2026’; Resolution No. 26-288 | 2026-10-09 (read with a dependency-free PDF text extractor, because this host blocks the script normally used; its output was validated against three Arlington figures already recorded on our Arlington page and matched all three) |
| City of Irving – Consolidated Fee Schedule FY26-27 Amendments, effective October 1, 2026 | headed ‘Exhibit A / CITY OF IRVING / SCHEDULE OF FEES / FY26-27 Amendments / Effective Oct. 1, 2026’; 29 pages; PDF created 25 September 2026 | 2026-10-09 (all 29 pages read as raw PDF text; item 14 prices the plumbing single trade, water heaters named in the line, at $65) |
| City of Austin — Residential Building Plan Review & Inspection Permit Fees | every page footer reads ‘Updated: 10/01/2026 - Effective 10/01/2026’; PDF created 1 October 2026 | 2026-10-08 (all six pages read as raw PDF text) |
| City of Brownsville — Code of Ordinances ch. 18 art. VIII §18-659, plumbing permit fees | deriving from Code 1971 §27-21, with substantive amendments by Ord. No. 92-853-A (1992) and Ord. No. 97-853-D (1997) and a chapter recodification by Ord. No. 2008-1485 (2008) | 2026-10-08 |
| City of Corpus Christi — FY 2026 Development Fee Schedule | states ‘effective fees from October 1, 2025 to September 30, 2026’; page footers read ‘Rev. October 1, 2025’; PDF created 21 January 2026 | 2026-10-08 (all 14 pages read as raw PDF text) |
| City of Dallas — Permit Fee Schedule, effective July 1, 2025 | ‘Permit Fee Schedule / Effective July 1, 2025’; PDF created 27 June 2025; linked by the city’s own Fees page as ‘Fee Guide’ | 2026-10-08; re-read 2026-10-17 (pdftotext -layout; Tables B-I and B-II on page 10, which the 2026-10-08 read missed) |
| City of Dallas — Building Inspection Division Fee Schedule for Permits and Services | undated on its face; PDF created 29 June 2016; cites Chapter 51A, Ordinance No. 10962 and Chapter 52 | 2026-10-08 (all four pages read as raw PDF text and searched for a plumbing or water heater line) |
| City of Denton — Permit and Fee Schedule, effective October 1, 2026 | ‘(Effective October 1, 2026, Ordinance 26-1576)’; PDF named ‘Permit Fee Schedule 10.01.26.docx’ and created 30 September 2026 | 2026-10-08 (all 16 pages read as raw PDF text) |
| City of El Paso — FY 2024 Schedule C, Departmental Fee List (adopted) | headed ‘FY 2024 Schedule C’ with its fee column headed ‘FY 2024 Adopted Fees’; PDF named ‘FY2024 Schedule C Adopted.xlsx’ and created 8 August 2023 | 2026-10-08 (all 48 pages read as raw PDF text; lines 595 to 638 are the plumbing and gas fee rows) |
| City of El Paso — FY 2027 Schedule C | page headers read ‘FY 2027 Proposed’ and ‘(As amended on 08/18/2026)’; PDF named ’27. Budget Reso Fy26-27.pdf’ and created 27 August 2026 | 2026-10-08 (88 pages; the file carries no usable text layer beyond its page headers, so no fee line could be read from it) |
| City of Fort Worth — Ordinance No. 26-28781, development fees schedule | Ordinance No. 26-28781, effective October 1, 2026 | 2026-10-08 (all 73 pages read as raw PDF text; Table No. 1-B, Table 1-D, Table IA-1 and Table 1-I are the relevant tables) |
| City of Frisco — Permit, Inspection and Miscellaneous Consolidated Fee Schedule | prints ‘Effective Date: 10/1/2026.’ on page 1; PDF created 2 October 2026 | 2026-10-08 (all 15 pages read as raw PDF text; the plumbing permit fees are on pages 9 to 11) |
| City of Frisco — Ordinance No. 2026-05-40, citywide technology fee | passed 19 May 2026; section 6 makes it effective sixty days after passage; PDF created 21 May 2026 | 2026-10-08 (all four pages read as raw PDF text, including subsection (D), the exclusions) |
| City of Killeen — FY 2027 Fee Schedule, effective October 1, 2026 to September 30, 2027 | ‘FY 2027 FEE SCHEDULE / Effective October 1, 2026 to September 30, 2027’; PDF created 8 July 2026 | 2026-10-08 (all 48 pages read as raw PDF text) |
| City of Lubbock — Building Safety Fee Schedule, fiscal year October 1, 2025 to September 30, 2026 | ‘Fiscal Year Effective Dates: October 1, 2025 - September 30, 2026’; PDF created 23 April 2026; still the only fee schedule linked by the city’s own Forms & Fee Schedule page on 2026-10-07 | 2026-10-07 (all six pages read as raw PDF text) |
| City of McAllen — Permit fee schedule | prints ‘(Effective October 1, 2016)’ on every page, with page footers ‘Updated: 11/21/2019’ and ‘Updated: 11/29/2019’; PDF named ‘Fee Schedule.xlsx’ and created 25 July 2017 | 2026-10-08 (all three pages read as raw PDF text) |
| City of McKinney — Plumbing, Mechanical, Electrical Permit Fees | no date, revision marking or ordinance number is printed anywhere on it; PDF titled ‘Plumbing, Mechanical, Electrical Permit Fees’ and created 10 December 2009 | 2026-10-08 (all five pages read as raw PDF text) |
| City of Mesquite — Residential Fee Schedule 2026-2027 | footed ‘HANDOUTS/2026FeeScheduleResidential - Revised 09/26’; PDF created 30 September 2026 | 2026-10-08 |
| City of Plano — Building Inspections Fee Schedule, Exhibit A to Ordinance No. 2025-11-4 | PDF titled ‘Building Inspections Fee Schedule - Effective Jan. 2, 2026’; Exhibit A to Ordinance No. 2025-11-4, which repeals Ordinance No. 2020-3-6; PDF created 11 November 2025 | 2026-10-08 (all nine pages read as raw PDF text) |
| City of Waco — Permit Fee Schedules | UNDATED. No effective date, fiscal year, revision date or ordinance number appears anywhere on the page; the plumbing figures are in its ‘Plumbing & Lawn Sprinkler’ tab | 2026-10-08 (read from the rendered page, all tabs) |
| Texas Occupations Code ch. 1301, §1301.551 Municipal Plumbing Ordinances and Permits | current online codification; §1301.551 last amended by Acts 2013, 83rd Leg., R.S., Ch. 981 (H.B. 2062), Sec. 7, eff. September 1, 2013 | 2026-10-08 (subsections (a) through (j) read) |
Tell us the job once — we send it to up to 3 license-verified plumbers. Free, no spam, delete your request anytime.
Secure form. Sent over an encrypted connection to up to 3 license-verified plumbers. Never sold to data brokers, and you can have your request deleted anytime.