Medford, MA Building Safety: Building Permits (2026)

Sec. 10-35 of the Revised Ordinances simply states that building permit and inspection fees are set out in Appendix A, so the substantive dollar amounts live in the city's consolidated fee schedule rather than in the chapter text itself. That schedule's Schedule of Building Fees, cross-referenced back to Sec. 10-35, prices permits for new building construction, additions, alterations, and repairs at $15.00 per $1,000.00 of estimated construction cost, with a separate $35.00 application fee due on top of that. The same schedule enforces the permit requirement financially rather than criminally: item (10), 'Work started without a building permit,' charges a quadruple fee once the building commissioner's office discovers the unpermitted work, meaning a project that skips the permit ends up paying roughly five times what a timely applicant pays for the same job.

Chapter 10, Article II adopts the Massachusetts State Building Code by reference under M.G.L.A. c. 143, § 98, so the substantive construction standards themselves come from the state code while Medford's own ordinance supplies the local fee and penalty structure that makes permitting worthwhile to do correctly the first time.