The $76,000 gap between two identical houses
Build the exact same house in Paekakariki and you might pay just under $5,000 in council fees. Build it in parts of Whitby, twenty minutes down the road, and that figure can climb past $81,000. Same size house. Same region. A $76,000 difference, purely down to where the site sits.
That fee is called a development contribution, and if you’ve never heard of it, you’re not alone. It’s a charge councils use to fund the infrastructure new development leans on: roads, water, wastewater, stormwater, reserves. Build a house, and you add demand to all of that. The contribution is your share of the cost of the extra capacity your project needs.
It gets calculated per Equivalent Household Unit, a standard measure of how much demand a development places on the network, and it’s triggered at whichever comes first out of resource consent, building consent, a service connection, or a new roading connection. Miss that it exists, and it lands as a surprise bill well after you thought the hard decisions were made.
The part that catches people out most: the gap isn’t only between councils, it shows up within one council too. In Porirua alone, a rural site can sit around $11,500 while a growth area a few suburbs over runs past $81,000, the same spread as crossing the entire region.
That variation is exactly why location is worth weighing early, not after you’ve fallen for a section. We’ve mapped development contribution costs across the wider Wellington region, catchment by catchment, so a project’s budget can account for this before a site’s locked in, not after.
Curious what a specific area looks like? Get in touch and we can email you all the charges and different locations. Targeting a specific area to develop within can save you thousands.
