Two Alberta cities went into the same national benchmarking study. They came out $57,000 apart on every low-rise home they approve.
Calgary charges $93,000 per low-rise unit in municipal fees. Edmonton charges $36,000. Same province, same building code, same trades driving between the two on Highway 2, and a gap of 2.6 times on what city hall bills before a shovel moves.
That result is a year old now and nobody has produced a newer national comparison, so it remains the honest scorecard on where Calgary actually stands. It is a better scorecard than most cities would want published about themselves. It is also a document with one very obvious problem in it.
Fifth overall with a thirteenth place problem
Calgary finished 5th of 23 municipalities. Top quarter of the country. On the process side the city earns it.
Planning features, 7th, on a score of 85%. Approvals timelines, 6th, at 4.2 months, improved from 5.4 months in the previous edition. That is real work by real staff and it should be said out loud before anything else.
Then you get to the fee columns. Government charges on low-rise, 13th of 23. Middle of the pack, in a country where the pack includes Toronto.
Read that pair together and the story writes itself. Calgary’s top five finish is carried almost entirely by its planning department. The invoice department is dragging it backwards. High-rise charges land 10th at $11,100 a unit, which is genuinely good against a national high-rise average of $35,000. Low-rise is the weak link, and low-rise is where most Calgary families actually buy.
Above the national average, in Alberta
The Canadian average municipal charge on a low-rise unit is $82,600. Calgary sits above it, at $93,000.
Sit with that for a second. A city in the province with the cheapest new housing in the country is charging more per low-rise door than the Canadian average, and $10,400 of that is above a national number inflated by places like Toronto. Edmonton, three hours up the road, is $46,600 below the same average.
None of this is a provincial policy. The building code is the same. Labour costs are close. Land is different, sure. But $57,000 a door does not come out of geology. It comes out of a fee schedule that a council writes, votes on, and can amend on any Tuesday it chooses to.
The uncomfortable comparison is not with Vancouver or Ottawa. It is with the other Alberta city that got measured on the same criteria in the same year and finished first overall while charging less than half as much.
What a month of waiting costs in Calgary
The study also prices delay, which is the cost nobody puts on an invoice.
In Calgary, every month a low-rise file sits carries an indirect cost of $3,862 per unit. High-rise runs $3,137 per unit per month. Both are higher than Edmonton’s equivalents, which means Calgary delay is more expensive delay.
The good news is the city has been cutting it. Going from 5.4 months to 4.2 months is 1.2 months removed, worth roughly $4,600 per low-rise unit. That is a genuine saving that went somewhere, and on a file volume the size of Calgary’s it adds up fast.
Now put it beside the fee gap. The city clawed back about $4,600 per unit on speed while still charging $57,000 more per unit than Edmonton does. The department that moves the needle is not the department holding the pen on the fee bylaw. Speed is being used to apologize for price.
The fix is a line item, not a strategy
Here is what makes this worth writing about rather than shrugging at.
Fixing an approvals process is hard. It takes software, staffing, retraining, culture, years. Calgary did that part and the ranking proves it. Fixing a charge schedule takes a council vote and the willingness to explain the vote afterward. It is the easier of the two jobs and it is the one still outstanding.
Every dollar of that $93,000 is recovered in the sale price. It does not come off the builder’s margin and it does not vanish into an accounting entry. It rides the mortgage for 25 years, with interest, which is why a fee decision made in a committee room in 2024 is still being paid off in 2049. Whatever room buyers picked up when the Bank of Canada gave them a break on rates, city hall has been taking a share of it straight back through the fee schedule.
Calgary has the planning process. It has the staff. It has the ranking. The full Calgary scorecard shows a city that is four fifths of the way to being the best in the country at this, and the missing fifth is a number in a bylaw.
Edmonton’s $3.3 billion in Edmonton real estate investment did not happen by accident either. Capital reads fee schedules.
Should Calgary council match Edmonton’s low-rise charges, or keep defending a fee schedule 2.6 times higher?
