Residential contributions
Whether you are adding extra rooms to your house, building another dwelling on your property, or undertaking a larger-scale development, you will need to pay a development contribution directly related to the amount of additional demand on services that development generates.
Charges will depend on the location (catchment area) of your development and the cost of providing different types of infrastructure to that area. All development also pays a contribution towards the infrastructure required to support growth across the whole district.
The basic calculation for development contributions is:
Additional units of demand x [district-wide development contribution rate + development contribution rate for catchment area of development] = development contribution payable.
See below for more information about the unit of demand and development contribution rates.
An assessment for development contributions will be made when you submit an application for a land use consent, subdivision, building consent, service connection or certificate of acceptance, and you will be notified of how much you have to pay.
The deadlines for payment will depend on the type of application. We will notify you about the amount you need to pay, payment due dates and how to pay when we issue your consent. Consent, certification or connection will only proceed after you have paid your development contribution. Find out more about payments.
You can use our Online Estimator to generate an estimate of how much you might need to pay
Important note: The Online Estimator is a tool to provide an estimate of the residential development contribution. We will notify you of the actual residential development contribution payable, as assessed by the council. The Online Estimator is not intended to be used in relation to non-residential development contributions.
Units of demand
The ‘unit of demand’ is the way we measure how much additional demand for infrastructure your development will create and it is used to calculate the charges. For residential development, this is called a ‘Housing Equivalent Unit’ or HEU.
The unit of demand (HEU) is based on the number of bedrooms or ‘habitable rooms’ in your development.
A habitable room is any space within a residential unit that can be used for sleeping purposes and that can be partitioned or closed for privacy. It includes spaces such as ‘games’, ‘family’, ‘recreation’, ‘study’, ‘sewing’, ‘den’, or ‘work’ rooms.
If a residential unit has living or dining rooms that can be partitioned or closed for privacy, all of them, except one, will be considered a bedroom.
The following spaces are not counted as bedrooms or habitable rooms:
- kitchen or pantry
- bathroom or toilet
- laundry or clothes-drying room
- corridor, hallway or lobby
- garage
- any room smaller than 6m²
If you are sub-dividing, you will be charged for a full HEU for each additional vacant site that is created. This gives you the ability to build a 3-4 bedroom dwelling. If you are developing an existing site by building a new dwelling or adding bedrooms to an existing site, you will be charged 0.25HEU for each additional bedroom on the site over the 4 bedroom allowance assumed to be already on the site.
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Number of bedrooms
|
Demand per HEU
|
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1-2 bedrooms
|
0.5 HEU
|
|
3-4 bedrooms
|
1 HEU
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5 + bedrooms
|
0.25 HEU per bedroom
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Residential development contribution rates
The amount of development contribution you have to pay will depend on the location (catchment area) of your development and the cost of providing different types of infrastructure to that area. Each zone has a different rate. The catchment areas are:
- Whanganui Urban Infill
- Whanganui Rural
- Springvale Expansion area (with three sub-zones B, C and D)
- Northwest Growth Area (with four sub-zones A1, A2, D and E)
You can see the different zones on this map
You can read about the council’s planned projects to deliver growth in each catchment area in Schedule 6 of the development contributions policy.
All development also pays a contribution towards the infrastructure required to support growth across the whole district.
The district-wide rate is added to the catchment area rate for your development when we calculate the amount due.
All the charges below exclude GST.
|
Category
|
District-wide (applies to all developments)
|
|
Community Infrastructure
|
$695
|
|
Transport
|
$4,921
|
|
City water supply
|
$644
|
|
Stormwater
|
$182
|
|
Wastewater
|
$2,154
|
|
Total excl GST
|
$8,596
|
|
Category
|
Whanganui Urban Infill
|
Whanganui Rural
|
|
Community Infrastructure
|
$ -
|
$ -
|
|
Transport
|
$376
|
$7
|
|
City water supply
|
$1,329
|
$103
|
|
Stormwater
|
$2,549
|
$ -
|
|
Wastewater
|
$648
|
$303
|
|
Total excl GST
|
$4,902
|
$413
|
|
Category
|
Springvale Urban Expansion Area
|
|
B
|
C
|
D
|
|
Community Infrastructure
|
$ -
|
$ -
|
$ -
|
|
Transport
|
$4,464
|
$8,335
|
$1,792
|
|
City water supply
|
$381
|
$207
|
$ -
|
|
Stormwater
|
$12,527
|
$4,959
|
$4,419
|
|
Wastewater
|
$ 888
|
$ -
|
$ -
|
|
Total excl GST
|
$18,260
|
$13,501
|
$6,211
|
|
Category
|
Northwest Growth Area
|
|
A1
|
A2
|
D
|
E
|
|
Community Infrastructure
|
$ -
|
$ -
|
$ -
|
$ -
|
|
Transport
|
$ -
|
$ -
|
$ -
|
$ -
|
|
City water supply
|
$1,143
|
$698
|
$396
|
$355
|
|
Stormwater
|
$12,045
|
$7,609
|
$8,696
|
$8,463
|
|
Wastewater
|
$778
|
$ 475
|
$ -
|
$ -
|
|
Total excl GST
|
$13,966
|
$8,782
|
$9,092
|
$8,818
|