While Washington waits to see whether the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act becomes law by presidential signature, by inaction, by override, or not at all, homebuilders and developers already know the issue at stake does not wait.
Here’s how regulatory cost adds up as a chokehold – not a theoretical – in the new-home business.
- It is a line item.
- It is a delay.
- It is a higher finished-lot price.
- It is a code change.
- It is an impact fee.
It is a traffic study, an environmental study, a utility hook-up charge, a land dedication, a design mandate, an inspection sequence, an interest carry, and often a month or year of time that the buyer ultimately pays for.
That is why the ROAD Act’s promise or limitation should be judged by a more practical question than whether Congress has finally recognized housing affordability as a national priority.
The question is this: How much of the actual regulatory cost burden on a new home is affected by the tools this legislation uses?
The answer is mixed.
The ROAD Act may matter. In some areas, it may matter a lot. But it is not a single master switch for lowering the cost of housing production because the regulatory cost stack itself is layered – with “carrots and sticks” – across federal, state, and local authorities.
Much of it lies exactly where federal housing legislation has the hardest time reaching: local land-use politics, permitting systems, design preferences, impact-fee regimes, and resistance to growth.
The National Association of Home Builders’ latest study, with comments here by Eric Lynch, economist in the survey research group, estimates that regulations imposed by government at all levels now account for $131,734, or 26.4%, of the final price of an average new single-family home built for sale.
Of that total, $46,795 comes during lot development. The remaining $84,939 comes during construction after the builder has purchased the finished lot.
That cost burden has climbed fast. NAHB’s estimate is up more than 40% from its 2021 figure of $93,870 and more than double its 2011 estimate of $65,224.
The important point is not that every regulation is bad. NAHB itself is careful to say that is not the argument.
The more useful point is that, in an affordability crisis, a $131,734 regulatory load on a $499,500 average new home is economically material. Regulatory burden weighs on builders’ and developers’ balance sheets and on would-be homebuyers’ first costs for ownership, a lose-lose alignment.
Where the money goes
The largest single item in NAHB’s 2026 breakout is not zoning approval, impact fees, or delay.
It is building-code change. NAHB estimates that changes to building codes over the past 10 years account for $40,288 per average new home. That makes code change the largest regulatory cost category in the study, and more than twice as costly as any other listed item.
This is a glaring reminder that safety and attainability are binding requirements – one can’t sustain itself without the other – and a firm guide for how builders should read the ROAD Act.
A bill that encourages zoning reform may help address land availability constraints. A bill that streamlines environmental review may help selected projects move faster. A bill that modernizes manufactured housing rules may unlock meaningful production advantages in that sector.
But the largest NAHB cost category is tied to building code evolution, adoption, enforcement and compliance. Those code systems are often locally administered, sometimes state-directed, and influenced by federal agencies and national model-code processes.
In other words, no single Congress can snap its fingers and make that $40,288 go away.
The second major cost category is fees paid by the builder after purchasing the lot, estimated at $20,154 per home. Architectural design standards beyond ordinary practice add $16,117. Land dedicated to government or left unbuilt adds $13,593. Hard costs of compliance during development add $10,755. Standards such as setbacks and other requirements beyond ordinary practice add $10,583. Zoning approval costs add $7,007.
These are the dollars behind the homebuilding industry’s argument that affordability is not simply a mortgage-rate story, a labor story or a materials story.
It is also a rules story. And in many communities, those rules function as a cost escalator long before a buyer ever walks a model-home center.
ROAD helps most where Washington controls the ROAD
This is where the ROAD Act deserves a fair reading. The legislation’s most practical potential is strongest where the federal government controls the process directly.
Environmental review is one of those areas. If the bill reduces duplicative review requirements, creates categorical exclusions for qualifying projects, or speeds federal approvals for small, infill, or federally assisted housing, it can translate into real-time savings.
Time matters because delay has a cost even when regulation imposes no direct fee.
NAHB estimates that regulatory delays during lot development average roughly seven months when they occur. During construction, regulatory delays average a little more than six weeks when they occur.
Those delay costs may look small in the NAHB dollar table compared with code changes or builder fees, but they understate the broader business impact. Delays slow capital velocity. They extend interest carry. They disrupt the starts cadence. They can cause labor, trade, and materials inefficiencies. They can force builders to reprice homes in a changed mortgage-rate environment.
In that sense, even modest streamlining can matter if it enhances predictability and reduces entitlement risk.
The ROAD Act also appears more consequential in manufactured housing, where federal standards and HUD authority play a more direct role. Provisions that remove the outdated permanent-chassis requirement, clarify HUD’s primary regulatory authority, and improve access to financing could change production economics for a category of housing that already has cost advantages.
That is not merely a federal nudge. It is a rule change. The same is true of certain FHA multifamily financing and community-bank provisions. Raising loan limits, indexing them to inflation, and improving access to housing credit may not change zoning maps, but they can alter what pencils.
Where ROAD runs into city hall
The scope of the legislation narrows as it approaches land-use authority. Congress can encourage zoning reform. It can publish best practices. It can reward jurisdictions that expand supply. It can tie certain future federal funding formulas to housing production. It can spotlight communities that do the right thing and, indirectly, shame those that do not.
Those actions are not the same as forcing a city council to approve smaller lots, duplexes, townhomes, ADUs, missing-middle formats, or higher-density apartment communities.
As the charts illustrate, a meaningful share of NAHB’s regulatory cost stack is attributable to local development rules.
Zoning approval costs. Required studies. Land dedications. Setbacks. Design standards. Utility hook-up charges. Impact fees. Architectural mandates. Delay.
The ROAD Act can push at those issues. It cannot fully guide them.
That is why the bill’s most immediate value may be political and informational rather than operational. It gives pro-housing state and local officials more cover. It gives builders and developers a federal reference point. It creates a common vocabulary for housing supply. It may redirect some grant money toward communities that choose to grow.
The affordability math
The affordability stakes are straightforward. When regulation accounts for more than one-quarter of the final price of a new single-family home, regulatory cost becomes a household-formation issue.
Every additional $10,000 in cost translates into a higher mortgage amount, a higher monthly payment, a higher required income threshold, and a smaller buyer pool. The burden falls hardest on the entry-level market, where demand is deepest and additional supply is most needed.
Lynch’s NAHB blog post frames regulatory costs as one of several supply constraints working against affordability, alongside tariffs on building materials, skilled labor shortages, the lack of available lots, and tighter lending conditions.
Regulation is not the only cost driver. But it is too large to ignore.
Evercore ISI’s Stephen Kim made the same point in investor language, noting that housing affordability is on everyone’s mind and that more than 25% of a home’s price is attributable to regulation. His team’s breakout shows that construction-phase regulatory costs have risen much faster than development-phase costs over the past five years, with total construction-phase regulatory costs up more than 60% between 2021 and 2026.
The public-policy debate often focuses on zoning and land use. Builders feel that pain acutely. But the data suggest that the construction-stage cost burden — code changes, builder-paid fees, design standards, labor compliance, inspections, and delays — has become the faster-moving problem.
If policymakers want to reduce the cost of new housing, they cannot stop at entitlement reform. They also have to examine what gets layered onto the home after the lot is already finished.
