"While the town is disappointed in the initial court ruling, we look forward to the appeal and continuing to work together on alternative funding sources."
That's Nolensville Mayor Halie Gallik, responding to a Chancery Court decision that could cost the town roughly $8 million. If you're shopping new construction in Nolensville right now, you may have heard a version of this story secondhand: builders sued the town, builders won, impact fees are dead. Every part of that sentence except the last word is true.
Here's what actually happened, and why it changes less than it sounds like it should.
A Charter Change That Had Nothing to Do With Construction Fees
In 2020, a group of Nolensville residents ran a campaign called Better Nolensville to change how the town governs itself, moving from a Mayor-Aldermanic system to a City Manager-Commission structure. The referendum passed. Nobody involved was thinking about impact fees at the time. The pitch was about governance, not development costs.
Three years later, the Home Builders Association of Middle Tennessee found the thread nobody had pulled. On December 7, 2023, HBAMT sued the town, arguing that the 2020 charter change had quietly stripped Nolensville of its legal authority to charge impact fees on new residential permits at all. Not that the fees were too high. Not that they were calculated wrong. That the town, under its new form of government, never had the right to charge them in the first place.
On October 28, 2025, the Williamson County Chancery Court agreed. The ruling found that Nolensville lost its authority to impose impact fees the moment it adopted the City Manager-Commission Charter, and ordered the town to return every impact fee collected from HBAMT members since August 6, 2020. The town had set the money aside rather than spending it, which is the only reason repayment is even feasible. Estimates put the exposure at close to $8 million.
The Board of Commissioners voted unanimously to appeal, and that appeal is still working its way through the courts. The town's own published process gives a sense of how long that can take:
| Step | Typical Timeline |
|---|---|
| Notice of appeal filed, record sent to Court of Appeals | Up to 60 days |
| Town files its brief | 30 days after record transfer |
| Home Builders file a response | 30 days after town's brief |
| Town files a reply | 14 days after response |
| Oral argument scheduled | 1 to 3 months after briefing closes |
| Written decision issued | 3 to 9 months after oral argument |
Run that timeline forward from a late-2025 filing and you land somewhere in mid-to-late 2026 at the earliest for a decision, possibly later. As of today, nothing about the town's fee authority is settled. If you're comparing that against calendar dates for your own purchase timeline, the honest answer is that you should not expect resolution before you close on a house.
Why This Doesn't Touch What You'll Actually Pay
Here's the part that gets lost when a lawsuit becomes a headline. The fee that Nolensville itself charges builders is only one layer of what shows up in a new home's price. Above it sits a much larger, and entirely separate, fee structure that Williamson County charges, and the county's authority to charge it was never part of this case.
Every new residential building permit in Nolensville still triggers two county-level charges, collected by the Williamson County Trustee at the time of permitting:
- A flat Privilege Tax of $2.00 per square foot of living and expandable space, split equally between the county's Adequate Facilities Tax and Adequate School Facilities Tax
- A tiered Education Impact Fee, ranging from $1,681 on homes up to 1,399 square feet to $12,399 on homes 3,400 square feet and larger
On a typical Nolensville home, those two county charges alone routinely add up to more than $18,000 per unit, before any surviving town-level fee is added on top. That's the county's fee, imposed under the county's own authority, and it was not part of the Home Builders' lawsuit against the town. Worth noting: the county's Education Impact Fee already survived its own legal challenge back in 2020, when the Tennessee Court of Appeals affirmed the county's right to collect it after an earlier fight with the homebuilders' association. That fee has a legal track record the town's fee never got the chance to build.
If anything, the county side of the ledger is moving in the opposite direction from what a builder win might suggest. In February 2026, a consultant hired by the county presented an updated cost study to the budget committee showing higher capital costs per student than the previous fee schedule assumed, based on the finding that a residential unit in Williamson County generates about 0.44 students on average. The county's budget committee unanimously voted to accept that study and authorize updated fee rates, up to the new study's maximums. So while the town's fee sits in legal limbo, the county's fee is trending toward higher, not lower.
The Real Premium Lives in the Product, Not the Permit
Even if you set every fee argument aside entirely, new construction in Nolensville still costs meaningfully more than resale, and that gap has nothing to do with the lawsuit.
Looking at closings over the past year on the Williamson County side of Nolensville, homes built in 2024 or later have been closing at an average price roughly 15 percent above the average for existing homes, driven by builder communities like Annecy, Telluride Estates, Carothers Farms, and Fairington. That premium tracks with what you'd expect from current building code, modern floor plans, and finish packages buyers are willing to pay for, not from a permitting fee measured in thousands rather than tens of thousands of dollars.
The product itself varies a lot by community, which matters more to your bottom line than any court filing. Burkitt Village has been delivering all-brick single-family homes in the $589,000 to $699,900 range on lots between roughly 1,900 and 2,900 square feet, a genuine entry point for buyers who want new construction without moving into seven figures. At the other end, Telluride Estates has custom builds from Barlow Homes exceeding $2.5 million, and Annecy has carried early-phase pricing from AR Homes in the $1.85 million to $1.95 million range. Carothers Farms straddles the Davidson-Williamson county line, which means school zoning can differ lot by lot within the same community, something worth confirming before you fall for a floor plan.
Retail is catching up to the growth too. The Village Green development opened in 2025, and several nearby new-construction communities now market walkability to it as part of their pitch, which is a fair selling point in a town that was mostly farmland a generation ago.
None of this is fee-driven. It's product-driven. A buyer waiting for the lawsuit to resolve in the hope that new construction gets cheaper is watching the wrong number.
The Trade-Off Nobody's Pricing In
There's a longer-term angle worth sitting with if you're planning to put down roots in Nolensville rather than just close on a house. If the town ultimately loses its appeal and has to both refund the collected fees and go forward without the ability to charge new ones, that revenue has to come from somewhere. Nolensville officials have already said publicly that they're exploring alternative funding sources for roads and infrastructure, and the options on the table if impact fees disappear for good are the ones that land on every resident, not just new-construction buyers: property tax and sales tax.
That's not a prediction, since the appeal hasn't been decided and the town hasn't proposed anything specific. It's a reason to think about Nolensville's fee fight as a question about how the town pays for growth over time, not as a coupon that might show up on your closing statement.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does this lawsuit affect a home I'm already under contract for? No. The ruling addresses the town's authority to collect impact fees going forward and to refund fees collected since August 2020. It doesn't unwind individual purchase contracts or change what you owe at your own closing.
If the town loses its appeal, will impact fees on new permits disappear immediately? Not necessarily, and not on a timeline you should plan around. Even a final loss would likely require the town to restructure how it funds infrastructure, which takes time and public process. The county-level Privilege Tax and Education Impact Fee are unaffected either way.
Should I wait to buy new construction in Nolensville until this is resolved? Given the appeal timeline the town itself has published, waiting could mean waiting a year or more for a case whose outcome won't change the price of the house you're looking at. The fee stack that matters most to your budget, the county's, isn't part of this fight.
If you're weighing new construction against resale in Nolensville, or trying to figure out which builder community actually fits your budget and school-zone needs, Shawn Tate and the Tate Team can walk you through the real math behind the price tag, not just the number a builder quotes at the sales office.
