What C-PACE actually costs, all in

Ask a C-PACE capital provider what it costs and you will get a spread over Treasuries. That is the right first number, and it is not the answer. The money that reaches your building is the assessment minus the programme’s fees, minus the closing costs, minus the interest you capitalise while the work is being built. Those three are the rest of the answer.

Every figure below was fetched from its source on 2 October 2026 and is what that source said on that date. Where a cost category is not published anywhere we could check, we say so rather than guess.

1. The rate, and what it tracks

C-PACE is long, fixed-rate money, so it is priced off a long benchmark. Lone Star PACE, which administers C-PACE for many local governments in Texas, publishes its guidance plainly. Its Program Guide, Version 2.2 of February 2025, gives an interest rate for the term of 350 to 400 basis points over the 10-year US Treasury, fixed. Its June 2025 general term sheet widens that to typically 300 to 400 basis points over the 10-year Treasury. The same guide is explicit that the interest rate and fees, other than those payable to the programme administrator, are negotiated between the property owner and the capital provider. The programme does not set your rate.

The benchmark on the day we checked: the US Treasury’s daily par yield curve put the 10-year at 5.24 percent on 1 October 2026. Add Lone Star’s 350 to 400 basis points and the indicative fixed rate in Texas was roughly 8.74 to 9.24 percent that day. That is a coupon, not a cost. For current market rates and how they compare, our C-PACE overview carries the headline figures; this page is about everything stacked on top.

2. Programme administration fees

The programmes we checked all charge the property owner for running them, and each charges differently. As published when we checked on 2 October 2026:

• North Carolina. The programme guidelines, dated January 2025, set a $750 application fee with each project application, then at closing a processing fee equal to 1 percent of the total amount financed, not to exceed $25,000, and a $500 administration fee to reimburse local governments. The guidelines state that these fees will be included in the C-PACE assessment and financing, to be paid by the property owner.
• Texas PACE Authority. Its published fee language, posted in September 2019 and still the schedule at that address when we checked, sets an application fee of the greater of $2,000 or 1 percent of the first $5 million of total project cost, 0.5 percent of the marginal amount above $5 million and 0.25 percent above $20 million, with $500 due on application and the balance at closing. It adds an ongoing residual fee of 8 basis points a year on the outstanding balance, paid as part of the annual assessment, which can instead be capitalised and paid at closing.
• Lone Star PACE (Texas). The Program Guide sets a $500 application fee, applied to the closing fee when the transaction closes. The closing fee itself is calculated as a percentage of the total assessment under the agreement with each local government, so the guide does not print one figure. The annual administration fee is up to 0.10 percent of the outstanding principal, or 0.08 percent for Dallas County projects, included in the amortisation schedule.

Fees differ by programme, so the same project pays different programme fees in different places. Note also that a programme can publish the structure of a fee but not the figure, as Lone Star does with its closing fee. Where that is the case, we get the number from the administrator for the specific deal.

3. Closing costs, and who pays them

The owner pays them. The useful question is whether they come out of your pocket at closing or get rolled into the assessment.

In North Carolina and in Lone Star PACE’s Texas programme, most can be rolled in. North Carolina’s guidelines list the soft costs C-PACE financing may include: project management, application and closing fees, title reports and credit checks, financial services such as capital provider and project developer fees, legal services for both the property owner and the capital provider, recording taxes and fees, escrow disbursement fees, engineering, appraisal and environmental reports, inspection and permitting fees, interest reserves and capitalised interest. Lone Star PACE’s guide similarly lists audit fees, permit fees, closing fees and capitalised interest as costs the financing can include.

What none of these programmes publish is what the capital provider’s fee, the two sets of legal fees, title and the third-party reports will add up to. Those are set deal by deal between you and the provider and its counsel. They vary with deal size, the state, and how much engineering the project needs. We quote them per deal; we will not estimate them here.

Financing them is convenient. It is not free. Every dollar of closing cost rolled into the assessment is repaid at the C-PACE coupon for the full term.

4. Capitalised interest during construction

On new construction and major renovation, there is a gap between closing and the first assessment payment. Lone Star’s term sheet allows capitalised interest and interest-only periods of up to five years combined, with full-term amortisation following. North Carolina’s guidelines say capitalised interest may be financed in an amount determined by the owner and the capital provider.

The detail that drives the cost is in the Lone Star guide: although the property owner and its contractors will not have received all of the funds, interest on the full amount of the assessment may begin accruing at the initial closing. Lone Star’s term sheet adds that assessment proceeds are funded into an escrow account at closing and drawn as qualified costs are incurred. So you pay interest on money that is still sitting in escrow, and you usually pay it by borrowing more of the same money.

5. A worked example

Take a $5 million C-PACE assessment on a project in a Texas PACE Authority jurisdiction, with an 18-month build and a 25-year amortisation afterwards. The inputs below are illustrative, not a quote. The coupon is the 10-year Treasury of 5.24 percent on 1 October 2026 plus 375 basis points, the midpoint of the band in Lone Star PACE’s guide. That band is Lone Star’s guidance, not the Texas PACE Authority’s, and we borrow it only to set an illustrative rate: 8.99 percent. The Texas PACE Authority charges its application fee on total project cost; for simplicity we take total project cost as equal to the $5 million assessment.

Line	Amount	Basis
Assessment	$5,000,000	Illustrative
Programme application fee	$50,000	Texas PACE Authority (2019 schedule): 1% of the first $5 million of total project cost
Capitalised interest, 18 months	$674,250	$5,000,000 × 8.99% × 1.5 years, simple interest on the full amount from closing
Capital provider, legal, title, third-party reports	Not shown	Quoted per deal
Left for the improvements, before closing costs	$4,275,750

Then repayment. A $5 million balance amortised over 25 years at 8.99 percent is about $508,600 a year. Add the Texas PACE Authority’s 8 basis point residual, charged here on the balance at the start of each year of amortisation, and the residual alone comes to about $68,700 over the term.

Treat that as cash flows: you net $4.95 million after the application fee, pay the construction-period interest out of escrow, then make 25 annual payments plus the residual. The rate that equates those flows, before any closing costs, comes to roughly 9.2 percent, against a coupon of 8.99 percent. Closing costs push it higher still, by an amount we can only tell you once a provider has quoted the deal.

The bigger number is the capitalised interest. On this example, about 13.5 percent of the assessment pays for the time the building is under construction rather than for the building. If what you need is $5 million of eligible work, the assessment has to be meaningfully larger than $5 million, and that larger amount has to fit inside the programme’s loan-to-value limit. Lone Star’s term sheet sets that at up to 35 percent for new construction based on appraisal; North Carolina’s guidelines cap the total financing at 35 percent of the property’s expected stabilised value with the improvements installed.

Our C-PACE calculator runs the amortisation on your own numbers. It does not model fees or capitalised interest, which is exactly why you should add them yourself using the lines above.

6. The headline rate against the all-in cost

The gap between the coupon and the all-in cost is driven by three things you can actually manage:

• Fees scale with structure, not just size. Percentage fees with caps (North Carolina’s $25,000 ceiling) and tiered fees (Texas PACE Authority’s falling marginal percentages) favour larger deals. Fixed amounts, such as North Carolina’s $750 application fee and $500 administration fee, weigh hardest on small ones.
• Capitalised interest scales with time. Every month between closing and first payment is a month of interest on the full assessment. A realistic construction schedule, rather than an optimistic one, is a major input to your real cost.
• Prepayment is a cost you may pay later. Lone Star’s term sheet says C-PACE is prepayable at any time via tailored fees that decline over time and are set by a capital provider. If you might sell or refinance early, that belongs in the all-in figure too.

None of this makes C-PACE expensive by default. A long fixed rate that becomes non-recourse upon completion, as Lone Star’s term sheet describes it, is worth paying for when you will hold the building. But it is worth paying for with the whole number in front of you, not the spread. If the whole number does not work, our guide to when C-PACE is the wrong answer sets out what to use instead.

C-PACE Desk is an advisory and placement service, not a lender. Send us the project and we will put the fees, closing costs and capitalised interest next to the rate before you sign a term sheet.