Buildium Pricing in 2026: The Fee That Doubled While the Sticker Price Stood Still
If you only watch the sticker, Buildium looks like one of the calmer pricing pages in property management. Essential starts at $62 a month, Growth at $192, Premium at $400, and those three numbers have not moved since at least October 2025. Stable, right?
Look one line lower. Between a dated October 2025 third-party snapshot and the live page in July 2026, the outgoing EFT fee went from a reported $0.50 to $0.99 per transaction. That is a 98 percent increase in under a year, on a fee that fires every time you pay an owner or a vendor, and as far as we can tell not a single page on the ranking SERP noticed. Incoming EFT rose too, from a reported $1.99 to $2.35 on Essential. And Premium, the plan that looks like it got cheaper, dropped from a reported $479 in May 2023 to $400 today, which reads like generosity until you realize the margin did not disappear. It moved into the transaction lines.
That is the story of this page: the sticker held still while the ledger moved. So this post does the four jobs no other Buildium pricing article does: the complete official add-on fee stack with dates and sources, the hike ladder as a dated timeline, per-door total-cost worksheets at 25, 50, 100, and 200 doors with the arithmetic shown, and the $99-per-bank-account trap that can cost an Essential customer $990 before day one. Every figure is labeled OFFICIAL (from buildium.com/pricing, checked July 24, 2026) or REPORTED (third-party, with the source and date named). For whether Buildium is any good, our Buildium review owns the verdict; this page owns the money.
The complete Buildium price and fee stack
No page on the current SERP prints the whole grid. Here it is: the three plans, then every official add-on fee, with a dated-source column so you know exactly how fresh each number is.
| Item | Essential | Growth | Premium | Source and date |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Base plan (starting at) | $62/mo | $192/mo | $400/mo | OFFICIAL, buildium.com/pricing 2026-07-24 |
| Incoming EFT (per transaction) | $2.35 | $1.35 | Free 12 months, then $0.60 | OFFICIAL, 2026-07-24 |
| Outgoing EFT (per transaction) | $0.99 | $0.99 | $0.99 | OFFICIAL, 2026-07-24 (REPORTED $0.50 in Oct 2025, SoftwareConnect) |
| Card payments | 2.99% | 2.99% | 2.99% | OFFICIAL, 2026-07-24 |
| Bank account setup | $99 per account | 10 free, then $99 | 100 free, then $99 | OFFICIAL, 2026-07-24 |
| Tenant screening, landlord-paid | $17 standard / $20 enhanced | OFFICIAL, 2026-07-24 | ||
| Tenant screening, applicant-paid | $35 | OFFICIAL, 2026-07-24 | ||
| eSignature | $5/document | $1/document | Unlimited, included | OFFICIAL, 2026-07-24 |
| Property inspections | $99 setup + $40 to $95/mo | Included | Included | OFFICIAL, 2026-07-24 |
| 1099 e-filing | $50 per batch + $4.50 per form | OFFICIAL, 2026-07-24 | ||
| Showings Coordinator | $25 setup + from $41/mo | OFFICIAL, 2026-07-24 | ||
| AI Assistant | Included | Included | Included (full AI suite) | OFFICIAL, 2026-07-24 |
| Open API access | No | No | Yes | OFFICIAL, 2026-07-24 |
| Live phone support | No | Yes | Yes | OFFICIAL, 2026-07-24 |
| Free trial | 14 days, no card required | OFFICIAL, 2026-07-24 | ||
Three structural notes before the math. First, all three plan prices are “starting at” figures that scale with unit count, with custom pricing above 5,000 units (the page routes big portfolios to a sales line at 877-396-7876). In a live browser session on July 24, 2026, the page’s own estimate tool labeled the printed prices as covering portfolios up to 150 units, so treat $62/$192/$400 as the up-to-150-unit band and everything above that as a quote conversation, not a published price. Second, the page prints no annual-discount or contract terms at all, so budget on the monthly figures. Third, the fees in the middle of that table are where the actual cost of ownership lives, which is what the rest of this page is about.
The hike ladder: every reported price step, dated and sourced
Buildium does not announce price changes with a blog post. You find them by comparing dated snapshots, so that is what we did. Everything below the July 2026 line is REPORTED, with the source named; only the last entry is OFFICIAL.
May 2023 (REPORTED, RentCheck snapshot): Essential $52/mo, Growth $166/mo, Premium $479/mo.
2023 to 2024 (REPORTED, aggregator steps): Essential steps up to $55, then $58. Growth steps to $174, then $183. Two quiet raises in roughly as many years, each small enough to slide under renewal-review radar.
October 2025 (REPORTED, SoftwareConnect snapshot): Essential $62, Growth $192, Premium $400. The plan prices arrive at today’s numbers. The same snapshot records incoming EFT at $1.99 and outgoing EFT at $0.50.
July 2026 (OFFICIAL, buildium.com/pricing, checked 2026-07-24): Plan prices unchanged at $62/$192/$400. But incoming EFT is now $2.35 on Essential, up 18 percent from the reported $1.99. Outgoing EFT is now $0.99 on every plan, up 98 percent from the reported $0.50.
Add it up across the ladder. Essential went from a reported $52 to an official $62, a 19 percent climb in about three years. Growth went from a reported $166 to $192, up almost 16 percent. And in the nine months between the last two snapshots, when the plan grid looked perfectly frozen, the outgoing EFT fee roughly doubled. That fee fires on every owner draw and every vendor payment a management company sends, which for a working portfolio is many times per month, every month.
One claim you may see elsewhere and will not see here: several unsourced AI-generated pages assert that Buildium’s EFT fees rose 40 percent in 2023. We could not trace that number to any primary or dated secondary source, so we are not printing it as fact. The ladder above contains only steps we can attribute.
The Premium repricing: $479 to $400 is not a discount
On paper, Premium is the only Buildium plan that got cheaper: a reported $479 in May 2023 versus an official $400 today, a 16 percent cut. We do not read that as generosity. We read it as repackaging.
Here is the trade as the ladder shows it. The headline number that shows up in every comparison table dropped by $79. Meanwhile the fees that never appear in comparison tables went up: incoming EFT to $2.35 on the entry plan, outgoing EFT doubled to $0.99 on all plans, including Premium. A Premium shop running 200 doors sends a lot of outgoing EFTs; at scale, the $0.49-per-transaction increase claws back a meaningful slice of that $79 sticker cut, and it does so invisibly, inside the transaction ledger where nobody comparison-shops.
This is the pattern our whole W54 pricing series keeps finding, and Buildium is the cleanest specimen: the sticker is marketing, the fee schedule is the business. If you are comparing Buildium’s headline prices against AppFolio’s per-unit model, our AppFolio pricing breakdown and the AppFolio vs Buildium head-to-head do that math; the point here is that neither vendor’s headline number is the number you will pay.
Per-door worksheets: what Buildium actually costs at 25, 50, 100, and 200 doors
Time to show the arithmetic. Assumptions, stated plainly: every door pays rent once a month by incoming EFT, and you send one outgoing EFT per door per month (owner disbursements and vendor payments; many managers send more). We use the official starting prices for the subscriptions, with the caveat that the real subscription scales with unit count above whatever the starting price covers, which we could not verify on the JS slider. Fees are the official July 24, 2026 figures. Premium rows show the after-year-one incoming EFT rate of $0.60, since the free-for-12-months window is temporary.
25 doors, Essential: $62 subscription + (25 x $2.35 = $58.75 incoming) + (25 x $0.99 = $24.75 outgoing) = $145.50/mo minimum. The fees are already 57 percent of the total.
50 doors, Essential: $62 + (50 x $2.35 = $117.50) + (50 x $0.99 = $49.50) = $229.00/mo minimum. Read that middle term again: at 50 doors, incoming EFT fees alone are $117.50 a month, nearly double the $62 subscription. The plan price is the cover charge; the EFT line is the bar tab.
50 doors, Growth: $192 + (50 x $1.35 = $67.50) + $49.50 = $309.00/mo minimum. Still more than Essential at this size, which is honest and worth knowing: at 50 doors you are paying $80 a month for Growth’s cheaper EFT rate, free bank accounts, $1 eSignatures, included inspections, and phone support, not for fee savings alone.
100 doors, Essential: $62 + (100 x $2.35 = $235.00) + (100 x $0.99 = $99.00) = $396.00/mo minimum. The subscription is now 16 percent of the bill.
100 doors, Growth: $192 + (100 x $1.35 = $135.00) + $99.00 = $426.00/mo minimum. The gap to Essential has narrowed to $30.
200 doors, Essential: $62 + (200 x $2.35 = $470.00) + (200 x $0.99 = $198.00) = $730.00/mo minimum, and at this size the starting-price caveat matters most, since the real Essential subscription for 200 units is almost certainly above $62.
200 doors, Growth: $192 + (200 x $1.35 = $270.00) + $198.00 = $660.00/mo minimum. Growth is now cheaper than Essential outright.
200 doors, Premium (after year one): $400 + (200 x $0.60 = $120.00) + $198.00 = $718.00/mo minimum, with unlimited eSignatures, included inspections, Open API, and 100 free bank accounts folded in.
The crossover math falls straight out of those rows. Growth’s incoming EFT rate saves exactly $1.00 per door per month versus Essential, and Growth’s base costs $130 more, so on EFT savings alone Growth breaks even at 130 doors. Below that, you buy Growth for its features; above it, Growth is simply the cheaper plan. Premium’s after-year-one rate saves another $0.75 per door versus Growth against a $208 base premium, which needs roughly 277 doors to break even on fees alone, so Premium is a features-and-scale decision, not a fee play, for almost everyone reading this.
The $99-per-bank-account trap
This is the fee that ambushes Essential buyers, because it charges you for doing property management correctly.
On Essential, every bank account you connect to Buildium carries a $99 setup fee. Growth includes 10 free bank account setups, Premium includes 100, and both charge $99 per account beyond their allowance. Now recall how trust accounting works: many states and most owner agreements require separate trust accounts per owner or per property. A small management company onboarding with 10 property trust accounts on Essential is looking at 10 x $99 = $990 in setup fees before collecting a single rent payment. That is 16 months of the Essential subscription, spent on day zero, for bank plumbing.
The trap has a shape worth naming: the customers most likely to need many bank accounts (managers running proper trust accounting for multiple owners) are exactly the customers Essential’s fee schedule punishes hardest, and exactly who Growth’s 10-free allowance is sized for. That is not an accident, it is plan segmentation implemented through a fee. If your onboarding plan involves more than two or three bank accounts, price Growth first, because the $130/mo plan gap can be smaller than the one-time bank account bill, and the cheaper EFT rate starts paying you back immediately.
Screening: the who-pays split
Buildium’s screening pricing is really a who-pays decision wearing three price tags, all official as of July 24, 2026:
- $17, landlord-paid, standard report.
- $20, landlord-paid, enhanced report.
- $35, applicant-paid.
The mechanics matter more than the numbers. If you absorb screening, you pay $17 or $20 per applicant and eat the cost of everyone you reject. If you pass it through, the applicant pays $35, which is 75 percent more than the landlord-paid enhanced report for what the pricing page presents as the passthrough option. Applicants in competitive markets pay these fees serially across multiple applications, so a $35 toll is a real filter on your applicant pool, and a growing number of states and cities cap or regulate application fees. Our position, consistent with the tenant screening roundup: decide the who-pays question deliberately per your local rules, and if you pass costs through, know that you are charging applicants nearly double what the report would cost you.
One adjacent note for completeness: Buildium’s plan grid includes an AI Assistant on every tier, with the full AI suite reserved for Premium. It is included in the prices above rather than surcharged, which is worth exactly one sentence of credit in a market where competitors bill AI as a percentage add-on (DoorLoop’s AI pricing is the case study). We have not evaluated the assistant’s depth, so we will not score it here.
Who owns Buildium, and why it matters for this page
Buildium has not been an independent company for a long time. RealPage acquired it in December 2019 for $580 million (reported by HousingWire and Bisnow at the time), and RealPage itself was taken private by Thoma Bravo in a $10.2 billion deal in 2021. Every price step in the ladder above happened under private equity ownership.
We are not printing that as a boo-hiss. Private ownership is normal in this market. We print it because it explains the pattern this page documents: steady sticker prices that comparison tables can screenshot, paired with fee-line increases that comparison tables never catch. That is textbook margin optimization for a mature, PE-owned platform, and it means the rational way to shop Buildium is to model your transaction volume, not to compare plan grids. It is also context for the trust question: the fee schedule you sign up under is not the fee schedule you should expect in two years, because it has not been stable for any two-year stretch we can document since 2023.
Which plan, for whom
Essential (from $62/mo) fits self-managers and very small operations with few bank accounts and modest transaction volume, who can live without phone support. Model the EFT line first: at 50 doors the fees alone can approach twice the subscription, and every bank account costs $99.
Growth (from $192/mo) is the real product for professional managers. The $1.35 EFT rate, 10 free bank accounts, $1 eSignatures, included inspections, and live phone support are the working toolkit, and past 130 doors the EFT savings alone cover the plan gap versus Essential.
Premium (from $400/mo) buys Open API access, the full AI suite, unlimited eSignatures, 100 free bank accounts, and 12 months of free incoming EFT followed by the $0.60 rate. On fee math alone it needs roughly 277 doors to beat Growth, so buy it for the API and scale features, not the fee schedule.
Look elsewhere if transaction fees are the dealbreaker entirely, or Buildium’s ladder history reads as a warning to you. Our Buildium alternatives guide covers the field, Buildium vs DoorLoop handles the most-asked head-to-head, and the wider market lives in our best AI tools for property managers roundup.
Verdict: price the ledger, not the sticker
Buildium’s 2026 pricing page tells the truth and hides it in the fee schedule. The three numbers to carry out of this post: $0.99 is the outgoing EFT fee that doubled in under a year while the plan grid stood perfectly still, $117.50 is what incoming EFT alone costs an Essential shop at 50 doors against a $62 subscription, and $990 is what 10 trust accounts cost on Essential before day one. The plans are floors, the fees are the building, and the ladder says the fees are the part that moves. Model your doors, your disbursements, and your bank accounts before you trust any starting price, ours included, because the slider decides your real subscription and the slider does not publish its math. For whether the product deserves your portfolio at all, the verdict lives in our Buildium review; the money now lives here.
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