Nearly every out-of-state buyer I work with asks about CDD fees, and almost every article they have already read gives them the same answer. Somewhere between $1,000 and $4,000 a year. Ask your builder.
That is not an answer you can budget against.
So I pulled the Tolomato Community Development District’s adopted FY2026 budget, which is a public document, and worked out what the numbers actually look like. Here is what I found.
Nocatee Runs on One District, But Sixteen Bond Issues
Nocatee’s CDD is the Tolomato Community Development District. One district covers the whole community, including the pocket that sits in Duval County rather than St. Johns.
What varies is the bond series your village sits under. The district has issued and refinanced debt in waves since 2007, and each wave funded infrastructure for a specific set of villages. Your annual debt payment is set by which wave built your neighborhood, not by what your house is worth.
That is why two homes on the same floor plan, three miles apart, can be $800 a year apart on the tax bill.
Your Assessment Has Two Halves
The total assessment on your November tax bill is made of two parts.
Debt repays the bonds that built the roads, drainage, and amenities. It goes straight to a bond trustee. It has an end date, and it can be paid off early.
Operations and Maintenance funds the day to day running of the district. Landscaping, the waterparks, the trails, staff, insurance. It renews every year and never goes away.
Neither of these is your HOA. Your village HOA is a separate bill entirely.
What the O&M Half Costs
The district allocates O&M by lot width using an equivalent residential unit factor. A 50 foot lot is the baseline at 1.00. From there:
- 40 foot lot: 0.90
- 50 foot lot: 1.00
- 60 foot lot: 1.10
- 70 foot lot: 1.20
- 80 foot lot: 1.30
- 90 foot lot: 1.40
- 100 foot lot: 1.50
In dollars for FY2026, a St. Johns County home on a 40 foot lot is billed $599.06 for O&M. On a 100 foot lot it is $998.42. A 100 foot lot pays about 67 percent more than a 40 foot lot for exactly the same amenities. If your home sits in Nocatee’s Duval County portion, every figure is slightly higher. $608.77 on a 40 foot lot, $1,014.62 on a 100 foot lot. That is not a different service level. St. Johns County takes a 6 percent collection discount and Duval takes 7.5 percent, and the district works that backward into what it bills so it nets the same amount either way.
Across all of Nocatee, the district budgeted $8.9 million in maintenance assessments for FY2026 against a general fund of about $10.8 million. The gap is covered by waterpark food and beverage, facility rentals, non resident memberships, and similar revenue.
What the Debt Half Costs, by Village
This is the part that actually separates one village from another. These are annual debt service figures per equivalent residential unit, calculated from the district’s FY2026 assessment schedules.
- Austin Park: $1,125
- Twenty Mile: $1,221
- Daniel Park: $1,265
- The Colony at Twenty Mile: $1,267
- Coastal Oaks: $1,326
- Willowcove: $1,332
- Anthem Ridge: $1,392
- Heritage Trace: $1,419
- Freedom Landing: $1,433
- Coral Ridge: $1,442
- Settlers Landing: $1,443
- Palm Crest: $1,463
- Pioneer Village: $1,475
- Liberty Cove: $1,493
- Seabrook Village I: $1,529
- Crosswinds: $1,621
- Franklin Square: $1,668
- Tidewater: $1,929
- Seabrook II and III: $1,964
Add O&M to those and most single family homes in Nocatee land somewhere between about $1,700 and $2,900 a year in total CDD. On a 60 foot lot in Settlers Landing you are looking at roughly $2,190 all in, or about $183 a month. In Austin Park on a 50 foot lot, closer to $1,790, or about $149 a month.
If your lot is wider than 50 feet, both halves scale up, so the spread between villages gets wider than these per unit figures suggest.
The Number Almost Nobody Checks
Here is what I think matters more than the annual figure, and it is the thing I have never once seen a buyer ask about unprompted.
When does the debt retire?
The older bond series are most of the way through their runs. Series 2019A, which covers Austin Park, Coastal Oaks, Willowcove, Del Webb, and Tidewater, amortizes out in the late 2030s. Series 2022A and 2022B, covering most of the Seabrook and southern villages, run to about 2040 and 2041.
Series 2024, which covers Seabrook Village II and III, runs through May of 2054.
Read that again. If you buy in Coastal Oaks, you are roughly twelve years from that line disappearing off your tax bill. If you buy in Seabrook II or III, you are twenty eight years out. That is sixteen additional years of a payment near $1,964 plus O&M, on a newer village that also happens to carry the highest debt figure in the community.
Nobody is hiding this. It is in the amortization schedules in the adopted budget. It just does not come up on a model home tour.
Two Things Buyers Get Wrong
The debt portion can be paid off. The O&M cannot. People hear “you can pay off your CDD” and assume the whole line goes away. Only the bond half is retireable. Operations and maintenance renews annually as long as the district exists, which is indefinitely. If you want your exact payoff figure, the district issues an estoppel letter and charges $250 for it.
Homes platted recently may not show up yet. The district’s assessment lookup reflects what was on the November 2025 county tax records. Anything platted after January 2025 will not appear until the following tax year. If you are buying brand new, the number you are quoted is an estimate until that first bill arrives.
How to Verify a Specific Address
Do not take a builder’s estimate, a listing remark, or this article as final for a particular home. The bond portion may have already been partially or fully paid down by a previous owner, which changes everything.
Three sources, in order of reliability:
- The estoppel letter from the district. Exact, current, and costs $250.
- The seller’s most recent county tax bill, where you want the non ad valorem section.
- The district’s resident assessment lookup, published annually as a PDF at mytcdd.com.
For resale in particular, pull the actual tax bill. I do this on every Nocatee showing, and I have seen the debt portion come back at zero on homes where the previous owner paid it off, which quietly makes that home several hundred dollars a month cheaper to carry than its neighbor at the same list price.
What This Means If You Are Relocating
If you are moving here from a state without CDDs, the instinct is to see this as a hidden fee. I would frame it differently. The infrastructure and the amenity network existed on day one instead of being promised for a future phase, and the assessment is what paid for that.
The part worth being deliberate about is which village you choose. The difference between the lowest and highest debt figure in Nocatee is more than $800 a year, and the difference in how long you pay it is closer to sixteen years. Those two things together are worth more than most of the upgrade decisions people spend far longer agonizing over.
If you are weighing specific Nocatee villages and want the real carrying cost on each, message me and I will pull the actual assessment figures for the addresses you are considering before you tour them.