Indonesia publishes one build cost per square metre, IDR 7,120,000, and it prices government buildings

Ask what it costs to build a villa in Bali and the answer comes back as a range. The Indonesian state publishes exactly one price per square metre of building, and it is not an answer to that question. It is the ceiling on what a government may spend building itself an office, and it touches a private villa at one moment only: when the owner is billed for a permit.

Contractors and agency pages quote IDR 6,000,000 to IDR 15,000,000 per square metre for a Bali villa.Unverified We print it because readers arrive carrying it, and unsourced because we found nothing behind it: no instrument we read contains such a range, and we did not survey the pages that do.

What is the number the state actually publishes?

Its name is the Standar Harga Satuan Tertinggi, the SHST. A ministerial decision of May 2024 defines it as the largest amount per square metre that may be spent on the physical construction of a state building’s standard works.^{Source: 2}JDIH Kementerian Pekerjaan Umum dan Perumahan Rakyat, Last reviewed 14/10/2026Confidence: Verified The regulation above it builds the standard cost of such a building from four factors: the SHST for its classification, a floor-count coefficient, the floor area and a function coefficient.^{Source: 3}JDIH Kemenko Bidang Infrastruktur dan Pembangunan Kewilayahan, Last reviewed 14/10/2026Confidence: Verified It also makes the figure a local duty — the SHST is set every year by the regent or the mayor, and in Jakarta by the governor.^{Source: 3}JDIH Kemenko Bidang Infrastruktur dan Pembangunan Kewilayahan, Last reviewed 14/10/2026Confidence: Verified

So there is no national number, and the nearest one published to Canggu belongs to the city next door. Denpasar’s mayor set the 2025 figure for a simple building at IDR 7,120,000 per square metre^{Source: 1}JDIH Kota Denpasar, Last reviewed 14/10/2026Estimate, and for a non-simple building at IDR 7,930,000.^{Source: 1}JDIH Kota Denpasar, Last reviewed 14/10/2026Estimate The same appendix prices three classes of state house — type A at IDR 7,710,000, type B at IDR 7,440,000, type C at IDR 6,340,000 — and prices fences separately, by the metre.^{Source: 1}JDIH Kota Denpasar, Last reviewed 14/10/2026Estimate Read the whole list rather than the headline row and the document names itself: a procurement schedule for government property.

Those figures are graded an estimate, not verified, and the reason belongs in the open: the decree is a three-page scan with no text layer. We read the appendix twice, at 170 dpi and at a 300 dpi crop, and the digits are not ambiguous. But a re-check means re-reading an image, not a string.

How does a government ceiling reach a private villa?

Through the permit fee, and two documents say so from opposite ends. The 2024 decision sets the retribution for a building approval as total floor area multiplied by a locality index applied to the SHST, then by an integrated index and a built-building index. It caps the locality index at 0.5 per cent. A note on the formula directs that the SHST used be the simple classification for office and other state buildings — a use which applies, in the decision’s own words, to the retribution of buildings other than state buildings.^{Source: 2}JDIH Kementerian Pekerjaan Umum dan Perumahan Rakyat, Last reviewed 14/10/2026Confidence: Verified

Badung’s own tax and retribution regulation says it from the other side: the unit price of the regency’s approval retribution is the SHST.^{Source: 4}Badan Pendapatan Daerah Kabupaten Badung, Last reviewed 14/10/2026Confidence: Verified Its exemptions reach government buildings and religious buildings, the balai banjar, the wantilan and the balai subak among them.^{Source: 4}Badan Pendapatan Daerah Kabupaten Badung, Last reviewed 14/10/2026Confidence: Verified A private villa is inside the charge. The approval is the Persetujuan Bangunan Gedung, the PBG; what the law obliges the owner of a villa built without one to do is a separate question, answered elsewhere.

Take 200 square metres of villa floor, apply the locality index at its 0.5 per cent ceiling to Denpasar’s simple-building figure, and leave the remaining two indices at 1.0: the fee is IDR 7,120,000^{Source: 2}JDIH Kementerian Pekerjaan Umum dan Perumahan Rakyat, Last reviewed 14/10/2026Estimate, about USD 397^{Source: 7}Bank Indonesia, Last reviewed 14/10/2026Estimate. The fee equals one square metre of the ceiling price, because the floor area and the capped index cancel. Two of the four terms are not ours to set: both remaining indices come from the regency’s own tariff table. This illustrates a mechanism; it quotes no bill.

The ceiling is not a build cost even for the government that spends it. The decision treats work above the standard as a percentage added to the standard cost, allowing up to 30 per cent for a higher quality standard alone, with further additions for lifts, air conditioning, fire systems, deep foundations and green-building compliance.^{Source: 2}JDIH Kementerian Pekerjaan Umum dan Perumahan Rakyat, Last reviewed 14/10/2026Confidence: Verified

Why can we not print Badung’s own figure?

Canggu, Seminyak and Uluwatu are in Badung, so Badung’s SHST would price an approval there, not Denpasar’s. We do not have it. The regency’s homepage offers one route to its legal products, its own legal-documentation portal; the host resolves to an address and then answers nothing at all on either port, which is a timeout and not a refusal.^{Source: 6}Pemerintah Kabupaten Badung, Last reviewed 14/10/2026Unverified The regency’s main site answered normally that day, and five neighbouring Bali portals answered too, so the silence is not ours.

The appendix that would carry the regency’s own table — Appendix VIII of the 2023 regulation, named in the article fixing the tariff — is absent from the published file, and the 2025 amendment rewrites Appendices I to III and V to VII and inserts a new VIa without touching VIII.^{Source: 5}Pemerintah Kabupaten Badung, Last reviewed 14/10/2026Confidence: Verified That is a statement about our access and two published files, not evidence that Badung has failed to set a figure.

We reached the same wall on Badung’s PBB-P2 land-tax schedule, and the price side repeats it: the only official residential price index near Canggu measures Denpasar. Both series measure the city next door.

One caution on our own reading: the published copy of the 2021 regulation has a damaged text layer — it renders 174 as I74 and 170 as t70 — so each article number quoted from it here was confirmed against the wording around it, not against the digits.

The number is the base of a fee, not a benchmark. The question worth putting to a contractor is which year’s SHST the regency applied and at what indices; the one for the regency office is to see the tariff table. That table is the only piece of this chain no file we could open contains.