The 55+ fee stack: every layer you actually sign up for.

Layer one is the neighborhood association — the fee everyone quotes. At Del Webb Wildlight the disclosure sheet puts it around $3,132 a year for the standard series and $5,700 for the maintained villas. Layer two is the master association many buyers never hear about until the estoppel arrives: the same Del Webb home also pays the Wildlight master fee, plus a separate garbage assessment — three association lines on one house. Sweetwater by Del Webb in Jacksonville runs the same master-plus-sub structure.

Layer three lives on your tax bill: the district. In Nocatee it is the Tolomato CDD, whose assessment is genuinely two charges — bond debt from building the place, plus operations and maintenance — and it varies by lot width: the FY2026 lookup puts Del Webb Ponte Vedra (platted as Riverwood) between roughly $1,315 and $2,526 a year. In Wildlight the district is a legislature-created stewardship district rather than a CDD, which is exactly why the question “is there a CDD?” can produce a truthful no and a real assessment anyway. Our CDD guides carry the community-by-community numbers; this page’s point is the anatomy. The St. Johns County CDD map →

The club layer is where 55+ communities differ most. Del Webb Wildlight’s disclosure includes a $720 annual food-and-beverage minimum at the club; Del Webb Nocatee has published a comparable dining-credit mechanism billed with dues. Stillwater flips the structure entirely: its villa HOA has been quoted near $691 a month because golf membership is deeded to the home — a country-club initiation dissolved into the monthly line. None of these structures is wrong; each just needs to be priced as what it is.

Then the one-time layer at closing: capital contributions and transfer fees. Del Webb Nocatee’s published figures have run $3,000 in capital contribution plus a transfer fee; every Wildlight sale — resales included — pays a community-foundation transfer fee of 0.5% of the price, capped at $2,500. These belong on a buyer’s cash-to-close math and a seller’s net sheet, and they’re the numbers most often discovered late. Disclosure-sheet figures carry their as-of dates and associations amend them — the current documents govern, and pulling them is part of my job, not yours. Wildlight’s full fee anatomy, verified →

Some 55+ communities genuinely carry no district line: Everlake at Mandarin and Sweetwater by Del Webb are the clean local examples — their stacks are association-only, which simplifies the math even when it doesn’t automatically lower it. And one honest flag: sources conflict on Del Webb eTown’s district status, so we don’t assert it either way — that one gets answered by pulling the actual parcel, which takes minutes and ends the debate. Treat any community’s “no CDD” claim the same way: verified on the tax bill, not on the flyer. The 55+ decision matrix — 19 communities, one table →