The default term. Your Ladder Fee is locked for 48 months at the state median household income at signing. Selection multiplier of 1.00× is the baseline — your profile scores are weighted at face value. Most first-cohort stewards choose 4 years.

Committing 8 years earns a 1.10× boost to your selection score — you rank higher when choosing your dwelling among stewards at the same profile tier. Your fee is still locked at the same base rate as shorter terms. The town rewards stability; you get better placement.

The longest term earns the highest selection priority — 1.25× the baseline score. Sixteen years of locked cost, maximum dwelling choice, and the strongest SWF compounding window. Stewards who select 16 years are making a generational commitment; the town reflects that in every allocation.

Your current Rainy Day Account has to be fully funded first. Then you pay the difference between your current unit's 12-Month Target Reserve and the new one's — in cash to jump the line, or financed at 20% down over 24 months with the same 10% carrying fee as the original deposit. All delta upgrades are recorded on the ledger and reflected in your accounts immediately.

A steward who needs to exit declares vacancy, the proprietary lease terminates, and the unit returns to the cooperative covenant allocation pool for the next qualified pledger. There is no steward-to-steward sale and no listing — the dwelling was never a tradeable asset. Your Steward Sub-Account is released to you in full; your Rainy Day Account is refunded pro-rata, less any unpaid deferred installments or repair costs; the Civic Anchor stays with the town. Moving to another URBAL town is a different event: both of your personal accounts travel with you and are handed to the receiving town's OCIO bank. You only leave the community capital behind if you leave the network. Every step is on immutable ledger.

The Ladder Fee is calculated from state prior-year median household income: (State Median HHI × 5%) ÷ 12 ÷ 900 sqft = $/sqft/month. The rate therefore moves with the state median income of the year you sign, and nothing else. This rate is locked at signing for the full PLC term. At renewal it recalculates from the new state median and locks again. Every dollar flows to the next town's construction escrow — tracked on immutable ledger and auditable by any steward.

URBAL stewards hold PLCs, not deeds — there is no assessed property value to tax. But the deeper point is what gets eliminated: property tax is structurally a slush fund, one municipal pool spent at discretion and accounted for after the fact. URBAL's fee architecture makes that abuse impossible — every category has its own escrow on the immutable ledger, and no human can redirect a dollar. The county is still paid: PILOT (Payment in Lieu of Taxes) activates in Year 8 at the county average property tax divided by 4, locked at raise time on the ledger, never recalculated. For most counties that is $15–$25/month for a 2BR — permanent, automatic, zero administration.

Once your youngest child turns 18 or finishes high school, a 4-year grace period begins. If bedrooms remain unused after the grace period ends, a bi-annual surcharge applies: +15% of your Ladder Fee every 6 months, with no ceiling. The escape valve: list the unused bedroom on the internal marketplace — for waitlisted pledgers, relocating stewards, or other stewards' adult children. While listed, the surcharge pauses. This protects town density without forcing anyone out.

Approved capital improvements to your dwelling are reimbursed at 80% of cost, vesting silently across eight years — nothing to apply for annually, nothing to track. At year eight you choose how to take it: a lump sum equal to 60% of the original cost, or monthly payments over two years totalling the full 80%. Leaving before year eight prorates what has vested rather than forfeiting it. There is no debt instrument here, no loan, and no OCIO involvement — you are never borrowing against your own home, which is the mechanism that makes improvement risky everywhere else. This is what makes stewardship distinct from renting: a renter who improves a space hands that value to whoever owns it. It is also what makes it distinct from owning: you are reimbursed for the improvement itself rather than gambling that a future buyer will pay for it.

A community whose members feel trapped is not a community — it is a detention facility with good architecture. The exit process is mechanical, not discretionary. The formula price is set before you move in and has not changed. There are no negotiations, no market conditions to navigate, no agent commissions. Your SWF balance is calculated and released within 30 days of vacancy declaration. Renovation reimbursements are calculated automatically from the ledger. The unit returns to the community pool — not to a speculative market — and the next steward on the waitlist takes it at formula price. The process runs the same way for every steward, in every unit, in every town. Every time.

The interest the escrow earns before Labor Day is swept into the town fund and split equally per door — every unit gets the same amount, a studio and a five-bedroom alike, and the figure moves with rates and raise size. It lands in the Civic Anchor Account: community capital, permanently rooted, OCIO-managed. It is not a personal balance you withdraw.

A conventional household carries mortgage interest, a car and its insurance, health premiums and deductibles, and student loan payments. None of these are negotiated down in an URBAL town — they are absent from the structure. There is no mortgage because a PLC fixes cost to square footage rather than market value. There is no car payment because the road grid is structurally absent. There is no premium or deductible because Direct Primary Care sits inside your monthly fee. What you do with the difference is entirely your business — URBAL does not model it, project it, or promise it. Separately, every first-cohort steward is seeded into the town Sovereign Wealth Fund on announce day, pro-rata by square footage. That seed is a selection reward, not an investment return.