Two desks, and neither one answers for the other
It is easy to treat this as one question with one answer. Pouring the driveway is a building code question and it is answered at the county building department. Connecting that driveway to the road is a right of way question and it is answered by VDOT where VDOT maintains the road. A yes from one desk is not a yes from the other, and a homeowner can end up needing nothing from the first one and a written permit from the second.
So work them in that order and work them separately. What your neighbor did last summer settles neither, because the first desk is a person exercising judgment and the second desk depends on who maintains the road in front of your house. Get one answer and assume the other and you can be exactly right about half of your own driveway. Two more rules can reach the same driveway. Virginia's erosion and sediment control requirements apply to "any activity that disturbs 10,000 square feet or more," and a locality may set that line lower, so a long drive can need a plan. And in a special flood hazard area the building official may require a permit application even for work the permit list exempts, and Carroll County's floodplain development permit application counts paving as development.
Desk one, the county building official
Virginia runs one building code, the Uniform Statewide Building Code, and it carries two separate exemption lists that do two different jobs. Section 102.3 exempts certain things from the code entirely. Section 108.2 exempts other things from the permit application and its related inspections. A residential driveway is not named on either one.
What ordinary driveway work usually rides on instead is Section 108.2 item 13, and the verb in it matters more than anything else on either list: the building official has to deem the work minor and ordinary, and the work must not adversely affect public health or general safety. That is a judgment somebody makes about your job, not a rule you can look up and rely on, and the somebody is a different person in every county. In Carroll County outside the Town of Hillsville that is the Building Official's office at 605-1 Pine Street, 276-730-3016, and inside the town limits the Town of Hillsville issues its own building permits. The point of the call is to get that read made on your job, because until somebody makes it, it does not exist. An owner who would rather have the paper can ask for it, because under Section 108.2, when the owner or the owner's agent requests a permit for work on its list, "a permit shall be issued and any related inspections shall be required."
In Grayson County the same read belongs to the Building Department in Independence, and because that county's own FAQ prints an exemption list with this discretion missing from it, the Grayson County permit guide is the better thing to read before you call them. In either county a phone call settles the question and more reading does not.
The sidewalk exemption, and why a driveway is not on it
Virginia does have a hard exemption for parking lots and sidewalks, and it is worth knowing about, because it is stronger than the permit list. Section 102.3 item 6 exempts "Parking lots and sidewalks that are not part of an accessible route," and Section 102.3 exempts from the code itself, not merely from the application. That is as far as it reaches, though: the exemption does nothing about zoning, the road authority or erosion rules.
It still does not answer the driveway question, and we are not going to stretch it so that it looks like it does. Nothing in item 6 establishes that a residential driveway is a parking lot or a sidewalk, nothing in it says who decides that, and a driveway is not named in it. A driveway is unnamed on both lists and it is a building official's call. That plain version is worth more to you than a citation that will not hold up at the counter.
And read the first sentence of the permit list, because it is the one that stops every overreach. The exemptions, it says, "shall not be construed to exempt such activities from other applicable requirements of this code." No permit is not the same thing as no rules. Thickness, base, steel and drainage do not stop mattering because nobody came out to look at them. That half is ours, and it is what our driveway page is about.
Desk two, where the driveway meets the road
This is the one people are surprised by and it is the one that actually bites. If your driveway ties into a road VDOT maintains, the entrance is not yours to build on your own say so. VDOT has to approve where the entrance goes and issue a permit before anything is built in the right of way, and it can act against an entrance that went in without one. That is the whole of what this page will say about the instrument.
The rest belongs to the permit rather than to the question this page asks. What it is called, whose name it runs to, what it costs, which office takes it, how you find out whether the road out front is VDOT's at all, and the several things an issued permit does not clear, are worked through on the entrance permit answer, with the residency offices and the forms on our VDOT entrance permit page. Take the two desks in order and take the second one there.
Across the state line the second desk flips
If the job is in North Carolina, do not carry the Virginia paragraph across with you, because the default runs the other way. NCDOT's rule says driveway connections to residences are "normally excluded" from the permit requirement, but may be included at the Department's option, and it lists the circumstances where the Department may pull one back in. Carry the word normally when you repeat that, because the Department decides and it is free to ask. The NCDOT driveway permit page works the North Carolina side, and the Virginia concrete permit guide works the Virginia side.
Two questions we are deliberately leaving open
How far from your property line the driveway can run is not a building permit question. It comes out of a local zoning ordinance, in the counties and towns that have one, rather than out of the building code. That mechanism, and why there may be no zoning number to find, is the property line answer.
Whether a slab poured as the floor of a building needs anything of its own is a different answer again, because that concrete rides on the building's permit instead of standing on its own, and the garage slab answer takes that contrast apart. Whether a local ordinance counts flatwork as a structure in the first place is the patio answer. None of those is settled by anything above, and a driveway answer should not be stretched to cover them.