The permit follows the building, not the concrete
Ask the question about the building and it gets simple. A garage is a structure going up on your lot, and Virginia's permit exemption list is not written with one in mind. The list does carry a small buildings item, for "One story detached structures used as tool and storage sheds, playhouses, or similar uses," but that item has two conditions that travel together: the building area cannot exceed 256 square feet, and the structure cannot be classified as a Group F-1 or H occupancy. A garage you can park a truck in is a long way outside that, and whether any particular building fits the item is the building official's read rather than yours.
Once the garage is permitted work, the floor is part of it. The concrete is not exempted separately and it is not evaluated separately. That is why this page gives a different answer from every other flatwork question on this site. Is my driveway exempt and is my garage floor exempt are not the same question wearing different clothes, and reading one answer into the other is how people end up pouring first.
Same concrete, different answer, and here is the seam
Pour a slab in the yard with nothing going up on it, a camper pad, a pad for a tank, a spot for the mower, and you are back in the flatwork world. There the slab is absent from both of Virginia's exemption lists and it comes down to a building official treating it as minor and ordinary work that does not adversely affect public health or general safety. Pour the identical slab with walls going up on it, for a building that needs a permit, and it has been part of permitted work since the first shovel. Same yards, same mix, same crew, opposite answer.
So the seam is the building, not the slab. It is worth being honest with yourself about which side of it you are on before the forms go in, because people put a pad down meaning to build on it later, and later arrives to find a pad that was never designed to carry walls. What to look for in that case is worked through on whether a garage can go on an existing slab, and what a garage foundation actually is sits on our garage foundations page.
What the permit changes on the day of the pour
The practical difference is that a permit creates a permit holder. Section 113.1.2 makes that holder the person responsible for telling the building official when the work has reached a stage that needs inspecting. On a garage a homeowner permitted themselves, that is the homeowner, and it is worth deciding out loud whose name is going on it before anybody books a truck. How that call gets made, and how far ahead, sits under when footing inspections are scheduled.
The code also lists the stages that land on a concrete job, as minimum inspections that apply where the construction or the permit calls for them. On a garage that brings in Section 113.3 item 1, a look at the footing excavation and its reinforcement, and item 3, the check on preparatory work, and both are written to come before any concrete is placed. Notice periods, and what happens when a truck beats the inspector to the site, belong to that scheduling answer rather than to this one. What this page settles is that on a permitted garage there is a named person carrying the duty.
One nuance worth carrying, because it is real and it is not yours to apply. Virginia's Section 113.1, and the enabling statute at Code of Virginia Section 36-105(B) in the same words, let the inspecting authority waive the inspection on construction costing less than $2,500, at its own discretion. That last phrase is the point. It is not a threshold a homeowner gets to measure their own job against and then act on.
The engine underneath changes at the state line
In North Carolina the permit follows the building as well, but the inspection duty is driven from a statute rather than mostly from the code. G.S. 160D-1113 says that as work under a building permit progresses, local inspectors "shall make as many inspections thereof as may be necessary to satisfy them that the work is being done according to the provisions of any applicable State and local laws and of the terms of the permit." Same destination, different machinery, and the local department is still the office that answers for your job.
Edition matters whenever somebody quotes North Carolina at you. The codes page kept by the office of North Carolina's State Fire Marshal, read on September 11, 2026, lists the 2018 building codes as currently effective, and the 2024 code's effective date was pushed from January 1, 2025 to July 1, 2025 and then replaced with a certification test. There is also a condition in North Carolina about the owner being present for the inspection on certain jobs the owner permitted themselves. It carries qualifiers, and we are not going to paraphrase it into a sentence that reads tidier than the statute does. Ask the county inspections department when the permit is issued. Start with the guide to North Carolina concrete permits.
Three things this answer leaves alone
It does not tell you how deep the footing under the garage wall has to go, because that number is set locally, and how deep footers are in Virginia is its own answer. It does not tell you where on the lot the garage may sit, which is a zoning question in the places that zone. And it does not tell you what the driveway running up to it needs, which is two desks again, one of them VDOT's.
What we can tell you is what goes under the floor and how it gets placed, and that part does not change with the county line. Garage and shop slabs is the page for that, and it is the same base, the same steel and the same finish whether the building went up in Hillsville or in Independence.