The instrument has a name, and it pays to use it
VDOT does not hand out a driveway permit as such. What it issues is a land use permit, and the version written for a private entrance carries the code LUP-PE. Use the code on the phone. The reason the family is that broad is 24VAC30-151-20, which puts any work, and any nontransportation use of any kind, behind written permission from VDOT before it happens on state right of way. A drive tying into the pavement is one entry on a long list of things that rule catches.
Private entrance is a category rather than a description. 24VAC30-73-10 draws it three ways. One is an entrance serving no more than two private residences, kept for the use of the people living in them. One is an entrance that gets an agricultural operation onto its fields. One is an entrance to a civil or communication facility whose traffic runs to ten trips a day or fewer, a cell tower, a pump station or a stormwater management basin being the examples the regulation itself names. What decides the category is what the finished drive will serve, not what stands on the land today, and a drive that ends up serving more than two residences moves into a category with an additive fee of its own and a published sight distance rule, at 24VAC30-73-80, that does not name private entrances.
A permit is permission from VDOT, and from nobody else
The common misread is that an issued permit is a clearance to work. 24VAC30-151-20 is blunt about the opposite. What is granted reaches only as far as the words on the permit, and only as far as VDOT's own interest in that ground goes. Anyone else with an interest in the same strip has to be asked separately, and every other legal requirement, federal, state or local, stays with the applicant.
So an approved LUP-PE settles one question and leaves the electric utility, the water authority, an easement recorded across your frontage and the county desks on the Virginia side exactly where they were. Whether your own county wants anything for the driveway itself is a separate question with a separate answer, and it is not the one this page is about.
Whose desk it comes from
24VAC30-73-40 routes the application by county. It goes to the district administrator's designee for the county the work sits in. VDOT's permits page says these permits are typically obtained at the district or residency office serving that locality, and it also takes applications online as a guest or a registered user. The counties around Hillsville do not sit under one office, or even under one district. Grayson and Wythe answer to Bristol. VDOT's districts page names the Wytheville residency at 2843 Chapman Road, 276-228-2153, as covering Bland, Grayson and Wythe, and Grayson County's own permit checklist says entrance permits may be applied for and obtained through that same office. Carroll, Floyd, Montgomery and Pulaski answer to Salem, and VDOT's districts page lists Carroll under the Martinsville Residency in Bassett, 276-629-2581, and Floyd, Montgomery and Pulaski under the Christiansburg Residency, 540-381-7201. Our entrance permit guide prints the residency addresses and numbers as VDOT publishes them, and it is worth a call to be sure the office you picked is the one that takes your address.
The permit belongs to the owner, not to the crew. 24VAC30-151-40(A) places an entrance permit on the adjacent property owner and lets it issue to owner and contractor together when the contractor is named as the owner's agent. That is why we do not pull it. We pour the apron and the drive behind it, and the free written estimate names the office the permit is coming from instead of leaving that part vague.
The published price, and the timeline nobody publishes
This is one of the few permit questions in either state with a printed answer. 24VAC30-151-710, amended effective November 19, 2025, sets $100 at (A)(1) as the application fee for a single permit, and the additive table in that same section shows private entrances at none. The standard schedule carries no separate inspection fee either, because the regulation charges that one nonrefundable fee to offset the cost of reviewing and processing the application and inspecting the work, with an exception at 24VAC30-151-70 for requests of an extraordinary nature or extent. Back in 24VAC30-151-710, subsection (A)(3) prices an extension of an active permit at $50, and reinstating a permit that has already expired at $100.
The calendar is the blank. How long a private entrance permit takes to review and issue appears nowhere in the land use permit regulations, nowhere on VDOT's permits page and nowhere on the form. The person who can put a number on it is the district administrator's designee at the residency office covering your county, so ring that office, take the answer you get, and set the concrete date behind it rather than ahead of it.
Whether the road out front is VDOT's is a phone call
None of this matters until you know whose road it is, and we found no address lookup that answers it. County roads in Carroll, Floyd, Grayson, Montgomery, Pulaski and Wythe are VDOT maintained. City streets are not, and neither are the streets of a good many towns, which is why VDOT's own published instruction is to ask, either at the district office or at the public works department for that town or city. The guide linked above lists the nearby towns that appear on VDOT's district pages.
The mirror image of that sits in the permit regulation. Under 24VAC30-151-40(A) a VDOT permit reaches only the right of way VDOT has jurisdiction over, plus property VDOT owns, and work on a road or street a county or city runs takes that jurisdiction's own permit instead. So the first question on a new entrance is not what the permit costs. It is who maintains the pavement your new driveway is about to meet.