One state code, applied by your county
Virginia works off the Uniform Statewide Building Code, defined in brief under Virginia USBC. The state writes the rules, and your county or city building department administers them, takes the application, issues the permit and sends the inspector. The code is statewide. The judgment on your job is local.
That code carries a written list of work exempt from applying for a permit at all, and most items on it come with conditions: fences, unless they serve as a pool barrier or are required for pedestrian safety; concrete or masonry walls up to 6 feet above finished grade; retaining walls holding back less than 3 feet of unbalanced fill with no surcharge beyond that fill; small one story detached storage sheds under the code's size cap; and pools of 150 square feet or less of surface that are also less than 24 inches deep. It is a specific list of specific things, and what is not on it matters more to most homeowners than what is. The list also carries two conditions of its own. An owner who asks for a permit on listed work gets one, inspections included, and a building official may still require an application for a listed item that sits in a special flood hazard area; both are quoted word for word in the Virginia permit guide.
Driveways, patios and walks: what the exemption list actually says
Driveways, patios, sidewalks, walkways and on-grade slabs are not named anywhere on that list. Several websites claim Virginia blanket-exempts flatwork. The regulation itself does not say it. A separate list, Section 102.3, does exempt a sidewalk or parking lot that is not part of an accessible route from the code entirely, at item 6. Driveways, patios and on-grade slabs are on neither list, so for those there is no statewide rule we can point you to and no blanket exemption to claim.
What is really happening is one line further down that list, item 13 of Section 108.2: construction work deemed by the building official to be minor and ordinary and that does not adversely affect public health or general safety needs no permit application. Plain driveway and patio pours are the kind of job that question gets asked about. That is a person in your county making a call on your job, though, not an automatic pass written into the code. Five minutes on the phone settles it and costs nothing.
Some flatwork draws a closer look: work that changes how water leaves the property, a slab cut into a slope, or a sidewalk that forms part of an accessible route. Our full Virginia concrete permit guide walks through those cases and the order things happen in.
Footings and foundations need a permit and an inspection
This part is rarely a gray area. A garage foundation, an addition footing, a poured wall under a building, a retaining wall holding back 3 feet or more of unbalanced fill: that work needs a permit, and the footing gets inspected before any concrete goes in it. The statewide carve out worth knowing is a qualifying farm building, which is exempt from the code itself, and the county building official confirms whether a building qualifies. Pouring first and asking later leaves a footing nobody has approved, and under Section 113.1 of Virginia's code a building is not deemed in compliance until the inspecting authority approves it. How deep that footing has to go is set locality by locality, and frost depth and footing codes lays out who sets the figure. Before anyone digs for it, 811 and utility locates covers who has to notify and how long a ticket lasts. The order those steps run in, and who owes each one, is on the pre-pour clock.
Plan the calendar around that inspection, because concrete runs on its own clock: the pour belongs after the inspection clears, and so does our own line pump when a job calls for one, which means a foundation, roughly eight or more cubic yards, or a lot too tight for a chute.
A new entrance on a state road: the VDOT LUP-PE
A lot of people find out about this one late: VDOT, not the county, controls where a driveway meets a state road. Installing or modifying that entrance calls for a Land Use Permit for Private Entrance, the LUP-PE. It comes from VDOT rather than the county, and it does not apply to entrances off a private road or a street the town maintains. Under 24VAC30-73-10 it covers up to two private residences, agricultural access to fields, or a small utility site such as a pump station. You apply online or through the VDOT office serving your county, and our full page on the VDOT entrance permit walks the rest. Cross the line into North Carolina and the same entrance goes through NCDOT rather than VDOT, a difference we take apart on the NCDOT driveway permit page.
Who to call
These three departments handle the counties we are in and out of most, and they are the fastest way to a real answer on your address. We have gone through all three in detail, what Carroll County publishes and what it does not and the Wythe and Grayson County guides linked in their entries below, and the numbers for all three are here:
- Carroll County outside the Town of Hillsville, Department of Inspections, (276) 730-3016, 605-1 Pine Street Suite C115, Hillsville, VA 24343; inside the town, the Town of Hillsville's own Building Code Official, (276) 728-2128, extension 307
- Wythe County outside its towns, Building Inspection, (276) 223-4505; inside the Town of Wytheville, that town's own Building Official, (276) 223-3339; read the Wythe County permit guide before you dial
- Grayson County, including the Towns of Independence, Fries and Troutdale, Building Department, (276) 773-2322, extension 103 for the permit technician, 129 Davis Street, Independence, VA 24348; read the Grayson County permit guide before you dial
Everywhere else we pour
Our radius runs about an hour to an hour and a half in every direction from Hillsville, which reaches plenty of counties we have not listed a number for. Smyth County around Marion, Montgomery and the Roanoke area all run their own departments. Floyd's is laid out in full on the Floyd County permits page, and Pulaski County's, with its two towns and Claytor Lake, on the Pulaski County permits page. Three independent cities that belong to no county run desks of their own: Galax, Radford and Salem. Everything above is Virginia. A North Carolina address is a different question, and we answer it on its own page: North Carolina concrete permits. Call your county building department to confirm before you pour. We would rather send you to the right desk than hand you a number we have not checked.
Permits and engineering, when a job needs them, sit outside the per square foot number on your quote, and your free written estimate spells out what is inside the price and what is not. We pour concrete. We are not the permit authority, and we will not call a job exempt when the county has not.