The code is written once, enforced at your county desk
Virginia runs one building code statewide, the Uniform Statewide Building Code, adopted as regulation 13VAC5-63. Counties and cities do not write competing codes of their own. What they do is administer this one. Your locality appoints a building official, and that office takes applications, decides what needs review, issues the permit, and sends an inspector out.
That split is the whole reason permit advice from a buddy two counties over is worth about what you paid for it. The rule text is the same. The person applying it is not, and the discretion the code hands that person is real. Read the Carroll County version, office by office before you assume the county next door runs the same way.
The part everybody wants is Section 108.2, the list of work that does not need a permit application. It is a numbered list and it is specific. Small detached storage sheds and playhouses under a size cap. Fences at any height, unless the fence is a pool barrier or is required for pedestrian safety. Concrete or masonry walls up to six feet above finished grade. Retaining walls holding back less than three feet of unbalanced fill, as long as they carry no surcharge beyond that fill. Swimming pools with 150 square feet or less of surface area that are also less than 24 inches deep. Flagpoles 30 feet or less. Tents of 900 square feet or less with an occupant load of 50 or fewer people. Ordinary repairs that are not structural. And one catch all item we come back to below: construction work deemed by the building official to be minor and ordinary and that does not adversely affect public health or general safety. Two more lines in Section 108.2 matter as much as the list. Its opening says that "when an owner or an owner's agent requests that a permit be issued for any of the following, then a permit shall be issued and any related inspections shall be required." And the section closes with an exception: "Application for a permit may be required by the building official for any items exempted in this section that are located in a special flood hazard area."
Driveways, patios and walks are not named on that list
This is the part that gets written wrong all over the internet. Several sites state flatly that Virginia exempts on grade patios and slabs that will not carry a future building. We went and read the regulation instead of the summaries. Driveways, patios, sidewalks, walkways and on grade slabs are not named anywhere in Section 108.2.
Of those, sidewalks are the one with a statewide answer, and it sits on the code's other exemption list: under Section 102.3 item 6, parking lots and sidewalks are exempt from the code itself when they are not part of an accessible route. For a driveway or a patio there is no statewide sentence you can print out and hand to an inspector. That does not mean every driveway or patio needs a permit. It means the exemption people quote does not exist in the form they quote it, and a crew telling you flatwork is exempt in Virginia is telling you something the code does not say.
What is really happening is the catch all. The last thing on that list before ordinary repairs is construction work deemed by the building official to be minor and ordinary and that does not adversely affect public health or general safety, and routine driveway and patio work is judged under it, one job at a time. A phone call to the building department is how you find out which side of that line your pour sits on. But that answer belongs to a person holding a job title, not to a statute, and a person can look at your particular job and say no.
The practical version we give every customer is short. Call the building department before you pour. It takes five minutes, it costs nothing, and it converts a maybe into a yes or a form. Write down who you spoke with and the date, and keep it with your estimate.
When flatwork usually clears without friction
None of the following is a rule you can rely on statewide. They are the kinds of jobs a building official may treat as minor and ordinary, and that call is the official's to make. They share a pattern. Nothing structural sits on them, they do not change where water goes, and they stay on your own property.
If your job reads like this list, expect the call to be short. Make it anyway.
- Tearing out a failed slab and replacing it in the same footprint at the same elevation
- A patio poured on grade behind the house with no roof over it and no footing under it
- A walk from the drive to the front steps on a residential lot
- A parking pad or turnaround inside your property line that does not touch a state road
- A slab under a detached storage shed that is itself small enough to land on the exemption list, though the slab is worth asking about separately
When it stops being minor and ordinary
The other direction is easier to predict, because these jobs stop being flatwork the moment you look at what they are doing. Something is going to stand on the concrete, or the concrete is going to change how the ground behaves.
Grade and drainage are the quiet trigger. A slab that fills a swale, raises one corner of a yard, or turns runoff toward a neighbor gets attention even when nobody would call it structural, and some localities look at land disturbance under a separate process from the building permit. That is a question for the same phone call, not something we will state as a rule for your county.
The one commercial case worth naming is the walk on a commercial site. A commercial walk is the flatwork most likely to draw a real review rather than a wave through, so treat it as a call to the building official before you set forms.
- A slab poured now that is meant to carry an addition, a garage or a sunroom later, which makes it a foundation, not flatwork
- A retaining wall holding back three feet or more of unbalanced fill, since the code only names walls holding back less than three feet of it as exempt; needing the permit does not settle whether a retaining wall needs an engineer
- A freestanding concrete or masonry wall taller than six feet above finished grade
- A covered porch or carport slab, because the posts holding the roof land on footings
- Any pour inside a road right of way; a pour over a recorded easement is a different kind of question, because what the easement lets its holder do is set by the recorded instrument rather than at the building desk, and our answer on whether concrete can go over an easement covers where that document sits and who to ask
- A commercial walk or parking area that forms part of an accessible route
Footings and foundations need a permit and an inspection, apart from qualifying farm buildings
Here the hedging stops. Nothing on the exemption list covers work that carries a structure. A footing under a garage, an addition, a pole barn wall, a covered porch, a retaining wall holding back three feet or more of unbalanced fill, or a poured foundation wall needs a permit, and it needs a footing inspection before concrete goes in the trench. That is standard code administration anywhere in Virginia, not a gray area, and it is not something a friendly official waves through. One carve out lives on the code's other exemption list: Section 102.3 item 9 exempts farm buildings from the code itself, which can take in a pole barn on a working farm that is used primarily for farm purposes and not used for residential purposes. That exemption still leaves erosion control, the VDOT entrance permit and the 811 locate in place, and your county building official confirms whether a barn qualifies, so read whether farm buildings are exempt from permits before you count on it.
The order of operations is the part people get wrong, so here it is plainly. You or your builder apply with a plot plan and drawings. Your permit gets posted where the inspector can find it, so ask the building department how they want it displayed. The trench gets dug to the depth on the permit, below the frost line the building official for your locality applies. Forms and reinforcing steel go in. Then somebody calls for the footing inspection and waits for it to pass. Concrete is the step after that, not before it.
The reason the sequence matters is that once concrete is in a trench, nobody can see the depth, the steel, or the soil the footing is bearing on. An inspector who shows up to a poured footing has nothing left to look at, and Section 113.1 of the code does not count a building as in compliance until it is approved. We have never met a customer who enjoyed sorting that out.
So schedule around the inspection rather than hoping it lands: no concrete booked and no pour time set until the inspection is on the calendar, and who is making that call settled in writing before the job starts. Running our own trailer mounted line pump with an operator and a hose guy helps here, because when an inspection slides a day we are moving our own equipment, not renegotiating with a second company's dispatcher.
Ask at permit issue what other inspections your permit calls for. Some jobs add a second one before a slab goes in, which Section 113.3 item 3 describes as inspection of preparatory work prior to the placement of concrete, and finding that out on pour morning is the expensive way to learn it.
The VDOT entrance permit is a separate thing entirely
If your driveway ties into a road the state maintains, the county building permit is not the only paperwork in play. VDOT issues a Land Use Permit for Private Entrance, the LUP-PE, and it is required to install or modify an entrance connecting to a state maintained road. New entrance, relocated entrance, or a widening of the one you have, all count as modifying it.
It does not apply everywhere. Entrances off a private road, or off a street a town or city maintains itself, are outside it. That is worth checking rather than assuming, because plenty of roads people call county roads are state maintained in practice.
Under 24VAC30-73-10 a private entrance is one serving up to two private residences, one that lets agricultural operations reach their fields, or one to a small civil or communication facility such as a pump station. A shared drive serving three to five houses on a privately owned road is not a private entrance at all, it is a different permit. You apply online or through the VDOT office serving the county where the work happens, and the whole LUP-PE process sits on a page of its own.
Who to call, three worked examples
These are the three offices we deal with most often, and the contact information here is confirmed. If you are pouring in one of these counties, this is your five minute phone call.
For anywhere else in our working radius, including Smyth County around Marion and the City of Salem, call your county or city building department to confirm. South of the state line the code above stops applying, so we put the North Carolina permit rules on a page of their own. We are not going to print a phone number we have not verified ourselves, and neither should anybody else's website.
Have your details ready before you dial. The person on the other end can usually answer on the spot if you can tell them the address and parcel, what you are pouring and how big it is in square feet, the thickness, whether anything is going to sit on it now or later, whether the grade changes, whether the drive touches a state maintained road, and roughly which week you want to pour.
- Carroll County, our home county, covering Woodlawn and the rest of the county outside the Town of Hillsville. Department of Inspections, (276) 730-3016, 605-1 Pine Street Suite C115, Hillsville, VA 24343. Inside the town limits the Town of Hillsville has its own Building Code Official, (276) 728-2128, extension 307, and the Carroll County permit guide explains where that line falls.
- Wythe County, outside its towns. Building Inspection, (276) 223-4505. The Town of Wytheville runs its own Building Inspection Department inside its limits, with its Building Official at (276) 223-3339, and the Wythe County permit guide takes up Rural Retreat and any address near a town line.
- Grayson County, covering the whole 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. The Grayson County permit guide covers the county's fee documents and how zoning works inside each town.
- Any other county or city: call the local building department and confirm before you pour. No guessed numbers, no borrowed rules from the next county over.
Settle the permit questions before a pour date
Permits belong at the start of the conversation, not as an afterthought at the end. Before a pour date is set, find out from the building official which parts of the job plainly need a permit and which come down to what that official calls minor and ordinary, and check whether the entrance work puts VDOT in the picture. Then write down who applies for what, and who is calling in the footing inspection, so it lives on the page instead of in somebody's memory of a conversation in a driveway.
What we will not do is tell you a permit is not needed because it is faster for us that way, or quote you a permit fee we have not confirmed. Fees are set locally and they vary, so ask when you make the call. Everything on our side, the scope, the mix, the joint plan, and the workmanship warranty in writing, gets confirmed on your free written estimate before anybody pours anything.