Mario Bailey
Founder, PermitNotebook
I built PermitNotebook because the honest answer to "do I need a permit for this" is almost never the one the internet gives you. The model residential building code exempts a shed under 200 square feet, so that is the number every article repeats. Read what jurisdictions actually publish and the number ranges from 36 square feet to 600, and most of them do not use 200 at all. The national answer is wrong nearly everywhere, and the only fix is to go and read 137 local governments one at a time.
That is what this site is. 1,418 rules across 27 states, each one read off the jurisdiction's own website, ordinance or fee schedule, recorded with the sentence that settles it and the date it was read. Editorial responsibility for all of it, including work published under the PermitNotebook Research byline, is mine.
How I actually work
A rule does not go on the site because it sounds right. It goes on when I have the jurisdiction's own sentence in front of me. If a county's exemption list is what answers the question, I keep the list verbatim, and it is quoted on the page so you can check me against the source rather than take my word for it.
Then I try to break it. Automated checks catch the failures I know I make: a fee tier recorded as though it were a size threshold, a verdict that contradicts the quote sitting next to it, a number whose unit measures the wrong dimension. That last one is a real trap. Virginia Beach publishes "30 feet" for fences and it is a distance from the right of way, not a height. Mecklenburg County's shed figure is a linear dimension, not an area. Both look like ordinary numbers and both would corrupt every comparison they entered.
The full method, including what I have deliberately chosen not to do, is on how we verify.
Where I have been wrong
A site like this is only worth reading if it corrects itself in public, so here is a real example. We published that violating a local building ordinance in North Carolina was a Class 3 misdemeanor. Re-checking the state code found that G.S. 160A-175(b1) bars criminal penalties for Chapter 160D ordinances entirely. The headline penalty on the page was right and the secondary claim next to it was wrong, which is the failure mode that survives review because everything around it checks out. It is fixed, and I went looking for the same shape elsewhere.
If you find one of these, please send it. The correction form reaches me, and corrections from permit office staff go to the front of the queue.
What I will not publish
35 of our 1,418 rules say we do not know. Each one is a jurisdiction that genuinely does not publish an answer, and each one is kept out of search results so it cannot pose as an answer. Filling those in from a neighbouring county would take an afternoon and would make the site worse.
The same rule applies to whole jurisdictions. I researched Oakland County, Michigan in full and then did not publish it. Michigan's own state licensing list records the county as having no building program, with all sixty of its cities, villages and townships running their own. Our jurisdiction pages promise a permit office, a portal and a fee schedule, and publishing that one would have asserted a government that does not exist. It cost a day of work and the page will never exist.
I also do not accept guest posts, paid links or sponsored articles, and no advertiser has ever seen a verdict before it published or can request a change to one.