Only Three of Thirteen Project Types Have Any Permit Exemption at All

“What can I build without a permit” is the most reasonable question a homeowner can ask and the one the internet answers worst. The standard answer is a list copied from the International Residential Code: a shed under 200 square feet, a deck under 30 inches, a fence under 7 feet. Those numbers are real. They are also not binding anywhere until a local jurisdiction adopts them, and we have now read the adopted rule in 137 jurisdictions across 27 states.

The short version is that the exemption you are hoping for is rarer than the list suggests, and it almost never means what “no permit” sounds like.

Only three of thirteen project types have any unconditional exemption

We track thirteen residential permit types. Across all 137 jurisdictions, only 29 rows in the entire dataset record a flat “no permit required,” and they fall into just three types:

• Fence permits: 15 jurisdictions
• Patio permits: 8 jurisdictions
• Roof replacement permits: 6 jurisdictions

That is the complete list. For the other ten types, including the three people ask about most, there is no jurisdiction in our coverage where the answer is an unconditional no:

• Sheds: 29 jurisdictions require a permit outright, 106 make it conditional, 2 we could not resolve. Zero exempt a shed entirely.
• Decks: 73 outright, 63 conditional, 1 unresolved. Zero exempt.
• Pools: 57 outright, 80 conditional. Zero exempt, and pools are the only type in the dataset with no unresolved rows at all, which is what you would expect from a drowning-risk structure.
• Solar: 129 of 137 require a permit outright. Solar is the most uniformly regulated thing a homeowner can put on a house.

So if you are searching for permission to skip the permit on a shed, a deck or a pool, the honest answer from 137 official sources is that no jurisdiction we have read gives it to you. What they give you instead is a threshold.

”Conditional” is the real answer, and it is a number

The 106 conditional shed verdicts are not vagueness. They mean the jurisdiction publishes a size below which no permit is needed. 107 of the 137 jurisdictions publish that number in square feet, and the spread is the finding:

The range runs from 36 square feet in Palm Beach County, Florida to 600 square feet in Santa Rosa County, Florida. Both are in the same state. That is a nearly seventeen-fold difference in what counts as small enough to ignore.

The modal value is 200 square feet, used by 38 jurisdictions, which is where the internet’s answer comes from. But 200 is a plurality, not a majority: 69 of the 107 use something else. The second most common value is 120 square feet, used by 30 jurisdictions, and the third is 256 square feet, used by 12. If you assume 200 and you are in one of those 30 jurisdictions using 120, you are 80 square feet into needing a permit you did not pull.

Decks are harder, because the stored number is rarely the whole rule. 63 of the 137 jurisdictions state a height condition and 39 state an area condition, but 46 also require the deck to be unattached to the dwelling, and in those places attachment ends the exemption on its own regardless of size or height. Fort Worth triggers at 6 inches above grade, the lowest we have found, against a modal 30. We treat the deck exemption at length in the deck permit exemption is a four part test.

Where the exemptions actually are

The 15 fence exemptions cluster heavily in one state. Seven of them are Virginia counties: Chesterfield, Fairfax, Fauquier, Loudoun, Orange, Spotsylvania and Stafford. That is not a coincidence, and it is the clearest illustration of how state building codes drive local answers. Virginia’s Uniform Statewide Building Code governs every jurisdiction in the state, and the fence answer follows from it rather than from seven independent county decisions.

The other eight are scattered: Jefferson County, Colorado; Escambia County, Jacksonville and Santa Rosa County in Florida; Indianapolis; Kansas City; Nashville; and Madison, Wisconsin.

Patio exemptions are more geographically telling. Of the 8, two are Maryland counties (Howard and Montgomery), two are Wisconsin cities (Madison and Milwaukee), two are Washington cities (Bellevue and Seattle), plus Columbus, Ohio and Fairfax County, Virginia. Patios sit at grade and carry no structural or life-safety load, which is why they are the type most likely to be waved through. They are still permit-triggering in 27 jurisdictions outright and conditional in 79, usually the moment the patio gets a roof, a footing, or a grade change that affects drainage.

Roof replacement is the most surprising of the three. Six jurisdictions require no permit for a re-roof: Montgomery County, Maryland; Jersey City, New Jersey; Nashville and Williamson County, Tennessee; and King County and Seattle in Washington. Two Washington jurisdictions and two Tennessee jurisdictions appearing together is the state-code pattern again.

The conditions that quietly reinstate the permit

Where a jurisdiction says “conditional,” the condition is usually one of four things, and each one catches projects people assume are exempt.

A dollar threshold. Eight Florida counties, including Broward, Lee, Miami-Dade, Orange, Palm Beach, Pasco, Pinellas and Polk, use $7,500 of work value as a roofing trigger. Sarasota County and Dallas use $500. Greensboro and Mecklenburg County in North Carolina use $40,000. The same re-roof can be exempt in one county and permit-triggering in another purely on price.

A percentage of the existing structure. Twelve jurisdictions gate roofing on how much of the roof you touch. 25 percent is modal, used by seven of them, including Riverside County, Hillsborough County and El Paso. Cleveland and Arlington use 10 percent, which is low enough that most real repairs cross it. New Orleans, Baltimore County and Rochester use 50 percent.

A layer count. Chandler, Cincinnati and Snohomish County gate on roofing layers, at two.

Whether the work is like-for-like. This is the most common unwritten condition across every type. A replacement that changes nothing about size, location, or load frequently escapes a permit, while the same component in a new location does not.

What this means before you start

Three practical conclusions follow from the counts above.

First, treat any national number as a hypothesis about your jurisdiction, not an answer. 200 square feet is right in 38 places we have read and wrong in 69.

Second, if your project is a shed, a deck, or a pool, stop looking for the exemption. It does not exist anywhere in our coverage. Look for your jurisdiction’s threshold instead, and check which unit it is written in, because decks alone are governed by inches in some places and square feet in others.

Third, the exemptions that do exist are narrow and local, and six of the 29 sit in Virginia because of one state code section rather than six local decisions. Knowing which level of government wrote your rule tells you where to go read it.

You can look up the verified rule for your own jurisdiction on the relevant permit page, or start from the permit type index if you want to see how a single project type varies nationally. Every figure in this piece is derived from the same verified rows those pages are built from, and each row carries its own official source and the date we last read it.