Arlington County, Virginia building permits

Arlington County, Virginia runs its permitting through Accela Citizen Access. Accela splits everything behind a row of tabs — typically Building, Planning, Enforcement and Licenses — and each tab has its own search form. Most Accela sites let you look up an existing permit without an account, but you must register before you can start a new application or pay a fee.

Official Arlington County permit links

Every link below points at Arlington County's own website, not at a copy of it. We retrieved them on 2026-08-06.

Does Arlington County or your city issue the permit?

Arlington County issues permits for unincorporated territory. If the property has a city or town mailing address that does not automatically mean the city issues the permit — mailing addresses follow postal routes, not jurisdictional boundaries. Check the parcel against the county parcel viewer or ask the office to confirm before you file.

The check that settles it takes two minutes: look the property up in the county parcel or GIS viewer by address or parcel number, and the record names the jurisdiction. Our jurisdiction helper walks through the indicators if you cannot reach the parcel viewer.

Which building code applies in Virginia?

Construction in Virginia is governed by the Virginia Uniform Statewide Building Code. The county enforces that code and may add local amendments on top of it — commonly for wind, seismic, snow load, floodplain or energy provisions — so the local amendment sheet is worth reading alongside the state code itself.

What permits does Arlington County issue?

Arlington County issues permits by category rather than as a single approval, and a project frequently needs more than one. The building permit covers the structure and the overall project; the trade permits cover the systems inside it, and each is inspected separately by a different inspector against a different code chapter.

The categories above are the ones almost every county building department in the United States operates. What differs locally is the threshold at which each is triggered — the shed size, the fence height, the repair value below which no permit is needed. Those thresholds are set by Arlington County and are the single most important thing to read on the official source before you start.

How to apply for a building permit in Arlington County, Virginia

1. Confirm jurisdiction before anything else. Establish that the property is in unincorporated Arlington County rather than inside an incorporated city or town. A city mailing address is not evidence either way — postal routes and municipal boundaries are drawn independently. Getting this wrong costs more time than any other single mistake, because you do not discover it until intake rejects the package.
2. Check zoning before you commission drawings. Setbacks, lot coverage and height are zoning requirements rather than building code, and they are decided independently of whether the structure is sound. A setback problem found after design means redrawing, so establish it first.
3. Write the scope of work properly. A vague scope is the most common intake rejection, and it causes damage further downstream: the scope decides which permit type applies, which departments review it, and what the inspector will check. A wrong permit type usually surfaces at inspection, which is the most expensive point to find it.
4. Register on Accela Citizen Access before you start filling anything in. Arlington County runs applications through Accela Citizen Access, and most actions — saving a draft, uploading drawings, paying an invoice — require you to be signed in. Creating the account first avoids losing a part-completed form.
5. Submit a complete package, not a partial one. Intake staff check completeness before the application enters review. An incomplete submission is returned rather than queued, so a missing certificate costs you the whole queue wait rather than a day.
6. Answer every correction comment in one resubmission. Expect at least one round of comments on anything non-trivial. This round is where most calendar time is lost, and it is lost by responding piecemeal — each partial response goes to the back of the queue again. Cloud or itemise the changes so the reviewer can see what moved.
7. Expect the invoice at issuance. Most offices invoice when the permit is issued rather than when it is submitted. An application that has gone quiet is usually still in review rather than waiting on your payment.
8. Book inspections in sequence, and never cover uninspected work. Each stage has to be visible when the inspector arrives. Insulating or drywalling over uninspected rough-in is the most expensive mistake on a residential job, because the only remedy is to open it back up.
9. Get the permit finaled in writing. A permit that is never finaled stays open on the property record indefinitely and transfers to the next owner, which is why it surfaces at sale. Treat the final inspection as a distinct task with a named owner rather than assuming the contractor handled it.

Arlington County permit fees: how the invoice is built

Arlington County publishes its fee schedule as Fee Schedules. We do not reproduce the figures, because fees are set by ordinance and revised without notice, and a stale number would cost you more than no number.

What you can rely on is the shape of the invoice. A base permit fee, usually tied to declared valuation above a threshold. A plan review fee, commonly a fixed percentage of it. Separate electrical, plumbing and mechanical permits, invoiced individually rather than bundled. Zoning review where footprint, height or use changes. Impact fees on new dwelling units, which on new construction frequently exceed the permit fee several times over and are the line people most often fail to budget for. Then surcharges — technology, records, state — listed apart from the headline number.

Declare the valuation accurately and include labour even where you supply it yourself. Offices maintain valuation tables and will correct a declaration that falls below them, and an under-declaration found later is treated as misrepresentation rather than error. Full breakdown of how permit fees work.

Booking a building inspection in Arlington County

Arlington County takes inspection requests through Inspections.

Ask what the daily cutoff time is when the permit is issued. Requests after it roll to the following business day, and the cutoff is routinely earlier than people assume — mid-afternoon is common and some offices are earlier still. You will normally be given a window rather than a time, and someone who can answer questions and provide access should be there for all of it.

The sequence runs footing, under-slab, rough-in for each trade, framing, insulation, drywall and final. The order matters more than the list: every stage has to be visible when the inspector arrives, which is why insulating or drywalling over uninspected rough-in is the most expensive mistake on a residential job. What happens when an inspection fails.

How to look up a building permit in Arlington County, Virginia

In Accela the public record search is usually reached from the tab bar rather than the home page. Search by permit number if you have it; otherwise switch the form to address search and enter the street number and street name only. Leaving off the suffix (Road, Street, Avenue) returns more results, because Accela matches the address string literally and a mismatch in the suffix returns nothing.

Search by parcel number rather than street address wherever Arlington County offers the option. Addresses are renumbered, re-suffixed and reassigned as areas develop, and a property standing for sixty years may have had several. Parcel numbers usually survive all of it, so a parcel search returns the complete history where an address search returns a partial one.

Permit records are public records in every state, and you do not need to own the property to request them. That is exactly how buyers and their inspectors check a property before closing, and it is a routine request rather than a favour.

Arlington County permit forms and submittal documents

Arlington County publishes its forms as Form Based Code Review Process. Download the form on the day you submit rather than reusing one from a previous project — forms are revised regularly and offices reject superseded versions. That is also why we link to the source instead of hosting copies here.

Every application needs the parcel number, a written scope of work, declared valuation, owner authorisation or an owner-builder declaration, and contractor licence and insurance details. Scope adds to that: drawings and structural details for anything load-bearing, a site plan with setbacks for new footprint, energy compliance forms for conditioned space, load calculations and fixture counts for trade work, an elevation certificate in a flood zone. The full submittal checklist.

What goes wrong most often in Arlington County

Two Accela quirks catch people out. Records created before the jurisdiction moved to Accela are often not loaded, so an older permit may return no result even though it exists on paper. And a saved-but-unsubmitted application expires from your dashboard after a set period, which is why a half-finished application sometimes disappears.

The second recurring problem is local amendments. Arlington County enforces the statewide code but may amend it — wind, seismic, snow load, floodplain and energy provisions are the usual candidates — and the amendment sheet is published separately from the code itself. Reading only the state code will miss them.

The third is record coverage. Online permit searches typically hold only what was created in the jurisdiction's current system, and digitisation cut-offs in the 1990s and 2000s are normal. A search returning nothing on an older property is weak evidence that work was unpermitted; ask the office to check the paper file before drawing a conclusion.

Nearby permit offices in Virginia

Property near a boundary is frequently under a different office than owners expect. These are the other counties we list in Virginia:

More detail for this jurisdiction

Arlington County, Virginia building permit FAQ