Elkhart County Planning & Development - Building Division

Elkhart County, Indiana

county

4230 Elkhart Road, Goshen, IN 46526

Required

WHERE AND HOW. The Building Division is in the Public Services Building at 4230 Elkhart Road, Goshen, IN 46526, on (574) 971-4678, email [email protected], with Kevin Williams as Building Commissioner. Office hours are Monday 8am to 5pm and Tuesday to Friday 8am to 4pm, and the cut-offs matter: a permit needing Health Department approval must be submitted thirty minutes before closing and any other fifteen minutes before closing. APPLICATION IS ON PAPER. No online permitting portal was found, and a web search summary claiming a CivicGov portal did not survive checking against the County's own Building page, which contains no portal reference of any kind. The form is the Building Permit Application PDF, whose type-of-work boxes are New Construction, Addition, Remodel Existing and Demolition. THERE IS NO ROOFING BOX: a re-roof is filed as Remodel Existing with a free-text description, which is exactly how the County's own issued-permit export shows them described, as NEW ROOF, ROOF REPLACEMENT and ROOF REPAIR. FEE. A Building (R) - Remodel permit is a flat fifty dollars, and the export shows that same fifty dollars applied to roofing jobs estimated between nine and twelve thousand dollars, so the fee does not scale with the value of the work. A separate builder or contractor annual registration is one hundred dollars, due each February 15.

A FLOATING ADOPTION OF THE STATE RULES, WITH NO COUNTY BUILDING CONTENT OF ITS OWN. Ordinance No. 2013-330, section 2: "Pursuant to Indiana Code 22-13-2-3(b), the following rules and regulations adopted by the Indiana Fire Prevention and Building Safety Commission are hereby adopted by reference which adoption shall be construed to include all amendments as of the date of this Ordinance and any later amendments to these provisions", the list including "Indiana One and Two Family Dwelling Code (Title 675, Article 14 of the Indiana Administrative Code)". That is a floating adoption in the ordinance's own words, so the County tracks Article 14 as amended rather than freezing an edition. WHAT ARTICLE 14 CURRENTLY REACHES, from the County's own current sheet: "2020 Indiana Residential Code - 2018 International Residential Code for One- and Two-Family Dwellings, First Printing." That matches 675 IAC 14-4.4. The County writes no technical amendment of any kind: its ordinance is definitions, adoption, permits, fees, inspections, appeals and penalties, and across forty-eight pages of its regulatory publications the words roof, shingle, layer and drip do not appear once.

Required — REQUIRED, AND ELKHART IS ONE OF THE COUNTIES THE STATE TABLE NAMES. This is a state determination reaching the County through its wholesale adoption of Article 14, not a rule Elkhart County wrote. The Indiana Residential Code's own Table R301.2(1), codified at 675 IAC 14-4.4-5, runs county by county, and the Elkhart row reads: "20 Elkhart 115 A 30 36 1 Slight to Moderate Moderate to Heavy Severe Yes 50.5", the columns being county, wind speed, seismic design category, ground snow load, foundation depth, winter design temperature, decay, termite, weathering, ice shield underlayment required, air freezing index and mean annual temperature. The ice shield column reads Yes. Elkhart County itself has enacted no separate ice-barrier provision and could not enact a weaker one. Note the distinction a roofer should carry: much of Indiana reads No in that column, so an ice barrier practice brought from another Indiana county is not transferable in either direction. About ice & water barrier

Not required — NO ROOFING STAGE EXISTS IN THE COUNTY'S INSPECTION LIST, AND THE LIST IS EXHAUSTIVE RATHER THAN SILENT. Ordinance 2013-330 section 8 sets out the required inspections by category: Structures - footing, foundation, framing and final; Plumbing - underground, rough-in and final; Mechanical - gas service, rough-in and final; Electrical - temporary service, permanent rough-in and final; and Energy or pre-drywall - mechanical, plumbing and insulation. No roof, dry-in, underlayment or mid-roof stage appears anywhere in it. A completed roof is reached only by the general Final inspection under Structures. So there is no mid-roof hold point to build into a schedule here, and a roofer who wants the deck seen before it is covered should arrange that with the inspector rather than expect a published stage.

Not required — NOT REQUIRED, AND THE NEGATIVE IS COUNTED RATHER THAN ASSUMED. Across all forty-eight pages of Elkhart County's building regulations and its July 2026 issued-permit export, the terms "impact", "UL 2218", "Class 4" and "Class IV" return zero occurrences. The County writes no technical building content at all, and the state rule it adopts, 675 IAC 14-4.4, makes no impact-resistance amendment to the roofing chapter. IC 22-13-2-3(c) would in any event bar the County from imposing a more stringent or more detailed requirement than the commission's rules. Impact-resistant shingles remain an insurance and warranty decision here rather than a code one.

THERE IS NO NUMERIC THRESHOLD, AND THE TEST IS STRUCTURAL STABILITY RATHER THAN COST OR AREA. Ordinance No. 2013-330, the Amended and Restated Elkhart County Building Code Ordinance, was read in full - seventeen pages, image-only and recovered by OCR - and it sets no dollar figure and no square-footage floor anywhere. Section 6(b)(ii) requires a permit before any person may "construct, reconstruct, extend, alter, repair, remodel or make an addition to any building or portion of a building", and the single exemption at section 6(b)(iv) is qualitative: "Interior or exterior painting and routine maintenance or repairs which do not affect electric, plumbing, heating, ventilation, air conditioning, or structural stability are specifically exempted." WHAT THE COUNTY ACTUALLY DOES, from its own records rather than from the text. The County publishes a monthly export of issued permits, and the July 2026 export shows roofing work of every size being permitted under the flat fifty dollar Building (R) - Remodel category: a new roof at an estimated nine thousand dollars, a roof replacement, a roof repair, and a repair after a tree fell at an estimated eleven thousand dollars, taken out by six different roofing contractors. No minimum was applied in any of them. So do not plan a job around the maintenance exemption; price the fifty dollars in.

THE FIGURES COME FROM THE STATE'S COUNTY-BY-COUNTY TABLE, NOT FROM ANY ELKHART COUNTY ENACTMENT. Table R301.2(1) as codified at 675 IAC 14-4.4-5 gives the Elkhart row as wind speed 115 mph, seismic design category A, ground snow load 30 psf, foundation and frost depth 36 inches, winter design temperature 1 degree Fahrenheit, decay slight to moderate, termite moderate to heavy, weathering severe, ice shield underlayment required Yes, and mean annual temperature 50.5 degrees. The air freezing index cell is blank in the Elkhart row where several neighbouring counties print 2000; that is reported as it stands rather than filled in. CORROBORATED FROM THE COUNTY'S OWN SIDE: its Requirements for Footings sheet calls for trench footings a minimum of three feet deep for structures attached to the residence, below the frost line as directed by the building official, which matches the 36 inch figure in the state row. The County publishes no design criteria of its own and could not vary these.

NO COUNTY RULE AND NO STATE AMENDMENT, SO THE BASE CODE APPLIES UNMODIFIED. Elkhart County's regulatory publications were read in full and counted rather than skimmed - Ordinance 2013-330 at seventeen pages, the 2015-214 fee amendment at nine, the Unsafe Building Ordinance at ten, and four departmental sheets, forty-eight pages and roughly sixty-five thousand characters in total. The terms that would carry a layer rule return zero: "R908" zero, "layer" zero, "shingle" zero. The County has never enacted a building-content amendment; its ordinance is administrative throughout. On the state side the residential rule is 675 IAC 14-4.4, the 2020 Indiana Residential Code incorporating the 2018 International Residential Code, whose only amendments in the roof assemblies chapter delete the word "approved" from two asphalt-shingle attachment and flashing sections, delete "printed" from a third and delete one sentence from the rooftop photovoltaic section; it makes no amendment to the reroofing section. Nor could the County add one, since IC 22-13-2-3(c) bars a county from an ordinance "that conflicts with or includes more stringent or detailed requirements than the commission's rules". So the answer here is the base 2018 International Residential Code rule on recovering an existing roof. Base-code rule, read at 2018 International Residential Code Section R908.3.1.1, Roof recover not allowed, and quoted here rather than left behind the ICC paywall: a roof recover "shall not be permitted" where "the existing roof has two or more applications of any type of roof covering." One existing layer may be recovered; a second existing layer means a tear-off to the deck.

7.00% in Elkhart County, the Indiana state sales and use tax rate, with no county or municipal add-on. Indiana authorises no local-option general sales tax, so neither the County nor any city within it levies anything on top of the state rate, and 7.00% is the full rate a roofing contractor pays on materials purchased here.