Structure, envelope and site permits

Roofing, foundations, additions and everything in the yard. This is the half of the permit record where the exemptions live, and where a buyer is most likely to misread a blank line as a problem.

Plano publishes real thresholds here, and they are more generous than people expect. A re-roof that does not exceed a quarter of the roof needs no permit. A fence repair inside a quarter of its area in twelve months needs none. A detached accessory building of a hundred and twenty square feet or less is exempt from the building permit altogether — though not, and this is the trap, from the zoning rules that still govern where it may stand and how tall it may be. And tree removal, which most local guidance treats as regulated, is expressly exempt on an individual single-family lot once the house has had its final inspection.

Where Plano is strict, it is very strict. Every foundation and footing must be designed and sealed by a Texas-registered engineer, with no size threshold, and an addition to a post-tension slab is caught by the same rule at any scale. Drawings marked “for pricing only” are rejected. So a foundation file either contains an engineer’s seal or the work did not go through the city — which makes this one of the few places where the absence of a record tells you something specific.

Roofing sits between the two, and it is the most instructive page on this site. A permit is required, the code is real, and yet the inspection behind it is thinner than almost any buyer would guess.