How does opting out of permitting actually work? In Cochise County, Arizona, we are fortunate to have an owner-builder permitting option that allows owners to build with whatever materials they want. This makes it possible for constructing with earth bags, straw bales, and other alternative building methods without the hefty permits and inspections of conventional house constructions.
How the Owner-Builder/Opt-Out Permit Works
Officially it’s called the Owner-Builder Amendment. Everyone just calls it the opt-out. Same thing.
There are two flavors, and which one you pick at the start basically decides how the rest of your build goes.
Option 1 — limited review, limited inspection. You submit plans, the county glances at them, and you get a handful of inspections along the way. At the end, if you’ve hit the minimum life-safety boxes, you can walk away with a conditioned Certificate of Occupancy. Not a full one. Conditioned. Meaning the county is saying “we checked the bare minimum, good luck.”
Option 2 — no review, no inspection. This is the one people mean when they say “the opt-out.” No plans submitted. No one shows up to check your work as you go. At the very end there’s a final site visit, but it’s administrative — they’re confirming a house exists where you said it would, not grading your framing. No Certificate of Occupancy, ever, under this option. The county isn’t vouching for your house. You are.
Neither option means you’re off the hook entirely. Septic still needs its own permit through the health department. Smoke detectors, electrical work, fire code still apply, opt-out or not. You’re opting out of the county checking your construction methods, not opting out of every rule that exists.
Who This Permit Is For
This isn’t really a permit for someone building a spec house to flip, or a contractor running multiple projects. It’s for the person who wants to build their own house, with their own hands, using whatever materials make sense to them; straw bale, earthbag, adobe, shipping container, whatever and doesn’t want a building inspector telling them their wall assembly isn’t in the code book. Because it isn’t. That’s the point.
The zoning requirement is the gatekeeper here. You need to be in an RU zoning district with a minimum lot size of four acres, and your parcel actually has to be four acres or larger. RU-4 covers something like 90% of unincorporated Cochise County, which is a big part of why this corner of Arizona has turned into a magnet for owner-builders. Pull up the county’s interactive zoning map before you fall in love with a piece of land. Don’t assume.
How to Apply
Short version, because the long version lives on the county website and we’re not going to retype their portal for them:
- Make an account on the Cochise County Permitting Portal
- Apply for a Residential Permit, single-family residence
- Tell them what you’re building, new construction, the parcel number
- Pick your option: limited review or no review
- Upload a site plan, a floor plan, a construction checklist, the owner-builder disclosure forms
- Sign off that you understand you’re responsible for code compliance, not the county
- Wait for the permit to actually issue before you touch dirt
Hand-drawn plans are fine as long as someone other than you can read them.
Some Caveats
A couple things that trip people up, because they tripped us up first.
This covers the main residential structure. It doesn’t blanket-cover every shed, workshop, or barn you decide to put up later. Detached accessory buildings come with their own permitting path, separate from the house. Don’t assume the opt-out you got for the house automatically extends to whatever else you build on the property down the road.
And it’s not unlimited. You get to use this once every five years, not once every five years per property. So if you’ve already used your opt-out on this land, you don’t get to buy a second parcel next year and pull another one. The 5 year clock has to run out first. Buy land five years from now, on the other hand, and you’re back in business.
Why Would Anyone Want This Permit?
Because the alternative is paying a contractor a fortune to build something the code book has never heard of, or quietly giving up on the materials you actually wanted to use in the first place.
We didn’t come out here to build a house that looks like every other house. We came out here to build with what’s around us… earth, stone, our own labor, on land we own outright, without a bank or a building department deciding what counts as a real house. The opt-out is what makes that legal instead of just stubborn.
It’s not a loophole. It’s the county admitting that out here, in the rural parts of Cochise, people have been building their own shelter with their own hands for longer than the code book has existed, and there ought to be a lawful way to keep doing that.
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