Three regimes, twenty-one counties
Permitting here is more fragmented than anywhere else in Tennessee, and for a repair that touches framing, wiring or layout it is the first thing to establish about an address. There is no single answer for the region and there is often no single answer for a county. Of the twenty-one counties on this site, eight are marked exempt by the State Fire Marshal, three take the state residential permit in their unincorporated areas, and ten have formally opted out of the state residential program altogether.
None of those three words mean what a homeowner would guess. Exempt does not mean uninspected. Opted out does not mean lawless. And a city inside any of the three can enforce a code the county around it does not. What follows is which counties fall where, and what each of the three actually means when a contractor is trying to work out who reviews a rebuild.
The eight exempt counties
Shelby, Tipton, Fayette, Madison, Haywood, Dyer, Crockett and Gibson are marked exempt. That means the state does not issue the residential permit in them and codes are a local matter, handled by a county or municipal department rather than by Nashville. In the largest of them the local departments are substantial: Madison, Haywood and Dyer run real county building departments, and Shelby permits most of its territory through a joint city and county office with a couple of municipalities running their own separate desks.
But exempt is a statement about which government issues the permit, not a statement that somebody is issuing one. At the other end of the same list, no county codes office could be found published at all for Crockett. So an address in one exempt county may face a full plan review at a local desk while an address in another exempt county faces nothing, and both are described by the same word on the same state list.
The three on the state permit
Chester, Hardeman and Lauderdale take the state residential building permit in their unincorporated areas. For an owner outside a city in one of those three, that is the cleanest situation on this list: there is a permit, there is an inspection, and the office that issues it is a state one that works the same way in every county that uses it.
Inside a municipality in any of the three, the city's own arrangement governs, which may be its own codes department or its own adopted code enforced through another office. The county line and the city limit line do different work here, and an address a few hundred feet on either side of a city boundary can sit under two different regimes with the same mailing address on both.
The ten that opted out, and the 2017 option
Benton, Carroll, Decatur, Hardin, Henderson, Henry, Lake, McNairy, Obion and Weakley have formally opted out. In the unincorporated parts of those counties nobody inspects a residential rebuild as a matter of course. A fire rebuild, a reframed floor, a rewired kitchen: none of it is reviewed unless somebody chooses to have it reviewed.
Since 2017 an owner in an opted-out area may request a voluntary state inspection. It is worth knowing that this exists, because in these ten counties it is one of very few outside checks available on work being done to a house. The other one is the license lookup at verify.tn.gov, which covers the state contractor's license at $25,000 and above in all ninety-five counties. Neither of the two West Tennessee counties that adopted the Home Improvement law for the $3,000 to $24,999 band is on this opted-out list, so in these ten the state license is the only license there is to check.
The three cases worth knowing by name
Henry County is the sharpest. The City of Paris enforces the full 2018 International series, which is about as complete a code regime as exists anywhere in the region. The county states plainly that no building permit is required and that no zoning applies outside the city limits. Two houses a few miles apart, one inside Paris and one outside it, face requirements with almost nothing in common, and the difference is not visible from the road.
Weakley County runs three regimes inside one county. Martin enforces its own codes. Dresden takes the state permit. Unincorporated Weakley charges a twenty-five dollar fee and has no code behind it. Three addresses in the same county, three answers, and the answer depends entirely on which line the parcel sits inside.
Decatur County is the far end of the range: opted out, with no exempt city in it and no county codes department at all. There is no local office to call, because there is no local office. In a county like that, the license lookup and the voluntary state inspection are the entire external apparatus, and an owner who wants a rebuild checked has to ask for it.
One thing is uniform across all twenty-one counties and worth remembering when everything else on this page is not: septic and electrical permits come from the state everywhere in Tennessee, regardless of which of the three regimes an address sits in. A county that issues no building permit at all still has a state electrical inspector attached to it.