Rolling Northern Virginia horse-country pasture with black board fencing, specimen oaks and a fieldstone wall.
Alexandria One statewide code, no local amendments

Barndominium Builders in Alexandria, VA

Alexandria is one of Virginia's 38 independent cities, which means it belongs to no county at all: there is no county building department above it and no county zoning reaching in, and Fairfax and Arlington have no authority inside the city line. It is also the densest incorporated place in Virginia, 160,662 people on 14.9 square miles, so dense that USDA does not report it as a farming unit at all. Nobody is putting a barndominium here. What this page is for is the land 40 to 80 miles west, and the three things about Alexandria that follow you out there: a Chesapeake Bay programme covering every square foot of the city, a mandatory soil report, and a design criteria sheet that is the city's own and nobody else's.

Alexandria at a glance

Independent city
Alexandria
Population
160,662
ZIP codes
22301, 22302, 22304, 22305, 22311, 22312, 22314
Site visits
Site visits west of the Beltway, where the land is
Start your project

Building conditions in Alexandria

The building code itself is the same in every Virginia locality, and no county, city or town may amend it. What changes from one to the next is who issues the permit and inspects the work, what that office charges, how the parcel is zoned, and the Table R301.2 design criteria the locality publishes — the 2021 Virginia Residential Code prints that table blank, with the instruction that additional criteria shall be established by the local jurisdiction. Those local numbers are what your drawings have to satisfy.

Build conditions for Alexandria , Virginia : design wind speed 115 mph on the city's current sheet, as amended in July 2025 over a printed 90 mph. BUILD CONDITIONS ALEXANDRIA, VAAlexandriaONE STATEWIDE CODEDESIGN WIND SPEED115 mph on the city…The 2021 Virginia Residential Code prints Table R301.2 blank, with em-dashes and the instructionthat additional criteria shall be established by the local jurisdiction, so this is a city fill-i…ZONING · R-20, R-12, R-8, R-5, R-2-520,000 sq ft in R-20, the largest si…Alexandria's Zoning Ordinance Article III sets out its single-familyand two-family zones and each states its lot size in its own purpos…PERMIT SURCHARGES, STACKED ON TOP OF THE BASE…30.2 percent, plus the state levyAlexandria's FY26 Permit Center fee schedule, adopted as CityCouncil Resolution 3287 and effective 1 July 2025, stacks a 14…WHO ISSUES THE PERMITCity of Alexandria Department of Cod…One department for the whole city, with no county above it.Environmental review runs through a second office: the Chesapeake… Design criteria are filled in by the jurisdiction under Table R301.2 and are confirmed per parcel before any drawing is sealed.
Build conditions for Alexandria, drawn from the sourced facts on this page. Every figure above is cited in the quick-facts panel below, with its source and vintage.
An independent city, in no county at all
Alexandria is one of Virginia's 38 independent cities, which are county equivalents belonging to no county. There is no county building department above it, no county zoning reaching in, and neither Fairfax nor Arlington has any authority inside the city line. The Department of Code Administration permits and inspects the whole city from the Alexandria Permit Center at 301 King Street. If a search result tells you a Virginia permit is handled at the county level, that is the wrong model for this address.

City of Alexandria Permit Center Fee Schedule, City Council Resolution 3287, effective 1 July 2025; Census Vintage 2025 and 2024 Gazetteer county files at www2.census.gov, where Alexandria appears as a county-level record, GEOID 51510

The densest place in Virginia, and USDA does not count it as farmland
160,662 people on 14.9 square miles makes Alexandria the densest incorporated place in the Commonwealth. The 2022 Census of Agriculture reports 98 Virginia county units, being the 95 counties plus exactly three independent cities, Chesapeake, Suffolk and Virginia Beach, and rolls every other independent city into a combined line. Alexandria is not in that file. Being absent from the national farm census is, in itself, the answer to whether there is land here.

Census Vintage 2025 population and 2024 Gazetteer land area; 2022 Census of Agriculture (USDA NASS) county reference file

The largest zone in the city is under half an acre
Alexandria's residential zones state their lot sizes in their own purpose clauses: R-20 on 20,000 square foot lots, R-12 on 12,000, R-8 on 8,000, and R-5 and R-2-5 on 5,000. R-20 is the largest and there is nothing above it, no agricultural zone and no rural zone. Twenty thousand square feet is 0.46 of an acre. The city is also moving the other way, permitting single-unit, two-unit and multi-unit dwellings of up to four units in each of those same zones.

City of Alexandria Zoning Ordinance Article III, Residential Zones, sections 3-100, 3-200, 3-300, 3-400 and 3-500

Every square foot of the city is a Chesapeake Bay Preservation Area
Readers assume the Bay Act is coastal. It reaches a statutory list at Va. Code section 62.1-44.15:68 which names Alexandria among its 17 cities, a hundred river miles from the Bay. The city then went further than the statute required. Its Environmental Management Ordinance says all land within the corporate limits of the city is designated as a Chesapeake Bay Preservation Area, that it applies as an overlay district, and that it supersedes any zoning, land use or land development regulation of the City Code that is inconsistent with it. All land not in a protection area is a management area.

Va. Code section 62.1-44.15:68; City of Alexandria Zoning Ordinance Article XIII, Environmental Management Ordinance, section 13-105(A) and (C)

Alexandria publishes its own design criteria, and they are nobody else's
The residential code prints Table R301.2 blank and tells each locality to fill it in, so these figures belong to Alexandria alone and borrowing a neighbour's would be exactly the error the blank table exists to prevent. The city's Residential Design Criteria sheet gives ground snow load 25 pounds per square foot, seismic design category B, weathering for concrete severe, frost line depth 24 inches, termite moderate to heavy, winter design temperature 17 and mean annual temperature 56F. The wind speed cell is the one to confirm: the sheet prints 90 mph with a July 2025 text box reading 115 mph over it, and a separate 2022 sheet still posted by the city reads 110.

City of Alexandria Department of Code Administration, Residential Design Criteria sheet for the 2021 code, and the city's 2022 Design Criteria sheet

Seventy-five cents a square foot, and thirty percent on top
Alexandria may not amend the statewide building code, so what it sets is the bill. New residential construction is $0.75 per square foot, and the schedule says expressly that this includes basements, garages and roofed carports, with a $95 minimum permit fee. On top of the Code Administration fee come a 14 percent administrative fee, an 11 percent Permit Center fee, a 5 percent information technology fee and a 0.2 percent training fee, plus the state levy for the Virginia Building Code Academy. A non-refundable deposit of 35 percent of the estimated total, levies included, is due with any application needing plan review.

City of Alexandria Permit Center Fee Schedule, City Council Resolution 3287, effective 1 July 2025

Also worth knowing before you build in Alexandria

The city wants a sealed soil report before it issues the permit
City policy PP 2012-13, dated 1 January 2013, says that prior to permit issuance new dwellings shall have a soil suitability report signed and sealed by a Commonwealth of Virginia licensed design professional, with site exploration bore logs detailing USCS soil classification and physical properties and flagging any problems found, expansive marine clay soils named first among them. The report must recommend foundation designs and, where problem soils turn up, remediation, and the design professional or their agent must inspect the in-situ foundation soil before placement. That is a citywide geotechnical requirement for every new house and it is unusual in Virginia.

City of Alexandria Department of Code Administration Policy PP # 2012-13, Soil Evaluation, 1 & 2 Family Dwelling Construction, 1 January 2013

The protection area buffer, and the date that decides a lot
Inside the Preservation Area the resource protection area includes a 100 foot buffer measured from top of bank, running along both sides of any water body with perennial flow, so a stream crossing a parcel carries a 200 foot corridor. The ordinance says the full buffer stays designated notwithstanding any permitted use, encroachment or vegetation clearing. A new dwelling is not a permitted use in a protection area, and the only administrative ways in turn on whether the lot was recorded before 1 October 1989 or between then and 1 March 2002. Neither reaches into the seaward 50 feet of the buffer. The recordation date of the lot decides the question.

City of Alexandria Zoning Ordinance sections 13-105(B) and 13-107; 9VAC25-830-80 and 9VAC25-830-140

Where the land actually is, and how far
Roughly 40 to 50 miles west: Loudoun's western half around Purcellville, Round Hill and Lovettsville, which holds 981 farms under 50 acres, the most in Virginia, at a median farm size of 21 acres, the smallest in the state, so parcels genuinely change hands; and Fauquier around Warrenton, Marshall and The Plains, 188,562 acres in farms and 45.5 percent of the county, fourth in Virginia by absolute farm acreage. Around 65 miles: Rappahannock at 39.2 percent in farms with the tightest rural zoning of the five, and Culpeper at 47.7 percent and growing 9.3 percent. Around 80 miles: Madison at 48.5 percent, the highest share of the five, against the national park boundary.

2022 Census of Agriculture (USDA NASS) county table: acres in farms, percent of land in farms, median farm size and farms under 50 acres

The Bay Act stops at a county line, not at the water
None of Loudoun, Fauquier, Culpeper, Rappahannock or Madison appears on the statutory Tidewater Virginia list, so none of them carries the Bay Act's unconditional 100 percent reserve drainfield that may not be built on, nor its 2,500 square foot land disturbance trigger, which the regulation says expressly includes single family houses, septic tanks and drainfields. Prince William, Fairfax, Stafford, Spotsylvania and Caroline are all on the list. Inside the programme a parcel has to physically fit the house, the shop, the well and its radius, the primary drainfield and a second drainfield of equal size kept permanently clear of structures.

Va. Code section 62.1-44.15:68; 9VAC25-830-130, general performance criteria, subdivisions 3, 5 and 7

There is no EPA radon zone for any Virginia city
The EPA Map of Radon Zones county table contains 95 Virginia rows and every one of them ends in County. No independent city appears, so there is no table value for Alexandria at all, only the map graphic, which shades the city as Zone 3 beside Zone 2 Arlington. That matters because Virginia Residential Code R331.1 lets a locality enforce the radon appendix only in Zone 1, which nothing in this part of the state is except Fairfax County. Virginia's own measured results for 2016 to 2024 put Alexandria at an average 1.8 pCi/L across 477 tests, a voluntary sample rather than a census.

EPA Map of Radon Zones county table, radon_zones-spreadsheet.xls; VRC 2021 section R331.1 via 13VAC5-63-210; Virginia Department of Health radon testing results, updated 23 September 2025

What the Permit Center wants to see
Residential submittals under the Virginia Residential Code go through APEX, the city's permit and land use management system, and must carry complete architectural and mechanical, electrical and plumbing drawings, building energy envelope load calculations, and documentation of compliance with the Virginia Energy Conservation Code, along with the proposed design criteria and loads. Plan review is included in the permit fee, but revisions or amendments provided after a permit is approved are $50 per trade discipline, and if the revision changes the estimated cost of construction the permit fee is recalculated as well.

City of Alexandria Plan Review Services Division, New Residential Plan Submittal Requirements; Permit Center Fee Schedule effective 1 July 2025

An excavator grading a compacted building pad on a cleared lot, with survey stakes and a drainage swale visible.
Below the slab

The expensive surprises are in the ground, not the building

What moves a Virginia budget is usually below grade, and it is soil rather than rock. Five localities already treat a soil answer as a condition of the permit rather than a recommendation — Fauquier, Chesterfield, Isle of Wight, Madison and Culpeper each require a soil report, an engineered foundation design, or both before the footings are approved. Chesterfield asks for one on every new house with no opt-out, on its own published reasoning that small amounts of shrink-swell soil may turn up anywhere in the county. Virginia Energy puts the same point bluntly: standard homeowner's insurance does not cover damage from expansive or compressive soils. Along the Interstate 81 corridor the question changes shape entirely — Virginia Energy counts twenty-seven Virginia counties in the karst zone that follows that road, where what matters is what is under the slab rather than what the slab sits in, and karst does not stay west of the Blue Ridge: Loudoun County publishes karst terrain of its own, on the other side of it. The same ground then sizes the septic system, because 12VAC5-610 works from bedrooms and soil texture — 150 gallons a day per bedroom, with no row in the table for a shop, a garage or a barn at all, and clay assigned to the slowest texture group at 91 minutes per inch or worse, past the 45 minutes per inch that makes a reserve drainfield mandatory. The soil that needs a foundation engineer multiplies the drainfield. So the site work, the foundation and the drainfield get resolved together rather than one at a time. We price the dirt before we price the building.

What we build in Alexandria

All nine services are available in Alexandria. What a build costs depends far more on the parcel than on square footage, so we price against your land rather than publishing a rate card.

Custom Plans

Barndominium floor plans drawn to your parcel and to the design criteria your own Virginia locality publishes, not to a generic national spec.

Barndominium Kits

Engineered barndominium shell packages delivered to your Virginia land, drawn to the criteria your own building department fills in.

Turnkey Builds

Start to finish barndominium construction: permits, site work, shell and full interior finish, under one contract and one schedule.

See all nine services

What a build looks like

Three stages every Alexandria project passes through, from a raw parcel to a finished home. Site work first, because that is where the budget is decided.

Aerial view of an undeveloped rural lot with cleared grass, a oak and hickory treeline with a few loblolly pines, and a pale gravel access track.
Stage one

The parcel

Zoning, setbacks, flood zone and utility access get checked before anything is drawn.

An excavator grading a compacted building pad on a cleared lot, with survey stakes and a drainage swale visible.
Stage two

Pad and permit

Clearing, grading and a compacted pad, while the submittal works through whichever office issues the permit where you are building.

A finished barndominium at dusk with warm interior lighting glowing through its large windows.
Stage three

Frame to finish

Shell erected and dried in, then systems, insulation and interior finish through to CO.

Those are the rules where you are building in Alexandria. Tell us what you want to build and we will draw it to them.

Start your project

Where we build around Alexandria

Alexandria and the rural land around it. The buildable acreage for a project this size usually sits outside the city limits, which is frequently what changes who issues your permit.

The Alexandria service area, including the rural acreage outside the built-up edge, which is where the parcels big enough for a build like this usually sit. The map marks the territory we build in. It is not a branch location, and there is no office at this pin.

Keep reading

The questions that usually come next once you know what Alexandria allows.

Barndominium Cost Guide

Sourced per-square-foot ranges by tier and by size, with a calculator built on the same figures.

Read it

Is It Legal in Virginia?

Classification, zoning, the HOA gate, and why "nonresidential farm building" does not cover a home.

Read it

How Long Does It Take?

Census build-duration data, and what actually sets the permit clock where you are building.

Read it

Nearby areas we build in

Others we cover nearby. One may be a county, another an independent city that belongs to no county at all, and another a town inside a county — so the office that issues the permit, the fees it charges, the zoning and the design criteria each locality publishes can all differ from one card to the next.

Arlington County

Arlington County
Prince William County

Prince William County
Fauquier County

Fauquier County

Building in Alexandria: common questions

7 questions we get asked most often about building in Alexandria. If yours is not on the list, ask it directly.

Start your project
Can I build a barndominium in Alexandria?
Realistically no, and it is better to say so plainly than to sell you a page. Alexandria is the densest incorporated place in Virginia, 160,662 people on 14.9 square miles, and it is so fully built out that the national farm census does not report it as a unit at all. Its largest residential zone, R-20, takes 20,000 square foot lots, which is 0.46 of an acre, and there is no agricultural or rural zone above it. On top of that every square foot of the city is inside a Chesapeake Bay Preservation Area, which brings a plan of development review for any disturbance over 2,500 square feet. If you own something unusual here we will look at it, but for almost every reader the building goes 40 to 80 miles west.
Then where do I actually buy land, and how far out is it?
Five places, in the order most people find they work. Loudoun's western half around Purcellville, Round Hill and Lovettsville is 40 to 50 miles out and has 981 farms under 50 acres, the most in Virginia, at a median farm size of 21 acres, the smallest in the state, so parcels genuinely change hands there, though you pay for the address. Fauquier, around Warrenton, Marshall and The Plains, is the same distance and is the Northern Virginia land answer: 188,562 acres in farms, 45.5 percent of the county, fourth in the state by absolute farm acreage, median farm 50 acres. Rappahannock, around Washington and Sperryville, is about 65 miles and the quietest, with the tightest rural zoning of the five. Culpeper is 65 to 70 miles, 47.7 percent in farms and growing fastest. Madison is around 80 miles at 48.5 percent, up against Shenandoah National Park. None of the five is on the Bay Act list, and you are.
Who issues the permit, Alexandria or Fairfax County?
Alexandria, and only Alexandria. This is the single most misunderstood thing about building in Virginia, and search engines get it wrong routinely by assuming permits are handled at the county level. Alexandria is one of the Commonwealth's 38 independent cities, which are county equivalents belonging to no county at all. There is no county building department above the city, no county zoning reaching into it, and neither Fairfax County nor Arlington County has any authority inside the city line. Everything runs through the city's own Department of Code Administration and the Alexandria Permit Center on King Street. Note also that a number of ZIP codes south and west of the city carry an Alexandria mailing address while sitting in Fairfax County, and those are a different building department entirely.
Why is Alexandria in a Chesapeake Bay programme when it is nowhere near the Bay?
Because Tidewater Virginia is a statutory list, not a piece of geography. Va. Code section 62.1-44.15:68 names 29 counties and 17 cities and Alexandria is one of them, alongside Arlington, Fairfax, Prince William, Stafford, Spotsylvania and Richmond city. Each must have a zoning ordinance carrying Bay Act protections. Alexandria went further than the statute required: its Environmental Management Ordinance designates all land within the corporate limits as a Preservation Area, applies as an overlay district, and supersedes any inconsistent city land use regulation. Practically, the resource protection area is a 100 foot buffer measured from top of bank along both sides of any water body with perennial flow, a new dwelling is not permitted inside it, and any disturbance over 2,500 square feet triggers a plan of development review and erosion and sediment control. Where it really bites is the land you buy: inside a Preservation Area a new build needs a reserve drainfield of the same size as the primary one, kept permanently clear of structures.
What design numbers does Alexandria publish, and can I use a neighbouring jurisdiction's?
No, and that is the point of the exercise. The 2021 Virginia Residential Code prints Table R301.2 blank, with em-dashes and the instruction that additional criteria shall be established by the local jurisdiction, so borrowing a neighbour's figures or lifting one off a national map is exactly the mistake the blank table exists to prevent. Alexandria's own Residential Design Criteria sheet gives ground snow load 25 pounds per square foot, seismic design category B, weathering for concrete severe, frost line depth 24 inches, termite moderate to heavy, winter design temperature 17 and mean annual temperature 56F. The wind speed is the cell to confirm before anything is drawn. The current sheet prints 90 mph with a July 2025 text box reading 115 mph placed over it and set to print, and a separate 2022 sheet still posted by the city reads 110 mph. Three figures, one city. Confirm the governing number with the Permit Center rather than guessing, and be aware that a design done to the wrong one is a plan review comment waiting to happen.
Will the city want a soil report?
Yes, for a new dwelling, and it is worth budgeting for at the start rather than discovering at submittal. City policy PP 2012-13 says that prior to permit issuance new dwellings shall have a soil suitability report signed and sealed by a Commonwealth of Virginia licensed design professional. Bore logs must detail USCS classification and physical properties and flag any problems found, with expansive marine clay soils named first in the policy's own list, and the report must recommend foundation designs plus remediation where problem soils appear. The design professional or their agent then inspects the in-situ foundation soil before placement. The building official may waive the report on justification such as a recent report from an adjacent lot. Additions have a second route: design to the residential code's presumptive 1,500 pounds per square foot bearing, with the same in-situ inspection.
Is there anything about building here that follows me out to the country?
Two things. First, soil, and it is the same clay under a different name. Alexandria sits east of the Fall Line on the Coastal Plain, which Virginia Energy names first among the areas most likely to have expansive or frost-heave-susceptible soils, alongside the Shenandoah Valley and the Mesozoic basins around Culpeper, Farmville, Danville and Richmond. The state also notes that standard homeowner's insurance does not cover damage from expansive soils or frost heave. Going west changes the problem rather than removing it: Culpeper sits over one of the basins the state names and puts a mandatory shrink-swell form in its residential permit packet, four of whose five options require an engineer. Second, the code itself, which does not change. It is one statewide building code that no locality may amend, at climate zone 4A with R-15 or R-13 plus 1 walls and a 5.0 ACH50 blower door result. What changes across a jurisdiction line is the Table R301.2 numbers, the zoning, the fees and the septic.

Building in Alexandria?

Start with the plan. Tell us what you want to build and we will draw it, then confirm which office issues the permit for your parcel, what it will let you put there, and what wind load it has to meet. That conversation costs nothing.

Start your project