Certificate of occupancy

Within five working days after a building's final inspection is approved, and once the building, or the part of it in question, is found to comply with the code and any pertinent laws or ordinances, the building official issues the certificate of occupancy under USBC Section 116. It comes at the end of the permit, not the start.

Approval of the final inspection indicates that all work associated with the permit complies with this code, and the permit is complete.

13VAC5-63-130, USBC Section 113

Put those two sections together and the sequence is plain. A building permit opens the work; inspections follow it; approval of the final inspection closes the permit; and the certificate of occupancy follows within five working days. The code requires the certificate before a building is occupied, and again before its occupancy changes.

The certificate is a record as well as a permission. Among the items it has to state is the edition of the Uniform Statewide Building Code under which the permit was issued, which tells a later reader which rules the work was built to.

It does not always wait for the very end. On a permit holder's request, a temporary certificate may be issued before the work is complete, provided that portion of the building can be occupied safely without endangering life or public safety.

The office that issues it is the local building official. In the City of Galax, for example, the Building Official's page lists reviewing and approving construction plans, issuing building permits, inspections and certificates of occupancy as one office's work. The certificate is only one of the approvals a new house passes through; the rest are set out in what permits you need to build a house in Virginia. Some run on separate tracks entirely, such as stormwater permit coverage for a larger site, the subject of what a stormwater permit is. Whether the plans behind the permit needed a design professional is its own question, covered in when you need an engineer to build on land.

A standing building may have no certificate on record. Section 116.4 gives the owner a way to get one, and says the gap alone does not stop the building from being used.

When the local building department does not have a certificate of occupancy for a building, the owner or the owner's agent may submit a written request for one to be created. The building official issues it if there are no current violations of the Virginia Maintenance Code or the Virginia Statewide Fire Prevention Code and the occupancy classification of the building has not changed.

Such buildings and structures shall not be prevented from continued use.

13VAC5-63-160, USBC Section 116.4

Time matters in one more way. Under USBC Section 115, when violations are discovered more than two years after the certificate of occupancy is issued or the date of initial occupancy, whichever is later, a notice of violation issues only on advice from the locality's legal counsel that action may be taken to compel correction. Work that was done without a permit in the first place raises its own questions at a sale, taken up in what happens if a house has an unpermitted addition.