Open semi-arid West Texas rangeland with sparse mesquite and a hard white caliche layer breaking through a shallow cut bank.
Midland County Edition set by the jurisdiction

Barndominium Builders in Midland County, TX

Midland County publishes no residential code edition and issues no building permit, and the list of permits it does issue runs driveway, road crossing, right-of-way, pole setting, floodplain and plat, with no building line on it. That is not the same as no rules. The county's own subdivision regulations say an owner who is not dividing land into two or more parts, and therefore needs no plat, must still apply to the county Floodplain Administrator for a floodplain determination before any construction. Inside a mapped special flood hazard area the order adds no freeboard, putting the lowest floor at the base flood elevation. Outside every mapped zone it still sets the finished floor at eighteen inches above the highest adjacent grade, or six inches above the crown of the road. Underneath is caliche, a cemented carbonate pan across two fifths of the county. Septic is the county's designation and a city health department enforces it.

Midland County at a glance

County
Midland County
Population
187,855
Where we build
Midland, Ector County, Odessa

ZIPs 79701, 79703, 79705, 79706, 79707, 79765, 79766, 79782

Site visits
We meet you on the tract, Midland or anywhere else in Midland County
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Building conditions in Midland County

What actually changes from one Texas jurisdiction to the next: who issues the permit, whether the residential code is enforced there at all, what the structure has to be engineered to, and what the ground is like. These are the numbers your drawings have to satisfy.

Build conditions for Midland County , Texas . BUILD CONDITIONS MIDLAND COUNTY, TXMidland CountyEDITION PER JURISDI…ADOPTED RESIDENTIAL CODEEDITION PER JURISDI…This jurisdiction publishes no design wind speed. It is settled in writing with the authority overyour parcel before the frame is ordered.ZONING · NO COUNTY ZONINGHalf an acre on a public water suppl…Local Government Code section 233.153(d)(2) does not authorise acommissioners court to adopt or enforce zoning, and Midland County…RESIDENTIAL ON-SITE SEWAGE FACILITY PERMIT$150.00The Midland Health Department's published OSSF fee, stated in thecounty's septic packet as being in effect since 1 June 2018: 150…WHO ISSUES THE PERMITMidland County Department of Public…Floodplain determinations and permits, plats, driveway, right-of-wayand pole-setting permits. Midland County Courthouse, 500 N Loraine…
Build conditions for Midland County, drawn from the sourced facts on this page. Every figure above is cited in the quick-facts panel below, with its source and vintage.
A floodplain permit is required even when no plat is
Section 5.4 of the county's subdivision regulations states that owners or developers who are not subdividing property into two or more parts, and thus do not require plats under the provisions of that court order, shall still make application to the Midland County Floodplain Administrator for a floodplain determination. The application must be made prior to any construction activity on the site or at time of plat application, whichever is earlier

Midland County Subdivision Regulations, section 5.4, Flood Plain Determinations and Permits, published by the county Department of Public Works; the preamble records the original order of 22 May 1992, revisions on 13 November 2018 and 24 August 2020 and an update authorised 17 December 2024

No freeboard inside the flood zone, eighteen inches outside it
Article 5 Section B(1) of the county's flood order puts the lowest floor of a new residential structure at or above the base flood elevation and adds nothing. Article 5 Section D(5) then reaches land in no mapped zone at all: the lowest floor must be at least six inches above the crown of the county road or state highway where that centreline is 100 feet or less from the nearest face of the structure, but in no case less than eighteen inches above the highest adjacent grade. In AO and AH shallow-flooding zones with no depth number printed on the map it is two feet

Midland County Revised Order Establishing Regulations for Flood Damage Prevention, article 5 sections B(1), D(1) and D(5), dated the 2nd day of March 2022 and signed by County Judge Terry Johnson

Caliche sits under two fifths of the county
A petrocalcic horizon, the cemented carbonate pan people out here call caliche, is mapped as a root and excavation restriction on components covering 235,346 of the county's 577,210 mapped acres. In Upton loam, the single largest map unit at 98,573 acres, the pan starts 38 centimetres down, about fifteen inches. In Kimbrough loam it starts at 20 to 25 centimetres. The soil names themselves say it: Upton is a Calcic Petrocalcid, Kimbrough and Slaughter are Petrocalcic Calciustolls and Paleustolls, Sharvana and Arvana are Petrocalcic Paleustalfs

USDA NRCS Soil Data Access, SSURGO survey area TX329 Midland County, corestrictions, component and mapunit tables

The county holds the septic designation and a city department enforces it
TCEQ's authorised agent record for Midland County returns the Midland County Authorized Agent with the area served given as entire County, and the contact on file is a City of Midland address on West Illinois Avenue. The county's own 1997 order says the Midland Health Dept, City of Midland is declared the designated representative for the enforcement of these rules. Fees are payable to Midland County and appeals go to the county's Commissioners Court

TCEQ Online Authorized Agent Reporting System, county search, with the Order Adopting Rules of Midland County, Texas for On-Site Sewage Facilities passed 29 December 1997 and approved by the TNRCC on 10 April 1998

The Railroad Commission has a seismic response area named after Midland
The Railroad Commission's Seismicity Response list names three areas, and one of them is Gardendale (Midland-Odessa). Its September 2021 action describes the area as running from northeast Ector County to southwest Martin County. Its 17 December 2021 action records that TexNet reported four earthquakes in northwest Midland County on 15 and 16 December 2021 at magnitudes 3.1, 3.6, 3.7 and 3.3, and suspends all deep disposal well permits inside the area, 33 wells, effective 31 December 2021

Railroad Commission of Texas, Seismicity Response page, Gardendale (Midland-Odessa) entries of September 2021, 17 December 2021, 19 December 2022 and 1 May 2023

No groundwater district, and a priority management area instead
TCEQ's January 2025 report to the 89th Legislature records that part of Midland County has sat inside the Reagan, Upton and Midland County Priority Groundwater Management Area since TCEQ designated it in 1990, and that during 2023 and 2024 no local, legislative or TCEQ administrative action was taken to create a groundwater conservation district in the PGMA territory in Upton and Midland counties. TCEQ recommended in 2016 that the Midland portion be added to the Glasscock district. It never happened

Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, SFR-53/24, Priority Groundwater Management Areas and Groundwater Conservation Districts: Report to the 89th Texas Legislature, January 2025, pages 11 to 13

Also worth knowing before you build in Midland County

The nearest district is a Martin County one, and it stops at the line
The Permian Basin Underground Water Conservation District is a Martin County district, created as the Martin County Underground Water Conservation District by House Bill 2382 in 1985. Its own management plan on file with the Texas Water Development Board says the District is bordered on the west by Andrews County, on the north by Dawson and Borden Counties, on the south by Midland and Glasscock Counties, and on the east by Mitchell County. No district in the state register takes in Midland County

Permian Basin Underground Water Conservation District Management Plan 2022, approved 4 October 2022, with the Texas Water Development Board's groundwater conservation district register

Why the state stopped trying to create a district here
TCEQ's own explanation, in the same report: since the area was designated in 1990, groundwater use has shifted significantly from mostly irrigation to mostly oil and gas exploration activity, and that share increases each year. A groundwater conservation district is not authorised to regulate groundwater used for oil and gas activities under Texas Water Code chapter 36. Given this situation, the agency writes, establishing a district may not be an effective approach for managing groundwater resources in the area

Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, SFR-53/24, Priority Groundwater Management Areas and Groundwater Conservation Districts: Report to the 89th Texas Legislature, January 2025, pages 11 to 13

Midland County is third in Texas for oil wells
The Railroad Commission's oil well count as of February 2025 gives Midland County 10,343 wells, behind only Andrews at 16,566 and Ector at 12,253 out of 238 counties with wells. The separate gas well count adds 238. Under Texas law the mineral estate is the dominant estate, and the accommodation doctrine protects an existing surface use, so a house that has not been built yet is not an existing use

Railroad Commission of Texas, Oil Well Counts by County and Gas Well Counts by County, February 2025, with Merriman v. XTO Energy, Inc., No. 11-0494 (Tex. 2013)

The county's whole permit list, and what is not on it
The subdivision regulations print a cross-reference of every required development document: plat application, flood damage prevention ordinance, storm water design manual, and seven permits, being road crossing, right-of-way, driveway, floodplain, pole setting, vacation of right-of-way and a temporary utility clause. The adopted fee schedule of 30 January 2025 prices six of them and tops out at 250 dollars. Neither list contains a building permit

Midland County Subdivision Regulations, Cross References for Required Development Documents, with the county's Fee Schedule for Permitting within Midland County dated 30 January 2025

The county publishes no seismic design category, because it has adopted no code
Seismic design category is a value a jurisdiction publishes when it adopts a building code. Midland County has adopted none, so there is no county figure to state. That is a separate question from what the Railroad Commission and TexNet report about injection-related seismicity in the Gardendale area, and the two should not be run together. What an engineer designs for on a particular slab is a question for a Texas-licensed professional engineer

Midland County's published departments, permits and fee schedule, which contain no adopted building code, read against the county's own Fire Marshal page stating that fire codes are enforced by the State Fire Marshal's Office

The playa floors are the one piece of shrink-swell ground
Almost nothing in Midland County is expansive: the highest linear extensibility among the major soil components is 6.4 percent in Slaughter, and most are under 4. The exception is small and mapped. Randall clay loam, occasionally ponded, 2,042 acres, and Lipan clay, frequently ponded, 3,523 acres, sit on what SSURGO calls playa floors, and the Randall variant runs 55 percent clay with a linear extensibility of 17 percent from 15 centimetres down

USDA NRCS Soil Data Access, SSURGO survey area TX329, chorizon and cogeomordesc tables, fields lep_r, claytotal_r and geomfname

The county's flood order names no Water Code section
Article 1 Section A of the order says only that the Legislature of the State of Texas has in Vernon's Civil Statues delegated the responsibility of local governmental units to adopt regulations designed to minimize flood losses, spelling and all. Several Texas counties recite a specific Water Code section in the same slot. Midland recites none, so there is no section number to quote back at the Floodplain Administrator

Midland County Revised Order Establishing Regulations for Flood Damage Prevention, article 1 section A, dated 2 March 2022

The county's own page understates its flood order by thirty years
The Floodplain Management page links the document as the Flood Damage Prevention Regulations (1992). The file it serves is titled REVISED ORDER ESTABLISHING REGULATIONS FOR FLOOD DAMAGE PREVENTION, its signature page is dated the 2nd day of March 2022, and the county's own stored filename records it as revised in 2022. The 1992 order was amended on 8 February 1999 to add criminal penalties and again on 29 November 1999 before the 2022 revision folded them in

Midland County Floodplain Management page and the document it serves, whose recitals and signature page carry all four dates

Ten acres does not switch the septic rules off, and the shop does not enlarge the field
The county adopted 30 Texas Administrative Code chapter 285 and the Design Criteria whole, with all future amendments incorporated by reference, and wrote no local departures at all: the amendments section of its order is the unfilled template. So the state rule as currently written is what applies, and nothing in the county's text redefines living area, counts a loft or pulls an attached shop into the design flow

Order Adopting Rules of Midland County, Texas for On-Site Sewage Facilities, sections 8, 9 and 10, passed 29 December 1997

The county cannot adopt a fire code even if it wanted to
Local Government Code section 233.061(a) opens a county fire code only to a county over 250,000 or one adjacent to such a county. Midland County was 187,855 in 2025 and its largest neighbour, Ector, was 173,801. The county does have a Fire Marshal, under section 352.016, which carries no population bracket at all; its published role is arson investigation and Tier II reporting, and its own page says fire codes are enforced by the State Fire Marshal's Office

Texas Local Government Code sections 233.061(a) and 352.016 with U.S. Census Bureau Vintage 2025 county population estimates, and the Midland County Fire Marshal page

Rural by the measure that matters, and not by much else
35,973 of the county's 187,855 residents live outside any city. Measured against the roughly 826 square miles of unincorporated land left once the 68 square miles of Midland city limits and the 6 square miles of Odessa city limits that fall inside the county are taken out, that is about 44 people per square mile. Odessa really does cross the line: 4,317 of its residents live in Midland County

U.S. Census Bureau Vintage 2025 sub-county population estimates with Census TIGERweb incorporated place and county boundaries clipped to the county

Claiming a platting exemption takes a recorded affidavit
Section 2.2 of the subdivision regulations says a property owner claiming an exemption under Local Government Code section 232.0015 must file an affidavit with the County Clerk that identifies and attests to the exemption, and deliver a copy of the recorded affidavit to Midland County Public Works. The same section warns that the exemption does not release the applicant from other county regulations or from extraterritorial jurisdiction requirements

Midland County Subdivision Regulations, section 2.2, Exemptions to Plat Requirements

Two cities' extraterritorial jurisdictions run out into this county
Section 2.1.2 requires an owner to consult the City of Midland Planning Department or the City of Odessa Planning Department for plat requirements where the land is in either city's extraterritorial jurisdiction, and says the subdivision approval process inside those rings is handled by each city. A Texas municipality still has no power to enforce its building code in its extraterritorial jurisdiction; platting is a different power

Midland County Subdivision Regulations, section 2.1.2, with Town of Lakewood Village v. Bizios, 493 S.W.3d 527 (Tex. 2016)

Where the water has to be proved is at the plat, not the well
With no groundwater district, the only place groundwater is formally examined is platting. The county requires a certification of groundwater availability prepared by a licensed engineer or geoscientist where the subdivision will be served by on-site water wells, on TCEQ form 20982 under 30 Texas Administrative Code chapter 230 and Local Government Code section 232.0032. A single house on an existing tract never reaches that form

Midland County Subdivision Plat Application and Checklist item 6, dated 5 May 2025, with TCEQ form TCEQ-20982, Certification of Groundwater Availability for Platting, revision of 12 February 2024

Buried lines go deeper in a playa
Section 5.4.2 of the subdivision regulations sets the depth of cover for buried facilities such as pipelines or utility lines in a playa or flood plain at three feet, and in the floodway at six feet. Playas are named in the septic packet too, in the list of things a floodplain permit is required for: ditches and playa lakes

Midland County Subdivision Regulations, section 5.4.2, with the Midland County septic permit packet, Notice To Midland County Residents Outside Midland City Limits

The lever behind a permit with no inspector
The septic packet tells county residents outside the city limits that failure to comply with the floodplain regulations may result in the septic system permit being withheld, along with difficulty obtaining a loan and expensive or unavailable flood insurance. On land with no building code, the enforcement point is another permit rather than an inspector

Midland County septic permit packet, floodplain notice and permit pages, City of Midland Health Department Environmental Section

Climate zone 3B, and it does not move with the edition
Midland County is climate zone 3B, hot-dry, on both the pre-2021 and the 2021 county maps, so unlike Dallas and Tarrant the insulation answer here does not change with which edition a jurisdiction adopted. Amarillo, 300 miles north, is 4B; Lubbock, 120 miles north, is 3B like Midland

U.S. Department of Energy and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, PNNL-33270, Guide to Determining Climate Zones by County, September 2022, climate zone data files

A licensed plumber is required even with no building code
The rural plumbing exemption expressly excludes plumbing performed in connection with new construction, so a licensed plumber is required on a rural Midland County build even where nobody will inspect the framing. Texas has no licence at all for a residential contractor, which is why the licensed trades are the only licence question worth asking

Texas Occupations Code section 1301.052

The county says out loud what it will not enforce
Section 2.3 of the subdivision regulations puts the responsibility for complying with applicable laws, court orders, county regulations and plans on the property owner, and then says the County is not responsible for enforcing regulations outside of its authority. Deed restrictions, a homeowners association's covenants and an oil and gas lease all bind regardless, and none of them is the county's to police

Midland County Subdivision Regulations, section 2.3, Compliance with Subdivision Rules Required

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 Texas budget is usually below grade, and it is soil rather than rock: shrink-swell clay. The Blackland Prairie and the Gulf Coast clays move enough between a wet season and a dry one to drive the foundation design across the state's largest markets, which is why several DFW cities require an engineer's seal on the foundation of every new house. Those are the same conditions that decide whether a septic field passes its soil and site evaluation, so the grading plan, 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 Midland County

All nine of our services — kits, custom plans, post-frame and steel construction, site preparation, permitting and engineering, through to turnkey builds — are available across Midland County. What a project costs depends far more on the parcel than on square footage, so we work from your land rather than from a rate card.

See what we build

What a build looks like

Three stages every Midland County 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 live oak and cedar elm treeline, 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 Midland County.

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 for Midland County. Tell us what you want to build and we will draw it to them.

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Where we build around Midland County

Midland County 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.

Our Midland County service area, covering Midland County and the surrounding rural acreage. This map marks the territory we serve, not a branch location.

Keep reading

The questions that usually come next once you know what Midland County 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 Texas?

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 in this part of Texas. The permitting authority, the adopted design criteria and the zoning can all differ from one to the next.

Midland

Midland County
Ector County

Ector County
Odessa

Ector County

Building in Midland County: common questions

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

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Does Midland County require a building permit for a barndominium?
No. The county publishes no building permit, no adopted residential code edition and no building department. Its subdivision regulations print a cross-reference of every required development document and its adopted fee schedule prices every permit it charges for, and neither contains a building line: what exists is driveway, road crossing, right-of-way, pole setting, floodplain, plat and vacation. Whether the Commissioners Court ever adopted an order under Subchapter F of Local Government Code chapter 233 has not been established either way. The county's online minutes archive begins in 2015, and the confirmed adoptions elsewhere in Texas are dated from October 2009 to September 2012, with one county still considering the step in 2024 — so a short window is not a safe filter either. Even where a county has opted in, Subchapter F gives it no permit, no fee and no county inspector; the builder contracts the three inspections privately. Ask the County Clerk on (432) 688-4401 before relying on the answer in either direction.
So what does the county actually make me do before I build?
Get a floodplain determination. This is the finding that surprises people, and it is in the county's own subdivision regulations at section 5.4: an owner who is not dividing the land into two or more parts, and therefore needs no plat at all, must still apply to the Midland County Floodplain Administrator, before any construction activity on the site. The county's septic packet puts it more bluntly still, telling residents outside the Midland city limits that by court order, all persons planning development in unincorporated Midland County must first obtain a floodplain permit. The application carries an office-use determination box recording whether the site is in a special flood hazard area and in a regulatory floodway. That determination is what decides which set of elevation rules you are under. The desk is the Department of Public Works, 11th floor of the courthouse at 500 N Loraine Street, on (432) 742-7370.
How high does my finished floor have to be?
It depends which of three answers your determination lands you in, and all three are in one order. Inside a mapped special flood hazard area where a base flood elevation exists, article 5 section B(1) requires the lowest floor including any basement to be elevated to or above the base flood elevation, with a certification to the Floodplain Administrator from a registered professional engineer, architect or land surveyor. It adds no freeboard, where Montgomery, Van Zandt and Burnet counties all require two feet. In an AO or AH shallow-flooding zone it is the depth number printed on the map, or two feet if none is printed. And on land in no mapped zone at all, section D(5) still applies: at least six inches above the crown of the county road or state highway where that centreline is within 100 feet of the nearest face of the structure, and in no case less than eighteen inches above the highest adjacent grade. Never quote one of those figures without its trigger.
What is the ground like, and what does caliche mean for the price?
Caliche is a cemented carbonate pan, and it is under a lot of this county. SSURGO maps a petrocalcic restriction on soil components covering 235,346 of the county's 577,210 mapped acres. In Upton loam, the largest single map unit at 98,573 acres, it starts about fifteen inches down; in Kimbrough loam nearer eight to ten inches. That is good bearing and hard digging, and it is a real line in an excavation quote for footings, a septic trench or a utility run. The flip side is that almost nothing here is expansive: the highest linear extensibility among the major components is 6.4 percent, against the fourteen to nineteen percent of the Blackland and Gulf Coast vertisols. The exception is the playa floors, where Randall and Lipan clays run above fifty percent clay. Neither the state nor the county classifies your parcel; a site-specific soil report and a Texas-licensed engineer's foundation design do.
There are earthquakes out here now. Does that change how I build?
Two things are true and they are separate facts. The Railroad Commission runs a Seismic Response Area it calls Gardendale (Midland-Odessa), described in its September 2021 action as running from northeast Ector County to southwest Martin County. Its 17 December 2021 action records TexNet reporting four earthquakes in northwest Midland County at magnitudes 3.1, 3.6, 3.7 and 3.3 and suspends 33 deep disposal well permits inside the area. The largest event near here was on 16 December 2022, which the Commission's own December 2022 notice calls a magnitude 5.4 about thirteen miles north of Midland and which its May 2023 response plan, and the USGS catalogue, call the magnitude 5.2 Range Hill event. Separately: Midland County has adopted no building code, so it publishes no seismic design category to compare that against. What your slab needs is a question for a Texas-licensed professional engineer, not for us and not for a county web page.
Who issues the septic permit, and does ten acres get me out of it?
The county holds the designation and a city department does the work. TCEQ's authorised agent record returns the Midland County Authorized Agent with the area served given as entire County, and the contact on file is at 3303 W Illinois Avenue, Suite 22, on (432) 681-7613 with a City of Midland email address. The county's own 1997 order says so in terms: the Midland Health Dept, City of Midland is declared the designated representative for enforcement. Fees are payable to the county and appeals go to the Commissioners Court. On the ten-acre question, the county adopted 30 Texas Administrative Code chapter 285 and the Design Criteria whole and wrote no local departures at all, so the state rule as it currently stands is what applies here. Published fees, in effect since 1 June 2018, are 150 dollars residential, 210 dollars commercial and 50 dollars for a re-inspection, all non-refundable, and the Authorization to Construct is valid one year.
Does my shop bay count toward the size of the septic system?
Not on the county's own text. TCEQ's application asks for the number of bedrooms and the living area in square feet, and the state wastewater usage table is headed number of bedrooms or living area of home. Both tests apply and the higher governs, but the area figure is living area, not total structure area. Some Texas authorised agents override that in their own orders and pull lofts or attached garages into living space; McLennan County is the example. Midland County did not. Its order adopts chapter 285 and the Design Criteria by reference, and its amendments section, the place where a county writes any more stringent local rule, is the unfilled template reading more stringent requirement, more stringent requirement. So a barndominium with three bedrooms and a 2,400 square foot shop is sized as a three-bedroom house. Confirm your own layout with the Health Department before the designer fixes the field, because the site evaluation is what sets the loading rate.
Do I need a permit for a water well?
There is no groundwater conservation district here to permit or register one, and the reason is more interesting than the answer. TCEQ designated the Reagan, Upton and Midland County Priority Groundwater Management Area in 1990, and it takes in portions of each of the three counties. A priority area is the state's flag that groundwater there needs managing; the usual next step is a district. In 2016 TCEQ recommended adding the Upton and Midland portions to the Glasscock district, and its January 2025 report to the 89th Legislature records that no local, legislative or TCEQ action was ever taken to do it. The same report explains why the agency has cooled on the idea: groundwater use here has shifted from mostly irrigation to mostly oil and gas exploration activity, and a district cannot regulate groundwater used for oil and gas under Water Code chapter 36. So there are no district spacing rules and no production limits, which is the opposite of the High Plains an hour north. What still applies is a licensed water well driller and the state well report, a one-acre minimum lot where the water comes from an individual well against half an acre on a public supply, and, at platting only, a groundwater availability certification sealed by a licensed engineer or geoscientist. Test quality and yield before you buy.
I keep hearing the minerals are not mine. What does that mean in practice?
Midland County had 10,343 oil wells on the Railroad Commission's February 2025 count, third of the 238 Texas counties with any, plus 238 gas wells. In Texas the mineral estate is the dominant estate: where the minerals have been severed, the mineral owner and their lessee have the right to use as much of the surface as is reasonably necessary to get them out, without your permission and without paying you for the surface. The accommodation doctrine gives some protection, but the Supreme Court of Texas held in Merriman v. XTO Energy that it protects an existing use, and Merriman had a house on his forty acres and still lost. A house that has not been built yet is not an existing use at all. Whether the minerals under your particular tract are severed is a title question and nobody can answer it from a map. Order the title commitment, read schedule B, and have the County Clerk's records searched at 500 N Loraine Street before you commit to a building site.
If I build in the extraterritorial jurisdiction of Midland or Odessa, whose rules apply?
The county's subdivision regulations answer half of it directly. Section 2.1.2 requires an owner to consult the City of Midland Planning Department or the City of Odessa Planning Department for plat requirements where the land lies in either city's extraterritorial jurisdiction, and says the subdivision approval process inside those rings is handled by each city with all plats conforming to that city's rules. What that does not do is import the city's building code. Texas appellate law is settled that a municipality cannot enforce its building code outside its corporate limits: the extraterritorial jurisdiction is a platting and annexation power, not a construction one. Note also that Odessa's city limits genuinely cross the county line, with 4,317 Odessa residents living in Midland County, so the address and the county are not the same question. Establish which side of a city limit line your parcel is on before you budget anything, because inside the line the answer changes completely.
Is there a fire code, or a fire marshal, on rural Midland County land?
There is a Midland County Office of Fire Marshal and Emergency Management, created under Local Government Code section 352.016, which unlike the fire-code power carries no population bracket. Its published role is arson investigation, major fire-related incidents and Local Emergency Planning Committee reporting. The county's own page for addresses outside the City of Midland limits then says fire codes are enforced by the State Fire Marshal's Office, and lists that office's District 12 contacts. The county cannot adopt a fire code of its own: section 233.061(a) opens that power only to a county over 250,000 or one adjacent to such a county, and Midland was 187,855 in 2025 with Ector, its largest neighbour, at 173,801. And even where a Texas county does have a fire code, section 233.062(a) caps it at commercial establishments, public buildings and multifamily of four units or more. It cannot reach a single-family house.
What else binds on rural land with no building code?
More than people expect, and most of it is not the county's. The septic authorisation must be obtained before construction, and no system may go into use until the health authority has inspected the installation and approved it. Occupations Code section 1301.052 requires a licensed plumber on new construction, because the rural exemption expressly excludes it. Health and Safety Code section 388.004 requires a builder outside any municipality to certify energy-code compliance and keep the certification three years. If you are dividing land, the plat rules apply, and claiming a section 232.0015 exemption takes an affidavit recorded with the County Clerk with a copy delivered to Public Works. Recorded deed restrictions and any homeowners association covenants bind regardless. And the county says as much itself: section 2.3 of its subdivision regulations puts compliance on the owner and then states that the County is not responsible for enforcing regulations outside of its authority.

Building in Midland County?

Start with the plan. Tell us what you want to build and we will draw it, then confirm what Midland County will actually let you put on the parcel and what wind load it has to meet. That conversation costs nothing.

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