Open rolling Blackland Prairie cropland grading into a post oak belt of the Eastern Cross Timbers, with a pecan-lined creek.
Bell County 2015 IRC as adopted here

Barndominium Builders in Temple, TX

Temple sits on I-35 between Waco and Austin, and it is one of the few Texas cities of its size that still has room inside it. The city covers 74 square miles and holds 98,412 people, roughly 1,300 to the square mile, and it has grown nearly 19 percent since 2020. Its Agricultural district allows a single-family house on a one-acre lot inside the city limits, which is more ground than the largest residential district in Waco permits. But the thing to settle before anything else here is the metal. Temple's Unified Development Code contains a section written specifically about metal facade houses and metal facade accessory buildings, with a by-right threshold that changes sharply at two acres and a Special Permit route decided by the Director of Planning wherever the by-right test is not met. Answer that for your parcel first, because most of the design follows from it.

Temple at a glance

County
Bell County
Population
98,412
Where we build
Temple, Killeen, Bell County, Waco, McLennan County

ZIPs 76501, 76502, 76504

Site visits
Site walks scheduled throughout Temple and Bell County
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Building conditions in Temple

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 Temple , Bell County, Texas . BUILD CONDITIONS TEMPLE, TXBell County2015 IRCADOPTED RESIDENTIAL CODE2015 IRCThis jurisdiction publishes no design wind speed. It is settled in writing with the authority overyour parcel before the frame is ordered.ZONING · AG, AGRICULTURAL, AND UE, URBAN ESTA…AG: 1 acre per single-family detache…AG is the district Temple assigns to property on annexation and thecode describes it as intended for undeveloped acreage large enough…PERMIT REVIEW CLOCK10 business daysPublished review target of the issuing authorityWHO ISSUES THE PERMITCity of Temple Building Permits & In…City Hall, 2 N. Main Street, Temple, TX 76501. Permit office (254)298-5640, press 0, or PermitApplications@templetx.gov. Separate…
Build conditions for Temple, drawn from the sourced facts on this page. Every figure above is cited in the quick-facts panel below, with its source and vintage.
Temple has a metal building ordinance written for houses, and two acres is the line
Most Texas cities regulate a metal home sideways, through a masonry percentage. Temple does it directly: the Unified Development Code has a section headed Metal Facade Residential Primary or Accessory Building. A building counts as metal facade if 25 percent or more of each exterior wall is formed steel, structural steel or lightweight metal alloy, calculated per side, with doors, windows and roofs left out of the sum. For a metal facade accessory building the by-right allowance turns on lot size: under two acres it may not exceed 15 percent of the primary building or 320 square feet, whichever is smaller, with a maximum vertical wall height of eight feet. At two acres and above it jumps to 5,000 square feet and a sixteen foot wall. Either way, one accessory building per lot, and it goes in the rear half.

Temple, Texas Unified Development Code Sec. 7.8.3.A and Sec. 7.8.3.B, Appendix A of the City Code, Ord. No. 2010-4413, last amended 7 July 2022

A metal facade house can be allowed by right, on four conditions
The same section deals with the house itself, and the answer is not a flat no. A metal facade primary residential building needs no Special Permit where all four of these hold: a Building Permit is approved under Sec. 3.13; it is the first structure placed on the lot; the exterior siding is an approved steel or vinyl siding applied in a horizontal lap joint treatment as the city's adopted residential code requires; and the Director of Planning determines the building is complimentary to the character of the residential neighborhood served. Setbacks and coverage still apply. Where any of that fails, a Special Permit is required, the Director of Planning may grant it as part of Building Permit review, and a refusal may be appealed to City Council.

Temple, Texas Unified Development Code Sec. 7.8.3.C and Sec. 7.8.3.D

What the Director of Planning actually weighs on a Special Permit
The six criteria are published, which is unusually helpful, because it tells you what to design for rather than leaving it to taste. They are: the current and future uses of the property and its neighbours against the Comprehensive Plan; whether other metal buildings already stand within 200 feet; how visible the metal sides are from public streets or adjoining properties; whether 25 percent or more of any exterior wall is metal and visible; the extent to which the appearance of the metal facade mimics the appearance of wood or masonry products for which no Special Permit is required; and whether topography, landscaping or masonry walls would screen it. The Director may also require documentation supporting a by-right claim, not only a Special Permit application.

Temple, Texas Unified Development Code Sec. 7.8.3.E and Sec. 7.8.3.F

One acre inside the city limits, in a district built for septic
Temple's Agricultural district allows a single-family detached dwelling on a minimum lot of one acre, with 100 feet of lot width, 150 feet of depth, a 50 foot front yard, 15 foot sides, a 10 foot rear yard and up to three storeys. The code describes AG as the district typically assigned to property upon annexation, covering rural land uses or undeveloped acreage, intended for areas farther from the city centre and large enough that municipal wastewater facilities are not required. The next district down, UE Urban Estate, sits at 22,500 square feet. An acre of city land zoned for acreage living is more room than the largest residential district in Waco allows.

Temple, Texas Unified Development Code Sec. 4.3.1 (AG purpose statement) and Sec. 4.5.1 dimensional standards table [Ord. 2020-5017]

In Temple every detached shop needs a permit, at any size
The residential code exempts small detached accessory structures from permits. Temple deletes that exemption. Its amendment to Section R105.2 strikes exempt items 1, 2, 4, 5 and 10 outright, and the one it keeps, retaining walls, is cut from four feet to two. Item 1 is the one-story detached accessory structure not exceeding 200 square feet. So the 200 square foot rule of thumb people bring from elsewhere in Texas simply does not exist here, and the city's own permit guidance lists accessory structures with submittal requirements and no size floor. Waco, 35 miles up the road, still has the 200 square foot threshold. Neighbouring cities are not interchangeable on this.

City of Temple Code of Ordinances Sec. 7-62(c), amending 2015 IRC Section R105.2; and City of Temple Building Permits & Inspections, Do I Need a Permit? page

The building permit waits on a plat filed in Bell County
A Building Permit may not be issued for any property in Temple until one of three things is true: the lot appears on an approved plat of record filed in the plat records of Bell County; the property is part of a Development Plan the City Council approved in a Planned Development district; or the unplatted-property route applies, which allows a permit for only one principal building where the tract faces a publicly dedicated street and its last division from other land happened before 1 September 1983, before annexation, or before the city's extraterritorial jurisdiction was extended. Separately, a division into lots that are all five acres or more inside the city, or ten acres or more in the extraterritorial jurisdiction, with street access and no public improvement dedicated, is exempt from subdivision review. How those two provisions meet on a particular tract is a question for the planning counter.

Temple, Texas Unified Development Code Sec. 3.13.1 [Ord. 2017-4878] and Sec. 3.6.2.A

Also worth knowing before you build in Temple

The city publishes no design wind speed, and one number in the code is a trap
Temple amends its adopted residential code in 34 separate places and leaves Table R301.2 alone, so it fills in no climatic or geographic design criteria at all: no design wind speed, no ground snow load, no frost depth, no seismic design category, no termite rating, no winter design temperature. There is exactly one wind figure in the whole building chapter, and it is not a design value. It sits inside a new exception the city added to the foundation anchorage rules, which relaxes anchor bolts for certain interior braced wall panels where the basic wind speed does not exceed 115 miles per hour. That is a condition on an exception, not a criterion Temple adopted. Anyone quoting you 115 mph as Temple's wind speed has read the right document and drawn the wrong conclusion.

City of Temple Code of Ordinances Sec. 7-62, all of which leaves IRC Table R301.2 unamended, and Sec. 7-62(q)(2)

Ten business days, and the clock starts when you pay
Temple states its review time plainly: after a permit is paid, the city has ten business days to review and make comments before a permit can be issued, and no work may start before the application is approved and the approved permit is in hand. Two details matter. They are business days, not calendar days, so a fortnight is the realistic figure. And the clock starts on payment rather than on submission, which means an application sitting unpaid is an application that has not started. Inspections then run on a separate rhythm: requests in before 4 p.m. are scheduled the next business day, requests after 4 p.m. go to the second business day, and same-day inspections are handled on an emergency basis only.

City of Temple Building Permits & Inspections, Permit Applications page and department index page

The residential fee counts everything under the roof
Temple prices new single-family and duplex construction at $0.135 per square foot of total square footage under roof, and the schedule is explicit that this single fee covers the structure, electrical, mechanical, plumbing, flatwork, certificate of occupancy and plans review. It also states what it does not cover: fences, storage buildings, accessory structures, lawn irrigation and swimming pools. For a barndominium that distinction is the whole argument for building it as one structure. Under one roof, the shop bay is inside the rate and inside the one permit. Built separately, the shop is a second permit at $35 and it falls under the metal facade accessory building caps instead. Annual contractor registration is $80, and starting work before the permit issues costs $50 plus a doubling of the permit fees.

City of Temple Permit Fee Schedule (Exhibit 1A), published on the Building Permits & Inspections page

Temple's extraterritorial jurisdiction is three and a half miles, not five
The reach of a Texas city's extraterritorial jurisdiction is set by its own population. A municipality of 100,000 or more gets five miles; one of 50,000 to 99,999 gets three and a half. Temple was 98,412 in the Census Bureau's 2025 estimates, so the ring around it is three and a half miles, and it is a genuinely different figure from the one that applies to Waco, Killeen or Austin. Out there the city applies only the subdivision provisions of its development code, under an interlocal agreement with Bell County, and Texas courts have held that a city cannot enforce its building code in its extraterritorial jurisdiction. A final plat for land in the ring must also go to the Bell County Commissioners Court for approval before it can be recorded.

Texas Local Government Code Sec. 42.021(a)(4) and (a)(5); U.S. Census Bureau Vintage 2025 sub-county population estimates; Temple UDC Sec. 1.7.2 and Sec. 8.1.1; Town of Lakewood Village v. Bizios, 493 S.W.3d 527 (Tex. 2016)

The septic answer is written into the subdivision rules, not the building code
Temple will not approve a subdivision on on-site sewage facilities if adequate wastewater service is available within 500 feet of the property line, or if any lot in it is under 22,500 square feet. The Planning and Zoning Commission may go below that, to no less than 15,000 square feet, but only where the subdivision predominantly contains one of five named soil series, Altoya, Bastrop, Lewisville, Menard or Venus, and only where the owner shows by convincing evidence from soil type, sewage volume, topography, building size, density and system design that the smaller lot creates no public health problem. In no event may a lot under 15,000 square feet be approved. The permit for the system itself comes from the county, not the city.

Temple, Texas Unified Development Code Sec. 8.2, Design Standards, On-Site Sewage Facilities

The ground here is Blackland Prairie, and it is named in the soil survey
Temple sits on the Texas Blackland Prairie, and this is not a general impression. The Natural Resources Conservation Service describes Major Land Resource Area 86A as lying entirely in Texas and names the cities within its boundaries, Temple among them, with soils characterised by their shrink-swell nature. The Branyon series, one of the two flagship Blackland clays and a Vertisol in the same taxonomic class as Houston Black, was established in Bell County itself. That matters for the foundation because the residential code hands expansive-soil foundations to the engineered design provisions of the building code at a plasticity index of 15 or greater, and because the Occupations Code removes the private-dwelling exemption for a foundation on expansive soil. On this ground, a slab gets an engineer.

USDA-NRCS Major Land Resource Area 86A description and the Branyon Official Series Description; IRC R403.1.8 with IBC Sec. 1808.6; Texas Occupations Code Sec. 1001.056(c)(2)

Temple does not copy the North Texas engineer rule, and that is worth knowing
Across the Metroplex an engineer-sealed foundation is a blanket local requirement on every new one- and two-family dwelling, adopted through a regional amendment package, and in Denton and Pearland it reaches a detached slab over 400 and 200 square feet respectively. Temple has none of that. Its building chapter leaves the residential code's foundation sections alone, and the city's residential submittal checklist asks for a universal application, a drainage plan, a site plan and an energy compliance report, with no engineer's seal on the list. The two places Temple does demand a seal are narrow and published: any retaining wall over two feet needs engineered stamped drawings, and a solar installation needs a signed engineer's letter that the roof can take the load. So the engineer arrives here through the soil and the statute rather than through a local blanket rule, and on Blackland clay that is very often the same destination reached by a different road.

City of Temple Code of Ordinances Ch. 7, Art. VI, which contains no amendment to IRC R401.2 or R403.1.8; City of Temple Residential Permit Submittal Requirements; City of Temple Do I Need a Permit? page, Retaining Walls and Solar Panels

Three deletions and an energy amendment you should know about
Texas cities may amend the code they adopt, including by deleting from it, and Temple does. Section R313, automatic fire sprinkler systems in one- and two-family dwellings, is deleted in its entirety. The whole of Part VIII, the electrical chapters, is deleted and replaced by the National Electrical Code and the city's own electrical chapter. Section R403.1.7.3, foundation elevation, is deleted and the city's drainage ordinance governs instead, which is why a drainage plan sits on the new-construction checklist. On energy, the city rewrites the Climate Zone 2 rows: the prescriptive ceiling R-value drops from 38 to 30, an alternative compliance path is added conditioned on duct leakage of 6 CFM per 100 square feet, whole-building leakage of 6 air changes per hour and a minimum air conditioning SEER of 16, and the maximum Energy Rating Index moves from 52 to 59 for permits from September 2022 onward.

City of Temple Code of Ordinances Sec. 7-62(o), (hh), (r), (u) and (ff)

The city's metal rule and the state statute sit side by side
Since 2019, Texas Government Code Chapter 3000 has barred a governmental entity from imposing a material or aesthetic-method standard on a residential building that is more stringent than the national model code, and it provides that a conflicting regulation is void. The same chapter expressly leaves recorded land-use restrictions untouched, so a deed restriction against metal is a separate matter that the statute does nothing about. Temple's building exterior materials section contains no clause conceding the point, unlike some Texas cities that have written the concession into their own codes. Both instruments are real and both are published. Whether a given application of the city's rule survives the statute is a question for the city's planning counter and, if it comes to it, for a lawyer. What is certain either way is that the city issues the permit, so that is the conversation to have first.

Texas Government Code Sec. 3000.002(a)(2), Sec. 3000.002(e) and Sec. 3000.004; Temple, Texas Unified Development Code Sec. 7.8

Temple is growing like a frontier city, not a built-out one
The Census Bureau puts Temple at 98,412 in 2025, up from 82,837 in 2020, a rise of nearly 19 percent in five years. The city covers 74.2 square miles of land, which works out at about 1,327 people per square mile, lower than Waco at roughly 1,620 and less than half of Killeen at about 2,964. That combination, fast growth at low density, is what a city with land left inside it looks like, and it is the reason the Agricultural district still has work to do here. It also means the answer to where you can put a barndominium around Temple is genuinely three answers: inside the limits, in the three and a half mile extraterritorial ring, or out in unincorporated Bell County, and the rules change at both of those lines.

U.S. Census Bureau Vintage 2025 sub-county population estimates (sub-est2025) and the 2025 TIGER place gazetteer land area file

Detached shop, attached shop: the setbacks are not the same argument
Temple treats a detached accessory structure differently from part of the house. A detached one must be located in the rear half of the property, with a three foot side setback, ten feet on a corner side, and three feet at the rear, and it must stand at least ten feet clear of the principal building. Where a one-hour fire wall is provided, one side yard and the rear setback fall away. An attached accessory structure simply takes the principal building's setbacks from the dimensional standards table. Put the shop and the dwelling under one roof and it is the principal building: no rear-half rule, no ten foot separation, and the metal question is decided by the primary-building route rather than by the accessory building's size cap.

Temple, Texas Unified Development Code Sec. 5.5.2, Minimum Setback Requirements, subsections A and B

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 Temple

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 Bell 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 Temple 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 Bell 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 Bell County. Tell us what you want to build and we will draw it to them.

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Where we build around Temple

Bell 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 Temple service area, covering Bell 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 Temple 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.

Killeen

Bell County
Bell County

Bell County
Waco

McLennan County
McLennan County

McLennan County

Building in Temple: common questions

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

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Can I actually build a metal barndominium inside the Temple city limits?
Yes, and Temple is one of the clearer Texas cities on the question because it wrote the rule down rather than leaving it to a masonry percentage. The Unified Development Code has a section headed Metal Facade Residential Primary or Accessory Building. A metal facade primary residence is allowed by right where four things hold: a Building Permit is approved under Sec. 3.13, it is the first structure placed on the lot, the exterior siding is an approved steel or vinyl siding applied in a horizontal lap joint treatment as the city's adopted residential code requires, and the Director of Planning determines the building is complimentary to the character of the residential neighborhood served. Setbacks and coverage apply as normal. Where the by-right test is not met, a Special Permit is required, the Director of Planning may approve it as part of the Building Permit review, and a refusal can be appealed to City Council. The definition itself is worth knowing: a building only counts as metal facade if 25 percent or more of each exterior wall is metal, calculated per side, with doors, windows and roofs excluded from the sum. A metal roof on its own does not trip it.
Why does two acres keep coming up?
Because it is the threshold that governs a metal shop built as a separate accessory building. On a lot of less than two acres, a metal facade accessory building is allowed by right only if it does not exceed 15 percent of the primary residential building or a maximum gross floor area of 320 square feet, whichever is smaller, and only up to a maximum vertical wall height of eight feet. On a lot of two acres or more, the same by-right allowance becomes 5,000 square feet and a sixteen foot wall. Both versions permit one accessory building per lot and both require it in the rear half of the lot, meeting the yard setbacks and coverage maximums. In practical terms, a real workshop as a separate metal building means either two acres or a Special Permit. The other route around it is to stop treating the shop as an accessory building at all and put it under the same roof as the dwelling, which is what a barndominium is, in which case the primary-building rules apply instead.
Which building code does Temple use?
The 2015 International Codes. Chapter 7 of the Code of Ordinances adopts the 2015 International Residential Code at Sec. 7-61, the 2015 International Building Code at Sec. 7-21 and the 2015 International Energy Conservation Code at Sec. 7-96, each of them worded so that later revisions come in automatically. The Building Permits and Inspections department publishes the same list on its own page, along with the 2023 National Electrical Code, and its inspections page sets out the mechanical, plumbing, fuel gas and fire codes on the 2015 edition too. Two things are worth confirming at the counter rather than assumed. The codified chapter carries no ordinance history notes, so the adopting ordinance number and its effective date are not printed in the published code. And the electrical edition differs between the department's page, the amendments in Chapter 7 and the codified electrical chapter, which is a normal consequence of a code being republished on a slower cycle than the counter operates on. A call to (254) 298-5640 settles both.
What design wind speed should the frame be engineered to?
Temple does not publish one, and that is the accurate answer rather than a dodge. The city amends its adopted residential code in 34 places, and none of them touches Table R301.2, so no design wind speed, ground snow load, frost depth, seismic design category, termite rating or winter design temperature is fixed by the city. Be careful of one number, though. There is a single wind figure in the whole building chapter, in an exception the city added to the foundation anchorage rules, which lets certain interior braced wall panels skip anchor bolts where the basic wind speed does not exceed 115 miles per hour. That is a threshold that switches an exception on, not a criterion Temple adopted, and it is exactly the sort of line that gets quoted back as the city's wind speed. The real values come from the engineer of record working from the code and from your parcel. Seismic, for what it is worth, is not a design factor for a house anywhere in Texas.
Will the foundation need an engineer?
On this ground, very probably, though Temple gets there differently from the Dallas-Fort Worth cities. Temple has no local rule requiring an engineer on every residential foundation, which several North Texas cities do through a regional amendment, and its residential submittal checklist does not ask for a seal. What does the work here is the soil. Temple sits on the Texas Blackland Prairie, and the Natural Resources Conservation Service names Temple among the cities inside Major Land Resource Area 86A, whose soils it characterises by their shrink-swell nature; the Branyon series, a Vertisol, was established in Bell County itself. The residential code sends foundations on expansive soil, at a plasticity index of 15 or more, to the engineered design provisions of the building code, and the Occupations Code removes the private-dwelling exemption for a slab on expansive soil. Two independent routes, one destination. Separately, Temple does require engineered stamped drawings for any retaining wall over two feet. What we do is have the foundation designed and sealed by a Texas-licensed engineer for the actual parcel.
How much land can I get inside the city limits, and do I need to plat it?
More than most Texas cities this size allow. The Agricultural district permits a single-family detached dwelling on a one-acre minimum lot, with 100 feet of width, 150 feet of depth and a 50 foot front yard, and the code describes AG as the district for undeveloped acreage large enough not to need municipal wastewater. Urban Estate is the step down at 22,500 square feet. On platting, the rule is firm: a Building Permit may not issue until the lot is on an approved plat of record filed in Bell County, or the property is part of an approved Planned Development plan, or the unplatted-property route applies, which allows one principal building where the tract faces a publicly dedicated street and its last division from other land predates 1 September 1983, annexation, or extension of the city's extraterritorial jurisdiction. There is also an exemption from subdivision review for divisions into lots that are all five acres or more inside the city, or ten acres or more in the extraterritorial jurisdiction, with street access and no public improvement dedicated. How those provisions land on your specific tract is a counter question, and it is the first one to ask, because the answer decides your programme.
What changes if the land is just outside Temple?
Two lines matter, and Temple's first one is closer than people expect. A Texas city's extraterritorial jurisdiction is sized by its population, and at 98,412 Temple sits in the band that gets three and a half miles rather than the five miles a city over 100,000 gets. In that ring the city applies only the subdivision provisions of its development code, under Chapter 242 of the Local Government Code and an interlocal agreement with Bell County, and the Texas Supreme Court has held that a city cannot enforce its building code in its extraterritorial jurisdiction. What does apply is platting, and a final plat out there must also be approved by the Bell County Commissioners Court before it can be recorded, so two bodies sign it. Beyond the ring you are in unincorporated Bell County, which is a different answer again, and our Bell County page is where that belongs. Our McLennan County page covers the ground north toward Waco.
What will the city charge, and how long does it take?
Temple prices new single-family and duplex construction at $0.135 per square foot of total square footage under roof, and its fee schedule says that one figure covers the structure, electrical, mechanical, plumbing, flatwork, certificate of occupancy and plans review. It also says what it excludes: fences, storage buildings, accessory structures, lawn irrigation and pools. So a barndominium built as a single structure carries its shop bay inside the residential rate; a separate shop is its own $35 accessory structure permit and its own metal facade question. Contractors register annually with the city for $80. Re-inspections are $50 in person from the third visit onward, and starting work before the permit issues is $50 plus a doubling of the permit fees. On timing, the city states that after a permit is paid it has ten business days to review and comment before the permit can be issued, so plan on roughly a fortnight from payment rather than from submission. Inspection requests before 4 p.m. are scheduled for the next business day; after 4 p.m. they move to the day after that.
Can I put the house on a septic system near Temple?
Inside the city limits most parcels are on city sewer and the question does not arise, but on the edge and in the Agricultural district it does. Temple's subdivision rules set the gate. A subdivision proposing on-site sewage facilities will not be approved if adequate wastewater service is available within 500 feet of the property line, or if any lot in it is under 22,500 square feet. The Planning and Zoning Commission can go lower, but never below 15,000 square feet, and only where the subdivision predominantly contains one of five named soil series, Altoya, Bastrop, Lewisville, Menard or Venus, and the owner demonstrates by convincing evidence from soil type, sewage volume, topography, building size, density and system design that the smaller lot creates no public health problem. The permit for the system itself is the county's rather than the city's, and Texas sizes a system off the dwelling's living area and bedrooms rather than the total footprint, which is a distinction worth understanding before the plan is drawn on a building with a large shop bay.

Building in Temple?

Start with the plan. Tell us what you want to build and we will draw it, then confirm what Bell 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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