Appleton Building Permit Guide
Appleton triples the fee when work starts without a permit, opens its inspectors' counter for ninety minutes a morning, and warns on its own website that an Appleton mailing address does not mean the parcel is in Appleton.
Brown County Building Permit Guide
Brown County is not comprehensively zoned — the county tells enquirers to ask their town, city or village what a property is zoned. What the county does issue is sanitary and shoreland permits.
Calumet County Permit Guide
Calumet County regulates something almost no other county does: building height inside microwave communication paths, alongside its zoning, sanitation and wind energy codes.
Chippewa County Permit Guide
Chippewa County gives you exactly seven days to fix an incomplete zoning application — and its comprehensive zoning covers six townships, while shoreland reaches every parcel near water.
Columbia County Permit Guide
Columbia County publishes the building process as a numbered order that county and town permits must follow — and before any of it can start, the property must be recorded showing you as the owner.
Dane County Building Permit Guide
Dane County reviews development in the unincorporated towns and issues zoning, shoreland and land division approvals — but the building permit itself comes from your town, and the septic permit from public health.
Dodge County Permit Guide
Dodge County puts it in bold on its own site: a land use permit and a building permit are two separate permits. The county issues one, your town issues the other.
Eau Claire Building Permit Guide
Eau Claire holds a capped delegation: the city reviews commercial plans only below fifty thousand cubic feet, so larger projects route to the state — and the review must be approved and paid before you may apply for a permit at all.
Eau Claire County Building Permit Guide
Eau Claire County breaks the Wisconsin pattern. Its Land Use Controls Division issues building permits itself in the unincorporated county, with its own county building inspector and a ten-business-day review.
Fond du Lac County Permit Guide
Fond du Lac County has no countywide zoning at all — each of its twenty-one towns controls its own ordinance and has its own permit issuer. What the county keeps is shoreland, sanitation and floodplain.
Grant County Permit Guide
Grant County will not issue a zoning permit for a land-locked parcel unless the easement is at least sixty-six feet wide — or predates the town's adoption of comprehensive zoning.
Green Bay Building Permit Guide
Green Bay once required its own HVAC license and then repealed it — a door most cities keep open, documented closing. What remains is precise: a three-outlet electrical trigger, witnessed plumbing tests, and doubled fees when work starts unpermitted.
Janesville Building Permit Guide
Janesville is the band city with an annually renewable permit: chicken coops must be permitted and renewed each year, with the Building Division mailing renewal notices every January.
Jefferson County Permit Guide
Jefferson County attaches a recorded maintenance agreement to every sanitary permit — and doubles the permit fee on anything built before it was approved, with a minimum penalty attached.
Kenosha Building Permit Guide
Kenosha put a date on the code change: the city's own page enforces the 2021 IBC for plans from November 1, 2025 — and adds a rule of its own on commercial HVAC, where every plastic exhaust and intake pipe must meet UL1738.
Kenosha County Building Permit Guide
Kenosha County requires a zoning permit before your town will issue a building permit, and it requires a surveyor to come back after you build to prove the structure landed where the plans said.
La Crosse Building Permit Guide
La Crosse reviews commercial plans only at the small end, and it prices neglect on a rising scale: vacant building reinspections climb from fifty dollars to five hundred and twenty-five.
La Crosse County Building Permit Guide
La Crosse County zones every unincorporated town except Campbell and Burns — and it will not issue your zoning permit until every other applicable permit is already in place.
Madison Building Permit Guide
Madison reviews its own commercial plans at every size with city examiners — and its building code reaches into the rental market, where open violations must be disclosed before a lease is signed.
Manitowoc County Permit Guide
In Manitowoc County no building or structure may be erected, moved, established, located or structurally altered until a zoning and setback permit has issued — and that permit comes before the town's.
Marathon County Building Permit Guide
Marathon County is the state's largest by area, with forty-two towns — eighteen of which participate in the county zoning programme. On building permits the county is explicit: it does not handle them.
Milwaukee Building Permit Guide
Milwaukee is the one Wisconsin city that licenses five trades itself on top of state credentials — and the only first-class city, so every commercial plan of every size is reviewed in-house.
Milwaukee County Building Permit Guide
Milwaukee County is one of the few fully incorporated counties in the country. There is no unincorporated land, so there is no county building permit — only nineteen municipal counters.
Oshkosh Building Permit Guide
Oshkosh regulates the roof over your head more tightly than most: metal roofs are not allowed on residential buildings unless they meet city guidelines and win approval, and shingles may go over only one existing layer.
Outagamie County Building Permit Guide
Outagamie County states the rule in its own permitting guide: building permits are issued by the towns, and where a project needs both county and town permits, the building permit will not issue until the county's is done.
Ozaukee County Permit Guide
Ozaukee County has a long history of leaving land use planning to its municipalities. What it does administer is narrow and specific: sanitary, floodplain, shoreland, manure storage and mining.
Portage County Permit Guide
Portage County will not issue a zoning permit for a new home — or an addition that adds bedrooms — until the sanitary permit is already in hand.
Racine Building Permit Guide
Racine wrote its permit rules into Chapter 18 with unusual specificity — down to a dedicated section requiring building permits for hoop houses — and stamps an eighteen-month life on every permit it issues.
Racine County Building Permit Guide
On an unsewered parcel in Racine County, the sanitary permit comes first — the county will not issue a zoning or building permit until it is in hand.
Rock County Building Permit Guide
In Rock County the towns hold the zoning authority, and the county provides zoning services on their behalf — so which permits you need depends on which town you are standing in.
Sauk County Permit Guide
Sauk County moved its land use and sanitary permits entirely online — and its application asks whether your parcel sits in the Lower Wisconsin Riverway or the Farmland Preservation Program, because both change what you can build.
Sheboygan County Building Permit Guide
Sheboygan County's towns write the same sentence into their own zoning ordinances: no building permit issues until water supply and sewage disposal are assured and the county sanitary permit is in hand.
St. Croix County Permit Guide
St. Croix County carries an overlay district no other Wisconsin county has: the Lower St. Croix Riverway, a federally designated wild and scenic corridor with its own bluff and shoreline rules.
Walworth County Building Permit Guide
Walworth County reviews and issues the three permits a rural house needs together, in one department — then asks for an updated plat of survey within thirty days of backfilling the foundation.
Washington County Building Permit Guide
Washington County issues sanitary, shoreland and stormwater permits online — and it withholds all of them on any lot that is not of record until the land division rules have been satisfied.
Waukesha Building Permit Guide
Waukesha states the sequence in writing: above fifty thousand cubic feet, the state review comes first and the city permit cannot even be applied for until it clears.
Waukesha County Building Permit Guide
Waukesha County zoning reaches six towns and the shoreland belt around every navigable water — and when it approves, it mails the zoning permit to your building inspector within two days.
Waupaca County Permit Guide
In Waupaca County you need an available development right before you can build anything — even a shed — and building without a permit is charged double by the county and the town both.
West Allis Building Permit Guide
West Allis licenses and bonds the concrete trade itself for right-of-way work, registers anyone placing facilities in its streets, and makes every new business clear a multi-department occupancy permit before opening.
Winnebago County Building Permit Guide
Winnebago County's zoning office says it plainly: it issues zoning permits, not building permits. County zoning covers four towns, shoreland covers far more, and the town inspector handles the building itself.
Wood County Permit Guide
Wood County still administers a zoning ordinance adopted in 1934 across all twenty-two towns — but its scope is narrow enough that twelve of those towns adopted their own on top.