St. Francois County No code adopted here

Barndominium Builders in St. Francois County, MO

St. Francois County is the Old Lead Belt: Farmington, Park Hills, Bonne Terre, Desloge and Leadwood clustered along and either side of US-67 about seventy miles south of St. Louis, with the igneous knobs of the St. Francois Mountains on one side and dolomite uplands on the other. It is a first-classification county on 67,503 people, which under RSMo 48.020 is a statement about assessed valuation and not about size — and it matters, because RSMo 64.170 empowers only first- and second-classification counties to adopt a building code at all. St. Francois may. It has not. The county's own departmental index runs assessor, auditor, collector, commission, county clerk, elections, emergency management, information technology, public administrator, recorder, road and bridge and treasurer, and contains no building department, no building official, no building commission and no planning or zoning office. What the county does issue is a permit — and reading it is the whole story. The "St. Francois County Building Permit" is a County Clerk form. Its heading cites Chapter 137 of the Revised Statutes, Assessment and Levy of Property Taxes. It asks for your name, the location and directions to the property, whether the building is residence, commercial, factory or other, the builder's name, the number of square feet, brick or frame, the acres or lots, the estimated cost of construction exclusive of land and the estimated date of completion — and it is signed by the County Clerk. There is no plan review on it, no inspection schedule, no code edition and no design criteria. The county's own floodplain page states the permit costs $20.00, is required for all new development before work begins, and is obtained from the County Clerk's Office on the third floor of the Court Annex in Farmington. So for land outside a city, what actually gates a barndominium here is a $20 registration at the courthouse, a floodplain check, and an on-site wastewater construction permit from the St. Francois County Health Center in Park Hills — which under its own ordinance wants a design plan and a soil morphology, not a percolation test. Cross a city limit and the answer changes completely, and it changes four different ways. Farmington runs the 2015 I-Codes with a filled-in Table R301.2(1), a building inspector and a fee schedule. Park Hills runs the 2012 editions and publishes different numbers. Desloge runs the 2006 editions and publishes a twelve-inch frost line where its neighbours publish thirty. Bonne Terre requires a permit, duplicate plans and a surveyor's site plan, but adopts no model building code at all. That spread — inside one county, inside eight miles — is the single most useful thing anyone can tell you before you draw a foundation here.

St. Francois County at a glance

County: St. Francois County
Population: 67,503
ZIP codes: 63640, 63601, 63628, 63624, 63637, 63653, 63036, 63087, 63630, 63626, 63648
Site visits: Same-week site visits across the county — Farmington and Park Hills on US-67, north to Bonne Terre and Desloge, west to Leadwood and Bismarck, and out to the acreage around Doe Run, French Village, Terre du Lac and the Big River bottoms.

Start your project

Building conditions in St. Francois County

Missouri sets no residential building code and no statewide way of adopting one, so the first question on any parcel is not what the code says — it is whether there is one. Only counties of the first and second classification may adopt a building code at all, and classification is set by assessed valuation rather than population, so a small county can hold the power while a much larger one does not. Zoning is a separate power with its own answer, granted only after a vote of the people and repealable by another. What changes from one jurisdiction to the next is whether the work is inspected, who issues the permit, what that office charges, how the parcel is zoned, and the design figures your drawings have to satisfy.

Build conditions for St. Francois 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.

This county is allowed a building code — and does not have one

Most Missouri counties may not adopt a building code at all: RSMo 64.170(1) empowers only "the county commission in all counties of the first and second classification." St. Francois is first classification, so it is one of the minority that may. It has not. Its own departmental index runs assessor, auditor, collector, commission, county clerk, elections, emergency management, information technology, public administrator, recorder of deeds, road and bridge and treasurer — no building department, no building official, no building commission, no planning or zoning office. That distinction is worth understanding before you buy: a third-classification county cannot adopt a code until its assessed valuation moves it up a class, whereas here the power exists and is simply unused. RSMo 64.170(2) sets the route if that ever changes — a county with no building code before 28 August 2001 needs voter approval, on a ballot reading "Shall ______ (insert name of county) have authority to create, adopt and impose a county building code?", and RSMo 64.170(3) says only voters in the affected area vote, so city residents do not decide it for the countryside.

RSMo 64.170, Title VI Chapter 64, Effective 28 Aug 2008, revisor.mo.gov, rendered and read 8 September 2026; RSMo 48.020, Effective 28 Aug 2026; Missouri Association of Counties, "Missouri Counties by Classification", published May 2025, mocounties.com/s/Missouri-Counties-by-Classification-2025.pdf, downloaded and read 8 September 2026; Saint Francois County departmental index, sfcgov.org, read 8 September 2026

The county's building permit is a tax form, and it says so on its face

St. Francois County does issue something called a building permit — but read what it is. It is a County Clerk form headed "RURAL BUILDING PERMIT, ST. FRANCOIS COUNTY" with a citation to Chapter 137 of the Revised Statutes of Missouri, which is Assessment and Levy of Property Taxes. It asks for the applicant's name and date, the location and directions to the property to be constructed, whether the use is residence, commercial, factory or other, the builder's name, the number of square feet, brick or frame, the acres or lots, the estimated cost of construction exclusive of land, and the estimated date of completion. The signature block reads COUNTY CLERK, ST. FRANCOIS COUNTY. RSMo 137.177, the only building-permit section in that chapter, describes exactly this instrument: the applicant files with the county clerk, the clerk "shall immediately prepare a building permit in the customary form and shall issue the same to the applicant" on payment, keeps a record, and every 1 January and 1 July "deliver to the county assessor a list of all building permits issued for the previous six-month period." There is no plan review, no inspection, no code edition and no design criteria anywhere in it. The county's own floodplain page prices it at $20.00 and states it is required for all new development before work begins.

St. Francois County Clerk form SFC-RURAL-BUILDING-PERMIT.pdf, county document server, page dated 26 May 2021, read from the Internet Archive capture of 10 May 2026; St. Francois County Forms & Permits page, sfcgov.org/county-clerk/forms-permits, Internet Archive captures of 19 April 2026 and 5 November 2024; St. Francois County Floodplain page, sfcgov.org/st-francois-county-floodplain, Internet Archive captures of 15 May 2026 and 9 October 2025; RSMo 137.177, Effective 28 Aug 1961, revisor.mo.gov, read 8 September 2026

Four cities in this county, four different answers on code

Cross a city limit here and the rules change — and they change four separate ways inside about eight miles. Farmington adopts the 2015 International Building Code and 2015 International Residential Code, with the 2015 Mechanical and 2015 Energy Conservation Codes, by Ordinance No. 15-11 of 18 December 2017. Park Hills adopts the 2012 International Building Code and 2012 International Residential Code by Ordinance No. 1063-14 of 11 February 2014. Desloge adopts the 2006 International Building Code and 2006 International Residential Code by Ordinance No. 2008.21 of 13 October 2008. Bonne Terre adopts no model building code at all — its Chapter 500 requires a permit, duplicate plans showing "the basic materials of which it is to be constructed", a site plan approved by a registered land surveyor on all new construction, and its only construction-standard article points at a state seismic statute. Three different code generations plus one city with none, and nothing whatever in the unincorporated county. Under RSMo 64.196 an adopting Missouri county may pick any nationally recognised edition published from 1999 onward, with no currency requirement and no state review, and cities under RSMo 89.020 are similarly free — so a twenty-year-old edition is not an oversight, it is the design of the system.

Farmington Municipal Code §§ 500.010, 500.060, 500.120, 500.180 (Ord. No. 15-11, 12-18-2017), ecode360.com/FA3296, code current through 01-08-2026, read 8 September 2026; Park Hills Municipal Code §§ 500.090, 500.340 (Ord. No. 1063-14, 2-11-2014), ecode360.com/PA3394, code current through 03-24-2026; Desloge City Code §§ 500.010, 500.110 (Ord. No. 2008.21, 10-13-2008), ecode360.com, code current through 11-10-2025; Bonne Terre Municipal Code ch. 500 arts. I–II (Ord. No. Z-3-90K, 12-14-1999, application amended by Ord. No. 201715, 6-12-2017)

Desloge publishes a 12-inch frost line. Farmington and Park Hills publish 30.

This is the sharpest practical difference in the county and it lands directly on your footings. Desloge's adopted Table R301.2(1), printed as Appendix B to its building-code chapter, gives a frost line depth of 12 inches, 20 psf ground snow, 90 mph wind, seismic design category D-O, weathering severe, termite moderate, decay slight to moderate, ice shield underlayment not required, air freezing index 500 and mean annual temperature 55–60. Farmington's filled-in Table R301.2(1) gives 30 inches, 20 psf, 115 mph, category D0, weathering severe, termite moderate to heavy, ice barrier not required, air freezing index under 1500 and mean annual temperature 55°F — and Farmington reinforces it with its own amendment at R403.1.4.1: "The frost line of the locality shall be thirty (30) inches below finish grade." Park Hills also inserts 30 inches, with 20 psf, 90 mph, category C, termite slight to moderate and air freezing index 750. Same county, two and a half times the footing depth depending on which side of a city line you are on. Design to the table of the jurisdiction that will actually issue your permit, and on unincorporated ground — where no table exists — design to the deepest figure your foundation contractor and the soil report will support.

Desloge City Code ch. 500 Attachment 2, Appendix B, Table R301.2(1) [R.O. 2001; Ord. No. 2008.21 §§1–2, 10-13-2008], publication August 2025, PDF downloaded twice and read 8 September 2026; Farmington Municipal Code § 500.130, Table R301.2(1) and § R403.1.4.1 amendment (Ord. No. 15-11, 12-18-2017), read and independently re-read 8 September 2026; Park Hills Municipal Code § 500.350, Table R301.2(1) insertions (Ord. No. 1063-14, 2-11-2014)

The Old Lead Belt: what it does and does not do to a build here

St. Francois County is the Old Lead Belt, and EPA Region 7 states the practical consequence plainly: mine waste, or chat, "has been manually relocated throughout the area as topsoil, fill material, and aggregate for roads, railroads, concrete, and asphalt across the county," and tailings were also spread as agricultural lime. The Big River Mine Tailings site is on the National Priorities List; EPA reports more than 5,100 residential properties tested and more than 1,475 cleaned up since work began in 2000, with cleanup meaning excavation of up to one foot of soil, more if lead stays above the action level, to a maximum of two feet, then replacement with clean soil and restoration of grade and lawn. Here is the part that matters to a landowner planning a build, and it is reassuring: none of that is a permit condition. There is no requirement in the county's permit, the health center's wastewater programme or the floodplain ordinance to test soil for lead before you build, no disturbance restriction, and no area where a house is prohibited on that account. What EPA does offer is testing at no cost to the property owner — "If your property has not been tested, and you would like to have your soil and/or groundwater analyzed" — and it is worth taking before you strip topsoil or import fill, because the fill itself is the historic pathway. Free childhood blood-lead testing is available at the St. Francois County Health Center, 1025 West Main Street, Park Hills, (573) 431-1947. Cleanup of the Big River and its floodplain is a separate, later stage: EPA states a proposed plan is still being developed and "a cleanup decision has not been selected at this time."

U.S. EPA Region 7, "Big River Mine Tailings National Priorities List (NPL) Superfund Site, St. Francois County, Missouri — Fact Sheet, August 2021", epa.gov/mo, page last updated 12 December 2025, rendered and read 8 September 2026; U.S. EPA Region 7, "Superfund National Priorities List (NPL) Sites Near Big River and Floodplain; St. Francois, Jefferson, and Washington Counties, Missouri — Fact Sheet, September 2021", epa.gov/mo, page last updated 12 December 2025

Septic is a county ordinance here, and it wants a soil morphology

The Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services county selector returns St Francois County Health Center, 1025 W. Main, PO Box 367, Park Hills, (573) 431-1947, with Authority Type: Ordinance — meaning the county administers its own on-site wastewater ordinance and "may have additional requirements beyond the state minimum construction standards," not the plain state programme. The health center's own wastewater page states that to construct a new system or make a major repair, "a Construction Permit Application, OWTS design plan, and soil morphology must be submitted to the Environmental Health Department," and that soil scientists and installers must be registered with DHSS. Note what that does not say: it does not say percolation test. 19 CSR 20-3.060(2)(D) allows either a percolation test or a soil morphology examination in a profile pit, and the administrative authority chooses — here the published requirement is the morphology. Because the authority runs on its own ordinance rather than the state baseline, do not assume RSMo 701.031's exclusion for single-family lots of three acres or more applies to your parcel; RSMo 701.047 expressly lets a county adopt standards more restrictive than the state's. Ask the health center about your acreage before you count on an exemption. DHSS also states that effective 28 August 2026, following changes to RSMo 701.046, the application fees for construction, modification and repair of on-site sewage systems are temporarily suspended.

Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services, OWTS Construction Permit Process, health.mo.gov/business-professionals/onsite-wastewater-treatment/owts-construction-permit-process?county=St.%20Francois, rendered and read 8 September 2026 (Camden run first as a known-good control); St. Francois County Health Center, Wastewater Treatment, sfchealth.org/services/environmental-health/waste-water-treatment, read 8 September 2026; RSMo 701.031 (Effective 28 Aug 2005) and RSMo 701.047 (Effective 28 Aug 1994), revisor.mo.gov

Also worth knowing before you build in St. Francois County

The floodplain ordinance is the county's one real construction rule: The county's Floodplain Management Ordinance No. 2011-01 had its first reading 1 February 2011, second reading 22 February 2011, and third reading and final approval 29 March 2011, and recites its authority as RSMo 49.600. The county states that under its agreement with FEMA it must "regulate building within the floodplain locations so that all new construction is elevated at least one (1) foot above the Base Flood Elevation." The building permit form itself asks "Is Site In Flood Plain? Yes / No" and warns that if yes, a Floodplain Development Permit is also needed. Flood maps can be viewed at the Floodplain Manager's office in the County Commissioners' Office, Annex Suite 301, Farmington. Eight communities in the county are in FEMA's Community Status Book with a current effective map date of 16 June 2011: unincorporated St. Francois County, Farmington, Park Hills, Desloge, Bonne Terre, Leadwood, Iron Mountain Lake — and Bismarck, which is listed as not participating and under sanction. If you are buying in or near Bismarck, that status decides whether federally backed flood insurance is available at all, and it is worth checking before you sign.
Fire districts: checked, and none of them is acting as a building department: This check matters in Missouri because a fire protection district is a separate route to construction regulation that has nothing to do with county classification: RSMo 321.220(12) lets a district board adopt fire ordinances whose standards may be industrial codes from nationally recognised trade bodies, and in some Missouri counties a district has become the only construction authority on the ground. Twelve fire organisations serve St. Francois County — among them Doe Run Fire Protection District, Leadwood Fire Protection District, Big River Fire Protection, Bismarck Rural Fire Protection Association, Wolf Creek Fire Protection Association, Terre Du Lac, Lake Timberline, Goose Creek Lake, and the Farmington, Park Hills, Desloge and Leadington municipal departments. Several of these are volunteer associations or municipal departments rather than Chapter 321 districts at all. None publishes an adopted residential or building code. There is also a limit written into the statute book: RSMo 321.228, effective 28 August 2012, provides that where a city, town, village or county "adopts or has adopted, implements, and enforces a residential construction regulatory system," fire districts inside it are "without power, authority, or privilege" to run one — the definition of that system expressly includes "any permitting system, or program relating to residential construction." Districts keep final authority over hydrant location and specification, hydrant flow rates and fire lanes, and may inspect the alteration, enlargement, replacement or repair of a one- or two-family dwelling, but may not charge a fee for either. Ask your district by name what it requires for access, hydrants and lane width — that part is real everywhere.
No metal-siding ban, no minimum roof pitch and no design review in Farmington's residential districts: Some Missouri jurisdictions prohibit exactly the exterior a steel or post-frame building is made of. Farmington's is not one of them. Its Zoning Regulations, Chapter 405, carry no prohibition on metal siding or metal roofing, no minimum roof pitch, no minimum eave projection, no architectural or appearance review board and no minimum dwelling floor area in the R-1 through R-7 residential districts or in the supplementary regulations; the dimensional standards are pushed out to tables of lot area, width, height and yards. Its building-code chapter carries none either. What Chapter 405 does regulate for a shop building is placement rather than looks: an accessory building may be built in a required rear yard but "shall not occupy more than thirty percent (30%) of a required rear yard," must stand at least five feet from any side or rear lot line or the width of any utility easement, whichever is greater, and if it sits closer than ten feet to the house it is treated as part of the house for setback purposes. There is no square-foot cap on it at all. Then there is the sequencing rule, which is the one that catches barndominium buyers: "No accessory building shall be constructed upon a lot until the construction of the main building has been actually commenced, and no accessory building shall be used for dwelling purposes unless the main building on the lot is also being used for dwelling purposes." Inside Farmington you cannot put up the shop, live in it, and build the house later.
Farmington's local amendments a steel building actually feels: Farmington does not adopt the 2015 IRC clean — its § 500.130 amendment list changes several things that bear directly on a metal-skinned building on open ground. R403.1.4.1 fixes the frost line at thirty inches below finish grade, citing the U.S. Weather Bureau and University of Missouri Extension. R405.1.1 requires "sixteen (16) total inches of one (1) inch or greater clean rock" for bedding and coverage on every concrete or masonry foundation drain, and permits Schedule 35 perforated pipe as an alternative. Section 1609.4.2 provides that wind surface roughness "shall be assumed to be Surface Roughness C unless sufficient information is submitted for the code official to determine that the site should be permitted to be classified as a different exposure category" — for a building sitting alone in a field, that is the realistic assumption anyway, and it is worth pricing in from the start. R105.2 exempts one-story detached accessory structures up to 120 square feet from a permit, and Park Hills sets the same exemption at 100 square feet. R302.13, fire protection of floors, and R303.4, mechanical ventilation, are both deleted. R313.2 is replaced with Missouri's builder-offers-sprinklers provision, under which a builder of one- to four-unit dwellings must offer the purchaser the option, at the purchaser's cost, of installing fire sprinklers.
Bonne Terre's only construction standard does not reach a house: Bonne Terre is a genuine oddity and worth knowing about if your land is on that side of the county. Its building chapter opens with Article I, Seismic Design, whose whole text is: "All construction in the City shall comply with the requirements of Sections 319.200 through 319.207, RSMo., and any amendments thereto, relating to earthquakes and seismic construction requirements." Read the statute it points at and the loop closes: RSMo 319.203.2 states those sections "shall not apply to" any private structure of less than ten thousand square feet in total area, or to "any single-family or duplex residence." So the city's one adopted construction standard, by the terms of the statute it adopts, does not reach a barndominium dwelling. What does apply is Bonne Terre's own permit machinery: no work may commence without a building permit from the Building Inspector, applications must come with duplicate plans showing size, location on the lot, "the basic materials of which it is to be constructed" and details of construction, all new construction plans must include a site plan approved by a registered land surveyor, and the fee is $10 for construction under $10,000 plus $1 per additional $1,000. Permits lapse if no work starts within six months or the work is unfinished after two years.
The ground: a fragipan on a quarter of the county, and rock is rarely the problem: "Ozarks" is not a soil report, and the measured answer here is not the one people expect. Across the 289,159 acres of the St. Francois County soil survey area, components carrying a lithic bedrock restriction within twenty inches of the surface account for about 12,700 acres — roughly 4% of the survey area. Within forty inches it is about 71,200 acres, near a quarter. The restriction that actually governs a footing here is not rock but a fragipan: about 78,300 acres, some 27% of the survey area, carry one, mapped between 41 and 91 centimetres — 16 to 36 inches — which is precisely the band Farmington's and Park Hills' thirty-inch frost line lands inside. The dominant soils split the county in two. Hildebrecht, Goss, Caneyville and Crider formed in loess over dolomite residuum on the carbonate side; Delassus, Jonca, Irondale and Syenite are the St. Francois Mountains, and their series descriptions are explicit — Syenite "formed in residuum from granite" with "boulders and stones" as a defining characteristic and bedrock at 20 to 40 inches, Irondale from residuum whose "parent rock is composed mostly of rhyolites and felsites," Delassus from loess over "residuum weathered from granite or similar igneous rocks." About 30% of the survey area sits in map units whose slope class starts at 15%. Get a site-specific soil investigation; on this ground the difference between two parcels a mile apart is real.
Old workings underfoot, and the free map that tells you where: Underground lead mining ran here from the 1700s to 1972 and left workings beneath a good deal of the county. The Missouri Department of Natural Resources puts the general hazard in one sentence: "What appears to be solid ground may only have a thin veneer of cover hiding an abandoned shaft, which could collapse under the weight of a person walking." The department maintains a Missouri Mine Map Repository whose database inventories more than 1,000 former and abandoned mines in the state, with maps available for download, and an Inventory of Mines, Occurrences and Prospects layer inside its GeoSTRAT web mapping application. Both are public and free. If you are buying acreage anywhere between Bonne Terre, Desloge, Park Hills, Leadwood and Doe Run, check them before you site the building, and tell whoever does your geotechnical work what you find — it is a cheap step that changes where a pad goes, not whether one can go there. The department's Land Reclamation Program takes reports of vertical openings and recent subsidence at 573-751-4041 or 800-361-4827.
The land here comes in the sizes a shop-and-house buyer wants: The 2022 Census of Agriculture counts 626 farms in St. Francois County holding 94,940 acres, against a county land area of 451.886 square miles. Average farm size is 152 acres, and the distribution is the useful part: 266 farms — 42% of them — are between 50 and 179 acres, another 196 are between 10 and 49 acres, and only 24 are 500 acres or more. Land in farms breaks down as 32,145 acres of pastureland, 29,514 of cropland, 26,835 of woodland and 6,446 other. That is a county of working smallholdings within commuting distance of St. Louis rather than one of large row-crop operations, which is exactly the parcel size a barndominium with a shop is built for.
Park Hills has adopted a tiny-home appendix out of a code it does not otherwise use: A small but genuinely unusual provision, and one nobody advertises. Park Hills runs the 2012 International Residential Code — but § 500.340.B separately adopts Appendix QA, Tiny Homes, of the 2021 International Residential Code, attached to Ordinance No. 1465-22 and held on file at the city offices. Appendix QA is the model code's purpose-built chapter for dwellings of 400 square feet or less, with its own rules on ceiling height, lofts, ladders and emergency escape. If a compact build is what you have in mind, Park Hills has already written the standard it will be judged against, and it is nine editions newer than the code around it.
Farmington's permit fees, published and per square foot: Farmington publishes its schedule rather than quoting on request, which makes budgeting straightforward inside the city. New construction or an addition is a $75 minimum, then $0.073 per square foot of total area, capped at $1,875. Alteration or change of use is a $50 minimum, then $0.052 per square foot, same cap. An accessory structure permit is $30, as are electrical and demolition permits, and a demolition also carries a $100 minimum refundable bond. A development permit is generally required for any land disturbance affecting one acre or more, and takes a stormwater pollution prevention plan, a stormwater management plan and a copy of the approved state land disturbance permit. Permit fees double if work has already started, under § 108.4 of the city's code. Outside the cities the comparison is stark: the county's own permit is $20.00 flat.
The county is named St. Francois. The river through it is the St. Francis.: Worth getting right, because it affects what you find when you search a flood map or a property record. The county's own floodplain page states that "St. Francois County is affected by two major rivers (St. Francis and Big River)" — the county spells its own name with the French -ois, the river runs as the St. Francis, and the two are pronounced the same locally. Most of the county drains north to the Big River, which runs on into Jefferson County; the far north-east corner drains toward the Mississippi; the south drains to the St. Francis. The county also lists Little St. Francis River, Doe Run Creek, Wolf Creek, Flat River, Owl Creek, Coonville Creek, Bee Creek, Terre Bleue Creek and Hazel Run among the smaller waters that have flooded in the past. If a search turns up St. Francis County, that is a different county in Arkansas, and Ste. Genevieve County is the neighbour to the east — three names that catch people out constantly.

Below the slab

The expensive surprises are in the ground, not the building

What moves a Missouri budget is usually below grade, and which problem you have depends on where in the state you are. Across the Ozarks it is karst: the Department of Natural Resources maps more than sixteen thousand sinkhole points, and what matters there is what is under the slab rather than what the slab sits in. Across the north and centre it is claypan — dense, slow-draining subsoil that perches water above it for months of the year. In the Bootheel it is deep alluvium carrying the highest seismic demand in the state, where the same soils modelled for liquefaction attack post embedment and slab bearing rather than the frame above them. The same ground then decides the septic system, and Missouri does not run that on a percolation test alone: the rule allows a perc test or a soil morphology examination in a profile pit, and the authority reviewing your parcel picks which. Where a drainfield sits near a sinkhole's drainage, perc testing on its own is not permitted at all. Whether that authority is the state or your own county is itself a local question, and it changes what you have to file. 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 St. Francois County

All nine services are available in St. Francois County. 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 your soil, and to whichever Missouri authority — a county, a city, or none at all — will review them.

Barndominium Kits

Barndominium shell packages delivered to your Missouri land, drawn to the criteria your own county or city publishes — because the state publishes none.

Turnkey Builds

Start to finish barndominium construction in Missouri: the permits that genuinely apply, site work, shell and interior finish, under one contract.

See all nine services

What a build looks like

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

Stage one

The parcel

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

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.

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 St. Francois County. Tell us what you want to build and we will draw it to them.

Start your project

Where we build around St. Francois County

St. Francois 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.

The St. Francois County 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 St. Francois 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 Missouri?

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, and they are not interchangeable. One may be a county with an adopted building code, another a county with no legal authority to have one, another a city that permits inside its own limits whichever county the land sits in. So the office that issues the permit, whether anyone inspects the work at all, the fees, the zoning and the design figures can differ from one card to the next — sometimes across a single property line.

Jefferson County

Franklin County

Building in St. Francois County: common questions

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

Start your project

Do I need a building permit to build a barndominium on land outside a city in St. Francois County?

Yes — but not the kind of permit most people picture. The county's own floodplain page states that all new development in the county must obtain a Building Permit before work begins, that it comes from the County Clerk's Office on the third floor of the County Court Annex at 1 West Liberty Street in Farmington, and that it costs $20.00. What that permit is not is a code-compliance permit. The form is headed to Chapter 137 of the Revised Statutes, Assessment and Levy of Property Taxes; it asks for square footage, acres, builder's name, estimated cost of construction exclusive of land and estimated completion date; and it is signed by the County Clerk. RSMo 137.177, the chapter's building-permit section, has the clerk issue it on payment, keep a record, and hand the county assessor a list of all permits issued every 1 January and 1 July. There is no plan review, no inspection, no adopted code edition and no design table behind it. If your site is in a regulated floodplain, a separate Floodplain Development Permit is also required from the same office. Call the Clerk at (573) 756-5411 to confirm what they need from you today.

Will anyone inspect the building?

The county will not — it has no building department and no building official. That is not the same as saying nobody will. Inside Farmington, Park Hills, Desloge and Bonne Terre the city inspects: Farmington has a building inspector and a published required-inspections list under § 500.290, Bonne Terre requires plans in duplicate and a surveyor-approved site plan before a permit issues, and each of the four runs its own permit system under RSMo 89.020. Your fire district may also have requirements about hydrants, hydrant flow and fire lane access — RSMo 321.228 preserves final authority over exactly those to fire protection districts even where a city or county regulates residential construction, and it is worth asking your district by name. And your lender and your insurer will each apply their own standards regardless of who inspects. On unincorporated ground the practical answer is that the quality of the build rests on the specification you agree and the third-party inspections you choose to commission, so it is worth writing them into the contract rather than assuming a public official will catch things.

Is the lead contamination going to stop me building here?

No. There is no requirement anywhere in the county's permit, the health center's wastewater programme or the floodplain ordinance to test soil for lead before you build, no restriction on disturbing ground, and no area of the county where a house is prohibited on that account. What is true is that EPA Region 7 states mine waste, or chat, "has been manually relocated throughout the area as topsoil, fill material, and aggregate for roads, railroads, concrete, and asphalt across the county" — so the material can be present in fill and in imported aggregate as well as in native soil. EPA offers testing at no cost to the property owner, and its residential programme has tested more than 5,100 properties and cleaned up more than 1,475 since 2000, excavating up to one foot of soil, and further if lead remains above the action level, to a maximum of two feet. The sensible sequence is to ask EPA to test before you strip topsoil or bring fill in, so you know what you are moving. Free childhood blood-lead testing is available at the St. Francois County Health Center in Park Hills at (573) 431-1947. EPA's separate work on the Big River and its floodplain is still at the investigation stage; the agency states a cleanup decision has not been selected.

How deep do my footings have to go?

It depends on which side of a city line you are on, and the spread inside this county is unusually wide. Desloge's adopted Table R301.2(1) prints a frost line depth of 12 inches. Farmington's prints 30 inches, and Farmington backs it with its own code amendment at R403.1.4.1 stating that the frost line of the locality "shall be thirty (30) inches below finish grade," citing the U.S. Weather Bureau and University of Missouri Extension. Park Hills also inserts 30 inches. On unincorporated ground no authority publishes a figure at all, because there is no adopted table to publish one in. Separately from frost, the soil survey matters here: a fragipan is mapped on roughly 27% of the survey area at 16 to 36 inches, which is the same band those thirty-inch footings sit in, and the igneous soils of the St. Francois Mountains — Syenite, Irondale, Delassus — carry boulders and stone as a defining characteristic. Get a site-specific soil investigation and have a Missouri-licensed professional engineer seal the foundation design; that is money well spent on this ground whether or not a city will be checking the drawings.

Can I build the shop first and live in it while I build the house?

Inside Farmington, no. Its zoning code § 405.230.A states that "no accessory building shall be constructed upon a lot until the construction of the main building has been actually commenced, and no accessory building shall be used for dwelling purposes unless the main building on the lot is also being used for dwelling purposes." That is an explicit bar on the shop-first sequence. Outside the cities the county publishes no zoning ordinance, so no county rule stands in the way — but three other things still do. The health center's on-site wastewater permit follows the design plan and soil morphology you submit, so occupancy has to match what the system was sized for. Your lender is likely to have views about occupying an unfinished structure. And if your parcel is in a regulated floodplain, occupied floor elevation is governed by the county's ordinance, which requires new construction one foot above base flood elevation. If the shop-first plan matters to you, confirm the zoning position for your specific address before you buy, because the answer changes at every city limit.

Are metal walls and a metal roof allowed here?

In the places checked, yes. Farmington's Zoning Regulations, Chapter 405, carry no prohibition on metal siding or metal roofing, no minimum roof pitch, no minimum eave projection, no architectural or appearance review and no minimum dwelling floor area in its residential districts or its supplementary regulations, and its building-code chapter carries none either. The unincorporated county publishes no zoning ordinance at all, so no material restriction applies there. This is worth checking rather than assuming, because some Missouri jurisdictions do prohibit exactly this exterior — and the restriction, where it exists, is usually written into a zoning district or a subdivision's own covenants rather than the building code. Which brings up the one restriction that genuinely does bite in this county: recorded subdivision covenants. Terre du Lac, Lake Timberline, Iron Mountain Lake and other platted developments here run private covenants and architectural committees that are entirely independent of any public code, and they can and do restrict materials, minimum floor area and outbuildings. Read the recorded restrictions for your specific plat at the Recorder of Deeds before you commit to a design.

What about septic — is my parcel exempt if it's over three acres?

Do not assume so. RSMo 701.031 does exclude the owner of a single-family residence lot of three acres or more from the state on-site sewage programme, subject to setbacks and no discharge crossing a property line. But that is the state programme, and St. Francois County does not run the state programme. The Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services lists the St. Francois County Health Center as an Ordinance authority — the county's own rules — and states that such a county "may have additional requirements beyond the state minimum construction standards." RSMo 701.047 expressly permits that: "Nothing in sections 701.025 to 701.059 shall be construed so as to prohibit any city or county from adopting minimum standards which are more restrictive than the standards adopted by the state." Neighbouring Missouri counties have used that power to reach parcels well above three acres. So ask the health center directly at (573) 431-1947 what applies at your acreage. What is published is the process: a construction permit application, an on-site wastewater treatment system design plan, and a soil morphology — carried out by a soil scientist registered with the state, not a percolation test — must all be submitted before a permit issues. DHSS also states that effective 28 August 2026 the application fees for construction, modification and repair are temporarily suspended.

Which code edition will my build be designed to?

There is no single answer for this county, and that is the honest and useful reply. Unincorporated St. Francois County has adopted no building code, so there is no edition and no design table there — a designer works from current model-code practice and from what the ground and your lender require, not from an enforceable local standard. Inside the cities, Farmington runs the 2015 International Building and Residential Codes under Ordinance No. 15-11 of 18 December 2017, Park Hills the 2012 editions under Ordinance No. 1063-14 of 11 February 2014, Desloge the 2006 editions under Ordinance No. 2008.21 of 13 October 2008, and Bonne Terre adopts no model building code at all. Under RSMo 64.196 an adopting Missouri county may choose any nationally recognised edition published from 1999 onward, with no obligation to keep current and no state review, and cities are similarly free — so an old edition is a lawful local choice rather than an oversight, and editions here do get revisited. Confirm the current edition with the permitting office for your address before drawings are finalised: Farmington's Development Services Department is at 101 South Jefferson Street, (573) 756-0608.

Is this earthquake country?

Enough to matter to the design, though far less than the Missouri Bootheel. The USGS seismic design service returns, for ASCE 7-16 at Risk Category II and Site Class C, Ss 0.579 g and S1 0.216 g at Farmington, 0.540 and 0.204 at Park Hills, 0.533 and 0.201 at Desloge, and 0.516 and 0.195 at Bonne Terre — seismic design category D at the first three and C at Bonne Terre. The cities' own adopted tables do not entirely agree with that: Farmington prints D0, Desloge prints D-O, and Park Hills prints C. Both sets of figures belong in the conversation. The adopted one governs a permit inside city limits; the federal one is what a designer would work from where nothing is adopted. Site class is decided parcel by parcel and cannot be read off any map, which is another reason the soil investigation earns its cost. Note also that Missouri's own seismic statute, RSMo 319.200 to 319.207, does not reach a house: § 319.203.2 excludes any private structure under ten thousand square feet and "any single-family or duplex residence." That exclusion is why Bonne Terre's adoption of those sections, which is its only construction-standard article, does not in fact set a standard for a dwelling.

Building in St. Francois County?

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