Cave Creek Residential Building Permit Requirements: What You File and the Steps

You cannot pour a footing or frame a wall on a new home in the Town of Cave Creek until the Town issues a building permit. The permit is the Town's sign-off that your plans meet the adopted codes, your zoning, and your site conditions. The Town's Development Services Department, through its Building and Fire Code Compliance Division, handles this for any lot inside town limits. This page walks the real steps: what you gather, how you submit it, how the Town reviews it, and what it takes to get the permit in hand.

What a residential permit requires

Cave Creek runs new-home permits through an online portal, not over the counter. The Town moved to paperless permitting and now requires digital submittals. A complete residential package comes together from these pieces:

• A site plan, drawn to scale and legible, showing the house on the lot with setbacks (the required distance from each property line) called out. The Town publishes a residential site plan review worksheet to guide this.
• Your construction plans, drawn to the Town's adopted 2024 I-codes, for framing, electrical, plumbing, mechanical, and energy.
• Your other required documents for the project type, submitted as digital files through the portal.
• Your parcel number, owner and property information, and contact details.
• Your project's lot coverage and zoning information for your district, since the permit also confirms the build fits the zoning.

The Town describes the division's job directly:

The Building and Fire Code Compliance Division ensures quality construction for the Town's residents by regulating building construction and building occupancy.

A package that is incomplete or a site plan that is not to scale gets handed back before review, which costs you days. If you cannot digitize a sheet yourself, the Town charges a per-sheet fee to scan it for you, so it is cheaper to submit clean digital files.

How review and issuance work

After you submit through the online permitting portal, the Building and Fire Code Compliance Division reviews your plans for compliance with the adopted Town codes and your zoning. A Town representative also decides during plan review whether a site inspection is needed. If corrections are required, you fix the sheets and resubmit through the portal. When the plans clear and the permit fees are paid, the permit issues, and you schedule inspections through the same system. The Town's published fee schedule sets what you owe.

Here is a real example. Suppose you submit a 2,800 square foot custom home in Cave Creek, with a site plan that shows the house too close to the front property line for your zoning district. Staff flags the setback in review. You shift the footprint or seek relief, then resubmit. That single correction round can add a week or two before the permit issues, which is why the site plan setbacks are worth getting right the first time. A plan started under the prior 2021 code cycle is reviewed case by case, so a current 2024-code set moves faster.

When this comes into play

This process governs the front end of every Cave Creek build:

• Build-on-your-lot. Your designer assembles the site plan and engineered documents, you submit through the online portal, and the review clock runs through any correction rounds before the permit issues.
• Septic and well first. A rural Cave Creek lot often has no Town sewer or water. Your septic approval and your private well run on a separate track through Maricopa County and the state, not the Town, and the two have to line up on the same site plan before you build.
• Zoning fit. The permit confirms your home meets the Town zoning for your district, including setbacks and lot coverage. A design that overbuilds the lot or crowds a property line gets caught here, before construction.

What this means for you

Budget for the permit as a real line item, and prepare clean digital files, because the Town no longer takes paper plans. Get the site plan to scale and the setbacks right the first time, because a setback problem is one of the most common reasons a residential plan gets corrected. Draw the set to Cave Creek's current 2024 I-codes, not a neighboring jurisdiction's edition, so review does not stall on a wrong-code sheet. Build review and correction time into your schedule rather than assuming the permit is instant. On a rural lot, line up your septic and well work in parallel, since the Town building permit alone does not give you water or wastewater. When the home passes its final inspections, the Town issues the certificate of occupancy that lets you legally move in.

This entry sits next to the codes in the Cave Creek module. The standards your plans are checked against are listed in Cave Creek Adopted Building Codes . If your lot is on septic or a private well, the water and wastewater side follows the county, covered in Maricopa County Septic and Well Requirements for a New Home . For the full picture of a custom build, see the steps to building a custom home in Arizona .

Source

The division's role, the paperless permitting requirement, and the adopted codes are published by the Town of Cave Creek: Building and Fire Code Compliance on cavecreekaz.gov and Development Services . The site plan worksheet and zoning resources are at Building Permit Zoning Information . The codes your plans are reviewed against are adopted in Cave Creek Town Code Chapter 151: Building Regulations .

This page is general information, not a substitute for the Town's current applications and checklists. Submittal items, fees, and timelines change, so confirm the live requirements with the Town of Cave Creek Development Services Department before you file.