Oregon Ground Snow Load: What the Adopted Code Carries

Oregon adopts the national building code without a ground snow load amendment of its own, so the governing figure for a given address is the one the code's own table carries, and the body that applies it is Building Codes Division, State of Oregon. 17 states are in the same position, which makes it the second commonest arrangement in the country. Oregon publishes ground snow loads through Building Codes Division, State of Oregon, and the jurisdictions reached for this had put none into a public document at the time they were read.

Building Codes Division, State of Oregon: the division points every site at a coordinate lookup rather than a table. In its own words: “The Oregon Design Criteria Hub is an interactive mapping tool that provides site-specific climatic and geographic design criteria for construction projects governed by the Oregon Residential Specialty Code (ORSC) and the Oregon Structural Specialty Code (OSSC).”

Part of Oregon is a case study area, meaning the published document expressly declines to give those places a figure and sends the designer back to the local building department for one. 16 states carry a rule like this, and it is the commonest reason a search for a single number comes back empty. The rule reads: “The 2025 OSSC requires use of the ASCE 7 Hazard Tool (set to ASCE 7-22 version to match the 2025 OSSC) or the Oregon Design Criteria Hub (2025 OSSC application) to determine the site-specific ground snow load based on the assigned Risk Category of the structure.”

The figure moves with elevation in Oregon, which is the hardest case for a reader: two houses a mile apart and a thousand feet apart take different numbers, and 13 states are keyed this way.

Building Codes Division, State of Oregon adopts Oregon Structural Specialty Code (2025). Oregon amended it rather than adopting it whole, and 22 states have done the same. The adopting rule reads: “The 2025 OSSC is based on the 2024 International Building Code (IBC) and ASCE 7-22 Minimum Design Loads and Associated Criteria for Buildings and Other Structures.”

A ground snow load is a weight per unit area and not a depth, and the two are joined only by the density of the snow on the day, which is why the published documents give the load and leave the depth out. Wet spring snow and dry January snow of the same depth are different weights on the same roof. Building Codes Division, State of Oregon works in loads for that reason, and so does every figure set out below.

The code's figure is applied to a given address by Building Codes Division, State of Oregon. The document behind it is BCD Technical Bulletin: Comprehensive Design Snow Load Changes in the 2025 OSSC, published by Building Codes Division, State of Oregon, read on September 23, 2026. It establishes the point this way: “The 2025 OSSC adopts ASCE 7-22, replacing Oregon's legacy SEAO snow load map with a national, risk-targeted, digitally mapped ground snow load database, which fundamentally changes how ground snow loads are determined.”

14 of 50: Connecticut, Indiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, New Hampshire, New Jersey, North Carolina, Rhode Island, Utah, Vermont, Wisconsin. The other 36 split into 17 that adopt the national code without a snow amendment and 19 that leave every figure to a county or city building department. That is the single most useful fact about this subject and no one state's own website carries it.