Pennsylvania Ground Snow Load by County and City

Pennsylvania sets no ground snow load at state level, so every figure comes from a county or city building department. Three figures from Pennsylvania counties and cities are set out below, each with the ordinance or code amendment it was printed in. 19 states work this way, which is why a search for one Pennsylvania figure comes back with several different answers from several different pages, all of them correct for the place they were written for. three Pennsylvania figures, running from 25 Pounds per Square Foot at Township of Findlay to 30 psf at East Donegal Township, every one of them quoted from the document it was printed in. Nationally 235 figures were read across 33 states.

The building code official of the municipality where the work is: the number is written into the code's design criteria table locally, most often by municipal ordinance. In its own words: “Pursuant to UCC Section 403.102(I), the following regulations are hereby enacted to facilitate municipal administration and enforcement of the UCC, including insertion of local climatic and geographic information.”

The figure is keyed to the county in Pennsylvania, as it is in 21 states, so the county line rather than the town line is what changes the answer. The published Pennsylvania figures run from 25 Pounds per Square Foot to 30 psf.

Department of Labor and Industry adopts Uniform Construction Code (2018 I Code series). Pennsylvania adopted it as written. The adopting rule reads: “The revised regulations adopting the 2018 I Code series as reviewed and amended by the Review and Advisory Council (RAC) have an effective date of February 14, 2022.”

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. The building code official of the municipality where the work is works in loads for that reason, and so does every figure set out below.

A Pennsylvania figure for an address the documents below do not cover comes from the building code official of the municipality where the work is. The document behind it is CHAPTER 403. ADMINISTRATION, published by Department of Labor and Industry, read on September 23, 2026. It establishes the point this way: “A building code official shall determine the climatic and geographic design criteria contained in Table R301.2(1) of the ''International Residential Code'' for residential construction.”

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.