Utah Ground Snow Load by County and Town

Utah publishes its own table of ground snow loads, 15A-3-202 Amendments to Chapters 1 through 5 of IRC, TABLE R301.2 (3) GROUND SNOW LOADS FOR SELECTED LOCATIONS IN UTAH, through Utah Code, Title 15A, Chapter 3, Statewide Amendments Incorporated as Part of State Construction Code. twelve of its published figures are set out below with the row each was read from. Only 14 states out of 50 publish anything of their own like it; the other 36 send a reader either to the national code or to a county counter. twelve Utah figures, running from 21 lb/ft2 at St. George to 67 lb/ft2 at Monticello, every one of them quoted from the document it was printed in. Nationally 235 figures were read across 33 states.

The Authority Having Jurisdiction (the local building department), under the Utah State Construction Code: the statewide table is the floor and the local jurisdiction may require more. In its own words: “1. Statutory requirements of the Authority Having Jurisdiction are not included in this state ground snow load table.”

Part of Utah 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: “2. For locations where there is substantial change in altitude over the city/town, the load applies at and below the cited elevation, with a tolerance of 100 ft (30 m). 3. For other locations in Utah, see Bean, B., Maguire, M., Sun, Y. (2018), "The Utah Snow Load Study," Utah State University Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications, Paper 3589, http://utahsnowload.usu.edu/, for ground snow load values.”

The figure moves with elevation in Utah, 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. The published Utah figures run from 21 lb/ft2 to 67 lb/ft2.

Utah State Legislature, Utah Code Title 15A, State Construction and Fire Codes Act adopts International Residential Code (2021 edition). Utah amended it rather than adopting it whole, and 22 states have done the same. The adopting rule reads: “the 2021 edition of the International Residential Code, issued by the International Code Council;”

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 Authority Having Jurisdiction (the local building department), under the Utah State Construction Code works in loads for that reason, and so does every figure set out below.

The Utah document itself is the place to look a town up, and what it prints is applied by the Authority Having Jurisdiction (the local building department), under the Utah State Construction Code. The document behind it is 15A-3-202 Amendments to Chapters 1 through 5 of IRC, TABLE R301.2 (3) GROUND SNOW LOADS FOR SELECTED LOCATIONS IN UTAH, published by Utah Code, Title 15A, Chapter 3, Statewide Amendments Incorporated as Part of State Construction Code, read on September 23, 2026. It establishes the point this way: “IRC, Figure R301.2 (3), is deleted and replaced with R301.2 (3) as follows: "TABLE R301.2 (3) GROUND SNOW LOADS FOR SELECTED LOCATIONS IN UTAH"”

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.