Portsmouth, VA Building Safety: Elevator Maintenance (2026)

Section 7-136 lays out a tiered, ongoing inspection schedule for vertical transportation equipment rather than a one-time permit check. Every covered elevator, dumbwaiter, moving stairway, moving walk and manlift gets a six-month inspection, and hydraulic elevators specifically get an annual hydraulic inspection while traction elevators get an annual traction inspection, reflecting that the two mechanisms fail differently and need different annual checks. On top of the annual cycle, the code layers a three-year inspection and a five-year inspection, both more thorough than the routine six-month visit.

New equipment does not skip straight into that cycle: it must pass an acceptance test for new construction before it goes into service. Each of these inspection tiers carries its own processing fee plus the inspection fee itself, both set in appendix A to the Code. Reinspections are billed differently than every other trade in the building code: § 7-101 specifically exempts elevator work from its standard reinspection fee, and § 7-136 confirms that a reinspection carries no additional processing fee, so an elevator owner who fails an inspection pays only the reinspection fee itself the second time around, not a second processing charge.