Bannock County, ID Building Safety: Fire Sprinkler Requirements (2026)

Bannock County adopted the 2018 International Residential Code (IRC) as its building code for the unincorporated area, then amended it section by section under Chapter 15.04. Two of those amendments deal directly with automatic fire sprinklers. First, the county deleted Section R313.2, the IRC provision that would have required an automatic residential fire sprinkler system in every new one- and two-family dwelling. That deletion means no county building permit for a single-family or duplex home in unincorporated Bannock County requires a fire sprinkler system as a condition of the IRC.

Second, the county kept the townhouse sprinkler rule at Section R313.1 but rewrote its exception: a townhouse is exempt from the automatic sprinkler mandate if the dwelling units are separated by either two one-hour fire-resistance-rated walls or a single common two-hour fire-resistance-rated wall built to item 2 of Section R302.2.2, or if the work is an addition or alteration to an existing townhouse that was never built with a sprinkler system. A builder who wants to avoid installing sprinklers in a new townhouse row must therefore build to one of those two wall configurations rather than relying on the base IRC exception.

Planning and Development Services reviews building permit applications for compliance with these fire-and-life-safety provisions before a permit issues, and inspectors verify wall assemblies against the approved plans during framing inspection.