Overland Park, KS Building Safety: Fire Sprinkler Requirements (2026)

The Overland Park Municipal Code adopts the International Residential Code (IRC) for One- and Two-Family Dwellings with local amendments codified at Chapter 16.110 of Title 16, Building Regulations. Section 16.110.R313 states plainly that Section R313 of the International Residential Code for One- and Two-Family Dwellings is hereby deleted. That deletion, first enacted by Ordinance BC-2936 Section 40 in 2012 and carried forward by Ordinance BC-3286 Section 57 in 2020, strips out the IRC's automatic residential fire sprinkler mandate for detached one- and two-family houses and townhouses built under the IRC. No square-footage trigger, no unit-count trigger and no hydrant-distance trigger brings sprinklers back into play under this chapter; the requirement simply does not exist in the local code.

The absence of R313 still shows up elsewhere in the code. Section R302.13, governing fire protection of floors, lets a builder skip the usual gypsum wallboard or wood structural panel membrane under an unprotected floor when the space is protected by automatic fire sprinklers, and even then allows the sprinkler branch line to run on a domestic water line rather than a dedicated fire main. Sprinklers remain an available design option and even a shortcut around other fire-protection requirements, but they are never mandatory for a single-family or two-family permit application.

Multi-family and commercial construction sit under a different chapter entirely: the amended International Building Code at Title 16.300 imposes its own automatic sprinkler and standpipe rules in Sections 903 and 905, with control-valve, supervision and alarm requirements that explicitly carve out automatic sprinkler systems protecting one- and two-family dwellings from the electronic supervision mandate in Section 903.4.1. That carve-out confirms the same policy line: residential sprinklers are optional, commercial and multi-family sprinkler systems are not.