Utah County, UT Building Setbacks & Zoning: Lot Coverage Limits (2026)

12's Special Requirements for the RR-5 Rural Residential Zone cap the footprint of non-dwelling buildings: all buildings, with the exception of a dwelling, may not exceed a maximum Lot Building coverage of fifteen percent (15%), with coverage counted as any building area covered by a roof or roof structure. In practice this means barns, sheds, greenhouses, farm-machinery storage structures and residential accessory buildings, all separately listed as permitted uses in the zone, are combined and measured against 15% of the lot area, while the house itself is not counted toward that ceiling.

The RR-5 zone's minimum lot size for a single-family dwelling is five acres, so on a typical five-acre parcel the 15% cap allows roughly 32,670 square feet of combined outbuilding roof area, a generous figure driven by the zone's agricultural character of pasturing livestock, keeping fowl, and growing crops. The same Special Requirements section also requires yards to stay free of debris and flammable material, caps driveway grade at 12%, and limits cut-and-fill slopes to the soil's critical angle of repose absent an engineered retaining structure.

Utah County's neighboring RA-5 Residential Agricultural Zone, by contrast, does not carry this same 15% Lot Building coverage cap in its own Special Requirements, so the limit is a distinctive feature of the RR-5 zone rather than a blanket unincorporated-county standard. The Utah County Community Development Department's Zoning Administrator reviews proposed accessory structures for compliance with the coverage limit as part of building permit issuance.