Arlington Heights, IL Building Setbacks & Zoning: Setback Rules (2026)

3, Required Minimum Yards, governs the R-3 District, the Village's mid-size single-family zone. The front yard is generally 25 feet, but where a building line was recorded on a subdivision plat before December 21, 1959, that older line controls instead. Where 40 percent or more of the frontage between two intersecting streets is already built with front yards deeper than 15 feet, the average of those existing yards becomes the required minimum for the whole block, though the code caps that averaged front yard at 40 feet and floors it at 15 feet on every lot.

The side yard is ten percent of lot width, with a floor of seven feet on any subdivision recorded after January 1, 2003. Corner lots carry an added exterior side yard requirement of ten percent of lot width, with a ten-foot minimum and a 40-foot maximum. The rear yard is a flat 30 feet, with no averaging or width-based formula. 3, showing that setback distances shrink as district density rises from R-1 through R-3. 6-4 locks it in going forward for any building existing on January 1, 2003, so an owner cannot shrink an established yard on a remodel below the current code minimum for equivalent new construction.