Salt Lake County, UT Fence Regulations: Retaining Walls (2026)

Salt Lake County's grading standards for the Foothills and Canyons Overlay Zone actively encourage retaining walls, because a well-placed wall reduces the steepness of man-made slopes instead of stretching long cut-and-fill scars across a hillside lot. The code then offers builders two configurations. The first is a single vertical retaining wall, permitted up to eight feet in height, expressly to reduce excavation and embankment. H limits to two walls with a maximum vertical height of six feet each. Terracing also carries a minimum one-to-one terrace width-to-wall-height ratio, so the bench between stacked walls must be at least as wide as the wall is tall; a six-foot wall needs a terrace at least six feet deep before the next wall can rise behind it.

That ratio keeps two terraced walls from functioning as one oversized wall. Appearance is regulated too: walls must be faced with stone or earth-colored materials so they blend into the foothill rather than reading as bare structure. Structurally, all retaining walls must comply with the minimum standards of the International Building Code, and nothing can be built until the county's development services engineer approves a grading and excavation plan.