What the word names in Virginia, and how narrow it is
Virginia's inspections section is Section 113.3 of the Uniform Statewide Building Code, codified at 13VAC5-63-130, and the footing inspection is item 1 on its list. What the item covers is narrower than most people picture: the excavation and the reinforcement material, looked at before concrete arrives. Nothing in the Virginia wording asks for the steel to be tied, names grade stakes, or mentions forms. The readiness standard is left with the building official, which is one reason a pour date follows the phone call rather than the other way around.
North Carolina's administrative rules are far more prescriptive about the same moment, and the contrast is the useful part. Where Virginia names the excavation and the reinforcement material and then stops, the North Carolina text also wants the grade stakes set, the steel and its supports tied rather than merely present, and all necessary forms in place and braced, all of it ahead of the truck. That requirement reads the same in the 2018 edition in force and in the 2024 edition that is adopted and not yet effective, but the two editions do not number the inspections identically, which is why the inspection gets named out loud on a North Carolina job rather than cited by item number. What North Carolina does instead quotes it in full.
The duty to notify sits on one named person
Section 113.1.2 is two lines long and it settles the argument that starts on most job sites. The duty to tell the building official that a stage is ready belongs to the permit holder. Not the contractor by job title, not the owner by title, but whichever name the permit was issued in. Section 113.1.1 loads that same person with whatever ladder, scaffolding or test equipment the inspection turns out to need. On a garage somebody permitted for themselves, both of those are theirs.
That is a code fact rather than a sales line, and it is exactly why the name of the person making the call belongs in writing before the pour. We pour footings, and when the placement needs a pump we run it with our own trailer line pump on 2.5 and 3 inch hose, and where another crew subs the pumping, we do the pumping for them. None of that makes the concrete crew the permit holder. The name on the permit decides that. When the call goes in, and what a county does or does not publish about getting somebody out to you, are the scheduling question rather than the definition, and that page carries them.
What comes back, and what the code leaves unwritten
Section 113.6 gives the official two moves and no third: approve the work in writing, or serve written notice of defective work on the permit holder. Ask, and that notice has to name the code section the defect rests on. Defects get fixed and looked at again before anything goes on top of them that would hide them.
Approval is the whole point of the exercise. Under Section 113.1, repeating the enabling statute at Code of Virginia 36-105(B), nothing is treated as complying until the inspecting authority has approved it. A footing poured ahead of its inspection has not had that approval, and building over the top of it does not supply it.
The Virginia code is also silent in a direction people assume it speaks. It carries no sequencing sentence of the kind the model building code carries, because Virginia does not adopt Chapter 1 of the model code at all, and nothing found in its administrative chapters gives an inspector the power to order covered work opened back up. That is an absence, not a rule against it, and silence is not permission either. The code does name what the building official can reach for. Section 114.1 says that when the building official finds work "is being executed contrary to the provisions of this code or any pertinent laws or ordinances, or in a manner endangering the general public, a written stop work order may be issued," and Section 115.2 says the official "shall issue a written notice of violation to the permit holder" if violations, or the official's directives or orders, are not corrected or complied with within a reasonable time. How those get used on a footing that went in uninspected is a conversation with your building official, better had before the pour than after it. The Virginia permit guide takes that further.
The names this inspection has, and one it does not have in Virginia
The list runs seven items and they are not consecutive on a concrete job. The footing is first. The foundation system is second, inspected "during phases of construction necessary to ensure compliance with this code." The third is the one that catches slabs, and its wording is about preparatory work ahead of concrete rather than about slabs at all.
Virginia's third item reads "Inspection of preparatory work prior to the placement of concrete," and we found no under slab inspection by that name anywhere on Virginia's list. Under slab inspection is North Carolina's phrase for a stage of its own, and using it on a Virginia job puts a term in the building official's mouth that the Virginia code does not use.
The list also carries a qualifier that gets dropped in the retelling. These are minimum inspections, required where they apply to the particular construction or permit, and whether one applies to your job is decided at the permit desk rather than by you. Ask there. Our footings and foundations page covers how we build up to that moment.