One code for the whole state, and it is a regulation
This is not a book the General Assembly passed and it is not anybody's town ordinance. It is an administrative regulation, filed in the Virginia Administrative Code at 13VAC5-63, under Virginia's Department of Housing and Community Development, DHCD for short. That is where Virginia's own words sit, free to read: its administrative chapter and its changes to the model text. Much of the technical text is not printed there, though. Section 101.2 says Chapters 2 through 35 of the 2021 International Building Code "are adopted and incorporated by reference to be an enforceable part of the USBC," and the residential rules come in by reference the same way, so a rule missing from 13VAC5-63 can still be Virginia's building code.
Statewide means what it sounds like. Section 36-98 of the Code of Virginia is the provision that puts this code over local building regulation, which is why a footing outside Hillsville answers to the same rulebook as a footing up in Independence. It is not one flat sentence, though. The same section also has the code supersede local ordinances for single-family construction that regulate dwelling foundations or crawl spaces, require specific building materials or finishes, or require a minimum window area or number of windows, and that sentence carries its own limit: "however, such Code shall not supersede proffered conditions accepted as a part of a rezoning application," nor conditions attached to special exceptions, special or conditional use permits or variances, nor certain local flood plain regulations, among others. If your job is one where that matters, the county's planning or zoning office is the desk that knows.
A county or a town does not write this code. It administers it, and those are two different jobs. The difference is the whole reason the permits section is about offices, process and who to ring rather than about what the rules themselves say.
Virginia adopts the model books and then writes its own front chapter
Virginia does not draft a building code from nothing. It takes the International Code Council's model codes and amends them. What it does not take is the model administration. Section 101.4 of the USBC says Chapter 1 of the IBC is not incorporated as part of the USBC, and Section 101.7 says model provisions that "address the same subject matter and impose differing requirements are deleted and replaced by the provisions of Chapter 1," unless Virginia's own Chapter 1 or its amendments specifically identify them as valid. Permits, inspections and enforcement therefore come out of Virginia's own first chapter, written into 13VAC5-63 itself.
That one piece of structure is worth more to a homeowner than it sounds. It means a rule quoted out of Chapter 1 of the model IBC is the wrong source for a Virginia permit rule or a Virginia enforcement rule, however confidently it gets quoted, because that chapter is not part of the USBC. Two of them turn up over and over. One is the much repeated line about not carrying work past a successive inspection until the official signs off, which is model wording and is not in the Virginia text. The other is the heading Approval required, which belongs to Chapter 1 of the model IBC and appears nowhere in Virginia's code either. What that absence means for a footing poured ahead of its inspection is worked through on the page about how footing inspections are scheduled.
Be suspicious of that pattern wherever you meet it, this page included. The test is short. If somebody quotes you a Virginia permit, inspection or penalty rule with a Chapter 1 section number off a model code, they are reading the wrong book. Ask where the rule sits. It may be in 13VAC5-63, in an ICC book the code adopts by reference, in the Code of Virginia, or in a local ordinance the code allows, the way Section 115.1 says "Any locality may adopt an ordinance that establishes a uniform schedule of civil penalties" for violations of specified provisions of the code that are not abated or remedied promptly after a notice of violation. If the person quoting it cannot point to one of those, take the question to your building official before you act on it.
Where Virginia changes the model text, and where it hands the number back
The Virginia amendments to the residential side of the code are nested inside one section, 13VAC5-63-210 at subsection R, and that is where to look when somebody tells you the rules here are different. A worked example a Blue Ridge crew runs into is Section 310.8 item 3, which, for localities in special wind regions, near mountainous terrain and near gorges, sets the ultimate design wind speed by elevation: 140 mph at 4,000 feet and above, 110 mph below that line, with gorge areas handled separately. That split is the state's own rule rather than a county invention, and it is why two sites at different elevations inside one county can be held to different figures.
The code also runs the other way in places, declining to supply a number and telling the locality to supply it. The frost line depth cell in the residential climatic table is the one that reaches a concrete crew every week: Virginia prints that column for the jurisdiction to fill in rather than filling it in itself. How that plays out from one jurisdiction to the next is set out under frost depth and footing codes, and what it does to a trench sits on the footings side of the work.
One naming point that saves a phone call. The part of the USBC that covers detached one and two family houses and townhouses, up to three stories above grade plane with a separate means of egress, along with their accessory structures, is the Virginia Residential Code, and the section numbers that begin with an R come out of it. It is not a second code competing with the first. Section 310.6.1 of the USBC is what makes the residential code apply, so it is a part of the same instrument rather than another name for it, and a question about either one goes to the same local building department.
The edition carries a date, and Virginia only has one of them
The 2021 edition is the one in force and it took effect January 18, 2024. Anything written about a Virginia job before that date was written against a different edition. DHCD's codes page is where a current edition gets announced, and when we read that page in September 2026 the 2021 edition was still the one named there.
There is something in that date beyond the number. Because this is one statewide regulation rather than a stack of separately adopted books, which edition a job answers to has a single answer in Virginia instead of one per county, so a citation to 13VAC5-63 can be checked against one published text with one effective date on it. What a locality still carries on top is the short list of figures the code leaves to it, and those sit on the locality's own sheet, under the locality's own date.