New Mexico

Statewide summary — confirm with your building department before designing

No value on this row was changed by this audit. The seismic design category C was verified against the USGS ASCE 7-16 design maps at Site Class D and Risk Category II and holds along the Rio Grande rift for Albuquerque, Santa Fe, Los Alamos and Taos; Las Cruces and Farmington compute to B, so C is the right conservative statewide letter. The frost depth of 18 inches is a valley-floor number and must not be used in the northern high country. New Mexico's Construction Industries Division does not publish a statewide frost line depth, the code leaves it to the local jurisdiction, and towns above seven thousand feet such as Taos, Los Alamos, Chama and Angel Fire freeze far harder than Albuquerque or Las Cruces. This audit could not establish an adopted figure for those places and did not invent one. Ground snow load is untenable as a single number, running from near nothing in the southern deserts to heavy loading in the Sangre de Cristo and Jemez high country, so 10 psf is a desert value only. Termite risk was not confirmed against an adopted New Mexico table and the stored slight may understate southern New Mexico; treat it as unverified. Winter design temperature is ASHRAE data and was not verified. SNOW LOAD AUDIT 2026-08-12 (physical design data pass). Minimum and maximum both left NULL. New Mexico has a real mandatory statewide residential code and it does not fill in the ground snow load. That is a proven absence, read out of the adopted rule. The instrument is 14.7.3 NMAC, the 2021 New Mexico Residential Building Code, issued by the Construction Industries Division of the Regulation and Licensing Department, applying to all one and two family dwellings and townhouses subject to CID jurisdiction for work performed on or after 14 December 2023. The official State Records Center and Archives publication of the full part was read. New Mexico amends Section R301 in exactly three places and all three are seismic. Footnote f of the climatic and geographic design criteria table is amended to read that the authority having jurisdiction shall fill in that part of the table with the seismic design category determined from Section R301.2.2.1 or from the U.S.G.S. software Design Values for Buildings found online. An exception is added to Section R301.2.2 exempting buildings whose bearing wall system is formed of earthen building materials, in seismic design categories A, B, C, D-zero and D-one, from the seismic requirements of the code. And the same USGS software is added at the end of Section R301.2.2.1 as an alternative determination method. The word snow does not occur anywhere in 14.7.3 NMAC. It also does not occur anywhere in 14.7.2 NMAC, the 2021 New Mexico Commercial Building Code, which was checked as a cross-reference. New Mexico therefore fills in one cell of the design criteria table, the seismic one, and even that it hands to the authority having jurisdiction with a named method; it publishes nothing at all for ground snow load, and nothing for wind speed or frost line depth either. Effect on the four existing values. None were changed. Seismic design category C is better supported than before, because the state code itself designates the USGS Design Values for Buildings service as an acceptable determination method, and that is precisely the government hazard service the earlier audit used to derive C along the Rio Grande rift. Ground snow load 10 psf, ultimate wind speed 115 mph and frost depth 18 inches remain unsourced against any New Mexico state instrument, and the earlier finding stands: 10 psf is a southern desert value that must not be carried into the Sangre de Cristo or Jemez high country, and 18 inches is a valley-floor frost depth that is wrong for Taos, Los Alamos, Chama and Angel Fire. No CID publication setting a statewide frost line depth or a statewide ground snow load was found, and none is created by the code.