Texas

Statewide summary — confirm with your building department before designing

No value on this row was changed by this audit, but the wind speed on it should not be relied on anywhere near the coast. Texas is too large and too varied for a single ultimate design wind speed, and no honest scalar exists. The Texas Department of Insurance, which regulates windstorm construction in the fourteen designated seacoast counties, sets three zones and publishes their ultimate design wind speed equivalents as 143 mph for Inland II, 155 mph for Inland I and 168 mph for the Seaward zone. Corpus Christi and Brownsville fall largely in Inland I and Galveston and the barrier islands in the Seaward zone, so more than a million and a half coastal Texans live where the requirement is well above the stored 130 mph. Inland Texas is the opposite problem: Dallas, San Antonio, Austin, El Paso and the Panhandle sit near the bottom of the ASCE 7-16 range, around 105 mph, where 130 mph grossly over builds. Because every candidate single number badly misdescribes either the coast or the interior, this cell is reported as untenable rather than corrected, and the coastal figure must be taken from the Texas Department of Insurance zone maps for the specific address. Seismic design category A is confirmed for the major metropolitan areas: the USGS ASCE 7-16 design maps service at Site Class D and Risk Category II returns 0.072 g at Houston, 0.103 g at Dallas, 0.054 g at San Antonio, 0.056 g at Austin and 0.064 g at Corpus Christi. El Paso is the exception at 0.333 to 0.342 g, which falls in category C, and Amarillo reads 0.211 g in category B; neither changes the statewide summary but both matter locally. Termite risk of very heavy is right for the eastern and coastal two thirds of the state and overstates west Texas and the Panhandle. Frost depth of 6 inches and ground snow load of 5 psf describe the major metropolitan areas but understate the Panhandle, where Amarillo and Lubbock sit above 3,000 feet and carry real frost and snow; neither was verified against an adopted Texas table. Winter design temperature is unestablished. Confirm your own lot with the local building official. Sources: https://www.tdi.texas.gov/wind/adopted-codes.html, https://www.tdi.texas.gov/wind/maps/nueces.html and https://earthquake.usgs.gov/ws/building-codes/ 2026-08-12 snow-load audit. Texas publishes no ground snow load, so min and max are left NULL. One point of framing on this row needs correcting, though no stored value changes. It is often said that Texas has no statewide residential code; that is not quite right. Texas Local Government Code Section 214.212(a), added by SB 365 of the 77th Legislature, provides that "the International Residential Code, as it existed on May 1, 2001, is adopted as a municipal residential building code in this state," and subsection (b) applies it to all construction, alteration, remodeling, enlargement and repair of residential structures in a municipality. Health and Safety Code Chapter 233, Subchapter F extends a comparable requirement to unincorporated areas of certain counties. So a statutory floor does exist. What does not exist is any state authority that fills in the design criteria. Section 214.212(c) lets a municipality establish procedures to adopt local amendments, and 214.212(d) lets it consider ICC amendments issued after May 1, 2001, which is how most Texas cities have moved to far newer editions. Texas has no state building code agency, and no Texas instrument publishes a ground snow load, a range or a county schedule. The number is set by the individual municipality or county in its adopted version of Table R301.2(1). The Texas Department of Insurance, which does publish binding design criteria, is a wind authority only: its designated catastrophe area rules cover windstorm construction in the fourteen seacoast counties and say nothing about snow. Nothing on this row was changed by this pass, and the existing assessment stands: the stored wind speed of 130 mph is untenable as a single statewide figure, badly under-describing the TDI coastal zones at 143, 155 and 168 mph and grossly over-describing the interior at roughly 105 mph, while the stored ground snow load of 5 psf and frost depth of 6 inches describe the major metropolitan areas and understate the Panhandle, where Amarillo and Lubbock sit above 3,000 feet. None of those four figures is traceable to a Texas government publication. A separate note on sourcing: statutes.capitol.texas.gov now serves its statute pages as a JavaScript application and returns only the page shell to a plain fetch, so the statutory text quoted here was taken from the enrolled bill on the Texas Legislature Online document server instead.