Permit Guide
In Salt Lake City, a detached shed of 200 square feet or less generally needs no demolition permit. Above that size, attached to the house, or with power, gas, or water run to it, you do need one. Utah also requires an asbestos inspection and a ten working day state notification before any structure is demolished.
In Salt Lake City, a detached accessory structure of 200 square feet or less generally does not require a demolition permit, which covers most backyard garden sheds. If the shed is larger than that, attached to the house, or has power, gas, or water run to it, the answer changes and permitting comes into play.
That threshold is why a shed can often be scheduled within days while a detached garage takes weeks. It is also why the first question we ask is the footprint, not the age or the material.
The exemption is written for detached accessory structures. The moment a structure shares a wall, a roofline, or a foundation with the house, it stops being an accessory building and becomes part of the dwelling, and removing part of a dwelling is structural demolition.
That covers attached carports, lean-to storage built onto a garage wall, enclosed patio rooms, and sunrooms. These need a permit regardless of square footage, and if anything being removed carries load, a stamped structural detail is needed before the work starts.
Utilities void the exemption in practice too. A shed with a subpanel, a barn on a water line, or an outbuilding fed by a gas run has to have those services properly disconnected and documented first, and that step is usually what pulls the job into the permit process.
Demolition permitting is set at the city or county level in Utah, so the rules genuinely change from one side of a street to the other. What differs is not usually whether small sheds are exempt, but the process around it: which application applies, what documentation the city accepts for utility disconnects, and whether the parcel is even inside city limits.
That last one catches people most often. Parts of the valley that carry a city mailing address are actually unincorporated county land, where the county issues the permit under its own process. The same is true in reverse near jurisdiction boundaries.
We confirm which authority holds your specific parcel before quoting a schedule rather than working from the address on your mail. Our service area pages cover the authority for each market we serve.
Two requirements are statewide and do not care which city you are in. A certified asbestos inspection is required before a structure is demolished, regardless of the age of the building. And a demolition notification must be filed with the Utah Division of Air Quality, carrying a ten working day notice period, even when the inspection comes back clean. Local specifics for the city are on our demolition in Salt Lake City page.
For a small exempt shed these rarely drive the schedule. For anything larger they set it.
For a genuinely exempt garden shed none of this applies, which is exactly why confirming the exemption is worth doing before the sledgehammer comes out. See our shed, deck and fence removal page for what removal costs and how bundling several items into one visit lowers it.
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