In this guide
Most articles about living off the grid are written by people describing a feeling. They talk about freedom and sunrise and not having a power bill. All of that is real. None of it is the thing that stops people.
What stops people is a permit. Specifically, it is this: in every state we sell land in, you cannot lawfully occupy a dwelling until somebody official has approved how you are going to get rid of your sewage. Not your solar. Not your water catchment. Your sewage. That one approval sits upstream of everything else, and it is decided by what is under your dirt, which you cannot see from the listing photos.
So this article is organized around permission rather than lifestyle. Water, waste, shelter, power, in that order, because that is the order the county cares about and because getting it backwards is how people end up with forty acres, a composting toilet and a notice taped to the door.
Start with water, because water decides whether the parcel works
You can haul water. People do it for years. But hauling is a chore that never ends, and the parcels where people stay are the parcels where they got a well. So the first question about any piece of ground is whether you are allowed to drill one, and for how much water, and that answer is set by state law rather than by the seller.
Here is where the law lands in each of the states we sell in. Read your own state's row before you read anything else on this page.
| State | Can you get a domestic well? | The limit that bites |
|---|---|---|
| Arizona | Yes, register a notice of intent to drill | Under 35 gallons per minute; different rules inside an Active Management Area |
| Colorado | Permit required, exempt category | 15 gpm, and under 35 acres it is household use only, indoors |
| Florida | Yes, no consumptive use permit for domestic use | Well construction permit still required from the water management district |
| Minnesota | Yes | Appropriation permit only above 10,000 gallons a day; well code is separate |
| Nevada | Yes, no permit | Two acre-feet a year, one well per dwelling, and some basins are closed |
| New Mexico | Permit required, but the State Engineer must grant it | Household use plus up to one acre of noncommercial trees, lawn or garden |
| North Carolina | Health department permit | No service until a certificate of completion issues, then mandatory water testing |
| Oregon | Yes, exempt use | 15,000 gallons a day domestic, half an acre of lawn and garden |
| Texas | Yes if the district exempts it | Tract larger than 10 acres and under 25,000 gallons a day; registration still required |
| Arkansas | Check with the state before you plan on it | We could not verify the exemption framework well enough to publish it |
The Colorado row is the one worth stopping on. Under state law an exempt well is capped at 15 gallons a minute, but the practical split is by acreage. A parcel of 35 acres or more gets a domestic and livestock permit: one well can serve up to three single-family residences, irrigate an acre or less of lawn and garden, and water animals. A parcel under 35 acres gets a household-use-only permit, which means exactly what it says. Water inside the house. Not the garden, not the chickens, not the trees you planted.
Nearly every affordable Colorado parcel on the market, ours included, is under 35 acres. If your plan involves growing food in the San Luis Valley on well water, that plan needs to change before you buy, not after. And none of the exemptions apply inside a Designated Basin, where the rules are tighter again.
Nevada has its own version of this. A domestic well needs no permit and is capped at two acre-feet a year, which is roughly 651,700 gallons and plenty for a household, but the State Engineer has closed individual basins to new domestic wells. The Pahrump Artesian Basin in Nye County is the well-known case. Check the basin, not just the state.
Then waste, which is the approval that actually gates occupancy
This is the part the lifestyle articles skip. In every one of our ten states, installing an on-site wastewater system requires a permit, and the permit requires a site evaluation of your soil first. In several states the rule goes further and makes occupancy itself unlawful until the finished system has been approved.
New Mexico states it as plainly as any state does: no person may install a new on-site liquid waste system without a permit, and it is unlawful to occupy a newly constructed dwelling requiring such a system until the department has granted final approval after installation. Arkansas splits it into two permits, one to construct and one to operate, and makes it unlawful to begin operating before the second one issues.
Texas is the instructive case, because Texas is where people go expecting no rules. Most unincorporated Texas land has no building code and therefore no certificate of occupancy at all. The sewage rule still applies. A person must hold a permit and an approved plan to construct or operate an on-site sewage facility, and the dwelling is not occupied until the permitting authority gives written notice of approval. There is a ten-acre single-dwelling exemption from permitting, but it is an exemption from the permit, not from the rest of the rules, and it carries conditions including 100-foot setbacks from every property line.
North Carolina comes at it from the water side instead: no person may place a private drinking water well into service without first obtaining a certificate of completion, and the building official leans on that certificate before issuing a certificate of occupancy. Different hook, same gate.
Shelter, and the RV question
The plan nearly everybody arrives with is to park a travel trailer on the land and build slowly around it. It is a reasonable plan. It is also regulated, and the regulations are more consistent across counties than you would expect.
Mohave County, Arizona is a good worked example because its zoning ordinance spells the whole thing out. An RV may sit on residential property without a special permit so long as it is not there more than 30 cumulative days in a calendar year, with no single stay over 14 consecutive days. Past that you need a permit. For construction specifically, an RV may be permitted as a temporary residence for one year while the permanent structure goes up, with six-month extensions for good cause. The RV has to be connected to an approved wastewater disposal system or taken regularly to a dump station. And an RV may be a permanent dwelling only in RV zoning, an RV park, or an approved manufactured home park. Nowhere else.
That structure repeats. A short unpermitted camping window measured in days. A separate fee-bearing temporary permit that is generally only available once you already hold a building permit for a real dwelling. A hard requirement that the RV be tied to approved wastewater. And an expiry pinned to the building permit or the certificate of occupancy.
Some counties also set a minimum dwelling size, which quietly rules out the smallest tiny homes. Ask your county planning department for the minimum habitable square footage before you buy a plan set, not after.
Power, and the honest comparison nobody runs
Solar is the answer in almost every case, and the federal cost data is not subtle about it. The Department of Energy and NREL benchmark residential solar at roughly $2,780 to $2,950 per kilowatt installed, which puts an 8-kilowatt array somewhere around $22,000 to $24,000 before any incentive. Adding a 13.5 kilowatt-hour battery takes the same system to roughly $35,000 to $37,000.
Those are grid-tied benchmarks, which matters. A true off-grid system needs more storage, a bigger array to carry the short days of December, and a generator for the weeks when neither of those is enough. Budget above the benchmark, not at it.
Small wind is where people lose money. The Department of Energy's distributed wind market report puts the capacity-weighted average installed cost for small wind at $11,410 per kilowatt across 2014 to 2023, and $7,370 per kilowatt in 2023 alone. Average capacity factor across small wind projects in 2023 was 13 percent, and by region it was 10 percent in the West and 5 percent in the Southeast. So small wind costs between two and a half and four times as much per kilowatt as solar, and in the regions where we sell it produces less per kilowatt installed.
The physics is why. Power available in wind scales with the cube of wind speed, and wind speed rises with height. A short tower on a lot with trees or a ridge nearby is sitting in slowed, turbulent air, and no amount of equipment quality fixes that. If you want a turbine because you want a turbine, fine. Do not buy one expecting it to beat panels.
The order to actually do this in
Here is the sequence that works, as opposed to the sequence people naturally follow. It is deliberately front-loaded with the cheap questions, because the cheap questions are the ones that disqualify a parcel.
The order to actually do this in
Call the county planning department before you buy.
Ask three things: is a single-family dwelling allowed on this parcel, is there a minimum habitable square footage, and what is the temporary RV occupancy rule. Fifteen minutes.
Call the health department or state onsite program next.
Ask who performs site evaluations in that county, what the fee is, and whether there are known soil problems in that subdivision. They talk to people all day and they will tell you.
Check the well rule for the state and the basin, not just the state.
Colorado by acreage, Nevada by basin, Texas by district and tract size, Arizona by Active Management Area. The table above is the starting point, not the answer.
Pay for the site evaluation before you commit to a build.
It is the cheapest way to find out whether the ground will take a conventional system or whether you are looking at an engineered alternative at several times the cost.
Size the power system for December, not for July.
An array that carries you in summer and leaves you running a generator for eight weeks in winter is a system you will end up replacing.
Write down what you will do when something breaks in February.
Who plows the road, how far the nearest parts store is, and whether an ambulance can find you. This is the part that sends people back to town, not the solar math.
What it actually costs, and what we will not pretend to know
We can give you honest numbers on some of this and not on others, so here is the line. Oregon publishes its onsite fees, and a site evaluation for a single-family dwelling runs $700 with a standard construction-installation permit at $1,038. Those are real published agency figures and they give you a sense of scale for the permitting layer.
Installed septic costs are different. We went looking for a government or extension source publishing current installed-cost ranges for conventional versus engineered systems and could not find one. Every figure available is from contractors and cost aggregator sites. So rather than dress up a vendor number as research, here is what is safely true: an engineered alternative such as a mound, an aerobic treatment unit, a sand filter or drip dispersal costs materially more to install, permit and operate than a conventional gravity trench, and aerobic units carry an ongoing service contract. Get quotes from installers in that specific county.
One federal program is worth knowing about. The USDA Rural Development Section 502 Direct loan can be used to build a home and to purchase and prepare sites, which expressly includes providing water and sewage facilities. It is income-limited and the property has to sit in an eligible rural area, but the infrastructure is inside the scope, which surprises people.
Where we fit, and where we do not
We sell rural parcels on terms across ten states, and plenty of our buyers are doing some version of what this article describes. What we will do is hand you the parcel number and the county so you can make these calls yourself before you commit. We would rather you find out the ground will not take a septic system during due diligence than after.
What we will not do is tell you a parcel is ready to live on. We do not pull your well permit, we do not run your site evaluation, and we do not know what your county will approve. Anybody in this business who tells you a raw parcel is build-ready without a site evaluation in hand is selling you something. If you want the shorter version of the diligence questions, we put it in the five questions to ask when buying vacant land, and the water-collection side has its own article in what to know about water catchment systems.
If living off grid is the actual goal rather than a phrase, start with our off-grid land listings and then make the two phone calls at the top of that checklist before you fall in love with a view.
None of this is meant to talk you out of it. People do live this way, successfully, on ground that costs less than a used truck, and the ones who make it work are almost always the ones who did the boring part first.
The boring part is two phone calls and a soil evaluation. Make them before you buy and the rest of it is just work you chose.
