Do the Amish Need Building Permits? Yes, With Some Religious Exemptions

Yes. Amish families need the same building permits as their neighbors, and many apply for them as a matter of course. The court cases involve a few conservative groups, above all the Swartzentruber Amish, who object to particular requirements: smoke detectors, stamped plans, inspections and septic systems. Some states now grant religious exemptions from specific rules.

Do the Amish have to follow building codes?

Building codes apply to Amish houses and schools as they do to anyone else’s, and the Amish are taught to respect the governing authorities. Paul wrote, “Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God” (Romans 13:1). The Dordrecht Confession, the Amish statement of faith, asks members to be subject and obedient to the government, “especially in that which is not contrary to the law, will, and commandment of God.” When the two conflict, the Amish cite the answer Peter gave the council in Jerusalem: “We ought to obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29).

In many places the question never reaches a courtroom. In 2008 the chairman of the supervisors in Leacock Township, in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, told the Associated Press that his township kept the Amish informed about the rules, that most conformed, and that he did not believe the board had ever taken an Amish resident to court over a building violation. According to the lawyers who later represented them, the Amish of Morristown, New York, had lived there for decades and never had trouble obtaining building permits until 2006.

Which requirements do some Amish refuse?

The objections come mostly from the most traditional affiliations, and they are specific. Swartzentruber families in New York refused to install battery-powered smoke detectors, submit certified architectural plans or fit hurricane tie-downs. The anthropologist Karen Johnson-Weiner explained the objection to detectors in the 2012 PBS documentary The Amish: “That’s putting your faith in a manmade device instead of God. What God wants to happen will happen.” Others object to the permit itself. In 2008 a lawyer for one Wisconsin man told the Associated Press that his client believed signing a permit would amount to lying, because he would not follow the parts of the code that went against his religion. A farmer in the same county who had built his house without a permit told the AP: “The permit itself might not be so bad, but to change your lifestyle to have to get one, that’s against our convictions.”

Many of the disputes concern sewage and wastewater rather than the house itself. Most Amish homes have indoor bathrooms, but members of the most traditional groups use outhouses, and some have no running water as most people would understand it. State rules on septic systems still apply to them.

The cases in New York

Morristown, in St. Lawrence County, updated its building code in 2006 and began ticketing Amish builders. In 2007 six Amish men were cited for refusing to submit building plans or install smoke detectors. On January 6, 2009, twelve Amish residents, represented by the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, sued the town in federal court. The town and the Amish settled in September 2012. The criminal charges were dismissed, the Amish agreed to build larger bedroom windows and to change some other methods, and the town accepted that some traditional Amish building practices already met the code. The town’s inspector would install smoke detectors before giving a home final approval, but, as in any house, whether they stayed was up to the owner. In the neighboring town of Hammond, two Amish men were cited in 2008 for building houses without permits.

The cases in Pennsylvania

Pennsylvania has written religious exemptions into its Uniform Construction Code. Since 2001 a member of a “recognized religious sect” building a house or a one-room schoolhouse may apply to be exempted from electrical provisions that conflict with the sect’s teachings. Laws passed in 2006 extended the exemption to lumber-grading and plumbing requirements. Agricultural buildings, which the law defines to include a carriage house that a religious sect uses to keep horses and buggies, are outside the code altogether.

The best-known Pennsylvania dispute was about sewage. A Swartzentruber congregation in Barr Township, Cambria County, collected the waste from its outhouses, including two used by its schoolchildren, in buckets and emptied them onto fields. After neighbors complained, a district judge in 2008 convicted the property’s owner and a church elder of failing to obtain a permit and discharging untreated sewage. On March 17, 2009, after the owner refused to bring the school’s outhouses into compliance, a county judge sentenced him to 90 days in jail and fined him $1,000 for contempt of court. The judge said, “Quite frankly, this is not a religious issue.” In 2011 the families agreed to build an underground tank for the waste, but the tank was never used, and by late 2012 the congregation had begun moving to St. Lawrence County, New York.

The cases in Wisconsin and Minnesota

In December 2008 the Associated Press counted at least 18 legal actions in the previous year and a half against Amish residents of Wisconsin and New York for building without proper permits. In Jackson County, Wisconsin, a judge fined two Amish men $9,450 and $10,600 in 2008 for building without permits. In February 2013 a Wisconsin appeals court upheld a fine against an Eau Claire County couple who argued that the code’s smoke-detector requirement violated their faith, and in March 2015 an Amish couple in the same county faced eviction after being found in contempt of court for refusing to install smoke and carbon monoxide detectors. Later in 2015 the state budget created religious waivers from the dwelling code, allowing Amish families to build homes without smoke or carbon monoxide detectors. The state granted the first waiver that September.

In Fillmore County, Minnesota, the dispute was over gray water from sinks and laundry. A 2013 county ordinance required modern septic systems, and the state pollution agency brought an enforcement action against 23 Amish families, who proposed mulch basins filled with wood chips instead. The county argued, among other things, that the Bible commands the Amish to submit to “secular authority,” an argument the trial court rejected. On July 2, 2021, the U.S. Supreme Court sent the case back to the Minnesota courts, and on July 10, 2023, the Minnesota Court of Appeals ruled that federal law barred the government from enforcing the septic-tank requirement against the four Amish men who had appealed, because it had not shown a compelling interest in applying the rule to them in particular.

Related reading

• Do the Amish shun electricity?
• Do the Amish pay taxes?
• How do the Amish make money?