The county rulebook for rural land
Know what you can build before you buy.
Permits, zoning, septic, RV and tiny-home rules for every county, quoted from official sources. Search a city, ZIP or county to see who handles what there.
The county rulebook for rural land
Permits, zoning, septic, RV and tiny-home rules for every county, quoted from official sources. Search a city, ZIP or county to see who handles what there.
National rankings
A first pass through the index: high-scoring counties for bolthole land, with a budget lens when carrying cost matters more.
The rulebook, county by county
Building permits, zoning, septic, owner-builder rights, RV and tiny-home occupancy — for every county in America, cited to the county’s own official pages. 3,109 counties so far carry answers quoted verbatim and re-checked by an independent reviewer, and the number grows daily.
Then compare
The Bolthole Index scores every county for backup land, off-grid living, and long-term resilience: seclusion, self-sufficiency, administrative boringness, durability, property autonomy, and carry cost. The rules above feed the score, so a permissive county ranks on what its rulebook says, not on a proxy.
A British word, an American search
A bolthole is a place of refuge—somewhere to go when ordinary systems fail or you simply need a way out. Here it means reachable rural backup land with enough water and productive capacity to support a household, but modest enough to own quietly and carry for years.
Jon Ragsdale built this independent project after reading Barton Biggs’s Wealth, War & Wisdom, a history of markets, real assets, and wealth preservation through World War II. Read the origin story and the full definition →
Methodology
The score is a first-pass due diligence model for bolthole land. It favors counties with practical self-sufficiency, distance from dense systems, durable climate and hazard profiles, workable local rules, property autonomy, and manageable carrying costs.