About HomeRuleCheck
HomeRuleCheck is four free tools for U.S. homeowners and renters: a permit checker, a smoke alarm inventory, a hazardous waste disposal finder, and an appliance cost calculator.
Most home questions like "do I need a permit for this" or "can I throw this away" don't have one universal answer — they depend on your city, your county, or your state. Rather than publish generic articles that read as if they have your answer, HomeRuleCheck is built around interactive tools that ask a few specific questions and tell you plainly what we know, what we don't, and where to check next.
We'd rather show "not yet verified for your city — here's a general pattern, and here's what to ask" than invent a confident-sounding answer that happens to be wrong. See our methodology for exactly how that works.
The four tools
Questions or corrections?
If you spot something that looks wrong, or you're a local building or waste official who can help us verify a page, get in touch.