Verified against the city’s published rules · page updated October 21, 2026 · rules change — confirm with the city before applying
Irving is the cheapest and simplest plumbing permit we have found in Texas, and it has one gate in front of it that will stop some people at the door. The fee is $65 flat. No drawings are required. But if you intend to do the work yourself, the city wants a homestead exemption already on file with the appraisal district before you apply, and it says so in one sentence on one page that the search results mostly bury.
Irving’s own page does rank, which makes it healthier than Garland. Around it sit three pages from a permit template site, a plumber’s marketing blog, a page that labels itself “Beta” and warns that the “site is under development, information may contain errors”, and three documents belonging to other Texas cities entirely.
The Building Inspections Division, at Irving City Hall, 825 W. Irving Blvd., 2nd Floor.
The Inspections line is (972) 721-2371, printed on every Inspections page, and the department answers email at irving-permits@irvingtx.gov. (972) 721-2600 is the City Hall main number. The division covers building, electrical, mechanical, plumbing and irrigation inspections. Everything transactional runs through the city’s online portal, MGO: applying, paying, downloading the permit and the approved plans, and scheduling inspections. There is a phone app as well.
Dallas County does not issue city plumbing permits. Irving sits in Dallas County, and inside the city limits this is the counter.
Building permits are required to “erect, enlarge, alter, move, demolish or repair a structure,” and plumbing is one of the trades inside that.
Then Irving publishes the clearest statement of the fixture-replacement line that we have found on any Texas city’s website:
Permits are not required for cosmetic work such as painting, carpeting and cabinetry, nor is it required for replacing fixtures or appliances, except water heaters, at existing connections.
Three conditions are packed into the second half of that sentence, and all three matter.
It is replacement. Swapping a fixture out for another one. Adding a fixture is not replacement.
It is at existing connections. This is the condition people drop. If the new fixture goes where the old one was and uses the pipe that is already there, Irving is not asking for a permit. The moment the connection moves, you are altering the plumbing and you are outside the sentence.
Water heaters are carved back in, by name. Irving wrote the exception into the exemption. A water heater is an appliance, it is often a genuine like-for-like swap at an existing connection, and Irving still wants a permit for it. That matches every other Texas city we have checked, and the statewide picture is on do you need a permit to replace a water heater in Texas.
That sentence is also the best illustration in Texas of what Section 1301.551(c) actually does. The statute lists five jobs the state will not force a city to require a permit for, and faucets, ballcocks, garbage disposals and toilets are four of them. Irving has taken that carve-out and written its own version of it, with conditions the statute does not impose, and has put the water heater back on the permit side. Nine cities’ versions of the same line, side by side, are on which small plumbing jobs need a permit in Texas.
One more thing Irving publishes that most cities do not: the list of permits that need no drawings at all. Plumbing is on it, and so is a water heater, alongside electrical, mechanical, demolitions without build-backs and reroofing. For most other residential permits the city wants a plan showing the proposed changes.
One condition, stated as a precondition to applying:
If the homeowner is planning to do the work themselves, the homeowner must have a homestead exemption filed with the Dallas Central Appraisal District before applying for a residential permit, except roof permits.
Note the shape of it. There is no affidavit named, no occupancy statement to sign, no limit of one permit a year of the kind Austin publishes, and no self-performance clause of the kind Arlington and Dallas impose. There is a filing with the appraisal district, and it has to exist before you apply. Roofs are the single carve-out, and they are the city’s carve-out, not ours.
The city code puts the same rule in its own words, and adds the condition the web page leaves implicit. Section 8B-27(c) lets homeowners “obtain permits to perform work at a residence for which they have a homestead tax exemption and in which they live without being registered and without the requirement of hiring a registered contractor.”
Irving and Garland lean on the same instrument and use it differently, which is worth knowing if you own property in both. Garland names three conditions, asks for a driver’s license showing the permitted address, and says its staff will look your exemption up on DCAD’s website before issuing. Irving names the filing and that you live there, and stops. Irving does not say it verifies, so we are not going to say it does.
The practical consequence is the same in both cities and it catches recent buyers. A homestead exemption is something you file; it is not automatic on closing. If you bought this year and have not filed, that is the thing to do before you plan the work, not after.
State law does not conflict with any of this. Section 1301.051 exempts a property owner from needing a plumbing license to work on their own homestead, which is an exemption from licensure only, and Section 1301.551(c) lets a city “prescribe the terms on which the permit is issued.” Irving has prescribed one term. Who may legally do the work is a separate question, on who can legally do plumbing in Texas.
Irving requires a plumbing contractor to register with the city, and none of its published fee schedules charges for it.
The requirement is in the city code. Section 8B-27(c) names plumbing contractors among those “required to register with the city in order to secure a permit as provided for in this code,” and a registration expires one year after it is issued. The Fees + Forms page lists Contractor Registration first among its applications and names the trade:
Required to register as a contractor, such as: electrical, mechanical, plumbing, irrigation, sign, fence, general contractor, etc.
Registration runs through MGO, the same portal as everything else transactional here, and the code also allows a written application on the city’s forms.
None of Irving’s three published fee schedules carries a contractor or plumbing registration line. Their registration fees are for short-term rentals, vacant buildings and dangerous dogs. That fits Section 1301.551(g): a plumbing contractor “is not required to pay a plumbing registration fee or administrative fee in a municipality or any other political subdivision.” Section 1301.551(h) is the authority for requiring the registration itself. We have not opened the registration application inside MGO, which needs an account, so we say the schedules print no fee rather than that registering is free.
On what the city publishes, Irving sits with Waco and Plano rather than with Fort Worth, where the registration page prints a fee with no exception while the city’s administrative code exempts state-licensed plumbers by name.
What Irving does publish, for plumbers rather than homeowners, is the validation path and its price. If you are validating onto an existing building permit for mechanical, electrical or plumbing work, you email the Inspections Department, it cannot be done through the portal, and in the city’s own words: “There is no fee to validate.”
$65 covers the whole residential plumbing permit, water heater included, and it is the same $65 in every schedule Irving has published since 2022.
Which schedule governs needs saying before the numbers do, because the city’s own pages disagree. The Fees + Forms page still links a schedule titled FY24-25 under Permit Fees. The city’s Rates + Fees page carries two newer ones. The February 2026 amendments, whose Inspections section took effect on February 13, 2026, are the fees in force today. The FY27 schedule’s cover says October 1, 2026, but its Inspections section is headed effective November 1, 2026, so it takes over then. Every figure below is the same in all three.
| Line | Fee |
|---|---|
| Plumbing single trade: water, sewer, gas service line replacements, water heaters, and similar plumbing work | $65 |
| Re-inspections | $75 |
| Investigation fee for work begun without a permit, in addition to the regular fee | 100% of the regular fee |
| Foundation repair, per building | $125 |
| Swimming pool, in-ground, including sewer P-trap and gas line | $240 |
| On-site utilities: storm drain, domestic water, sanitary sewer, gas line, fire main, per utility | $75 plus $0.10 per linear foot |
| Validating a trade onto an existing building permit | no fee |
Two of those deserve a sentence. $65 is the whole residential plumbing permit, and the schedule’s own description of what it covers is broad: water, sewer, gas service line replacements, water heaters “and similar plumbing work.” That is one line item where Arlington has fifteen and Corpus Christi charges per square foot of the house. A plumber quoting you a few hundred dollars for an Irving permit is not quoting the city’s number, which is the kind of check how to tell if a plumber is overcharging exists for.
And the re-inspection costs more than the permit. $75 against $65. Failing once more than doubles what you have paid the city. That is unusual enough to plan around: Irving’s own guidance is that the work has to be ready when the inspector arrives.
Starting without the permit doubles the fee rather than adding a flat investigation charge, which is the same structure Arlington uses and a gentler one than Corpus Christi’s. What happens if you skip a plumbing permit in Texas has the statutory side.
Scheduled through MGO, and the cut-off is 6 a.m. on the day you want it.
Irving states that twice, on two pages, in the same words: requests go in through the portal and the deadline is 6 a.m. the business day requested. After 6 a.m. the earliest available is the next business day. There is no phone path published for scheduling and the portal is where results appear as well.
The city also charges to do by hand what the portal does free, which is worth knowing before you call: the fee schedule carries a re-inspection line at $75 and the city’s instruction throughout is to use MGO.
Pre-construction meetings are not required in Irving, which the city says explicitly, but can be arranged virtually on request by email.
Irving changed its codes this year and some of its own pages have not caught up, so here is what we read and where the city’s labels are out of date.
Irving enforces the 2024 International Plumbing Code and the 2024 International Residential Code, with local amendments. The City Council passed Ordinance 2026-11253 on March 26, 2026, and by its own terms it took effect on May 1, 2026. The city code now reads: “The 2024 edition of the International Plumbing Code is adopted as the plumbing code of the City of Irving, Texas, as amended herein.”
Two city pages still say otherwise. Every Inspections page links the item as “Proposed Ordinances for Adopting the 2024 International Codes”, and the Residential Contractors’ Checklist linked from the Residential Guidelines page is still headed “For compliance with the 2021 International Residential Code”. The ordinance is the law and those labels are stale. For a permit issued before May 1, 2026, ask the city which edition it was reviewed under.
Every fee above is the same in all three schedules the city publishes, so which one governs does not change any number on this page.
We have not said registering as a contractor is free. Irving requires it and none of its fee schedules prices it, and we have not seen the application inside MGO.
And we have not read Irving’s permit portal from the inside. Everything here is from the city’s published pages and its own fee schedule, which is also how we found the one sentence on this subject that is worth more than the rest of the page: fixtures and appliances, at existing connections, except water heaters.
Every figure on this page comes from one of the documents below, each published by the body that sets, measures or administers the thing it describes. We record the document’s own date and the date we read it, because published pages change without notice.
| Source | Document date | We read it |
|---|---|---|
| City of Irving – Residential Guidelines (the homeowner rule, the no-plans list and the cosmetic-work exemption) | undated city web page | 2026-10-03 |
| City of Irving – Building Inspections (the division, the MGO portal and the 6 a.m. inspection cut-off) | undated city web page | 2026-10-09 (re-read in the desktop browser: MGO scheduling and 6 a.m. cut-off sentence; Inspections block prints (972) 721-2371) |
| City of Irving – Fees + Forms (the contractor registration application; validation is free) | undated city web page; its Permit Fees link still opens the FY24-25 schedule, and the sentence under it links Rates + Fees | 2026-10-09 (re-read in the desktop browser; registration line and validation sentence matched character for character) |
| City of Irving – Rates + Fees (links the FY26 and FY27 Consolidated Fee Schedules) | undated city web page | 2026-10-09 |
| City of Irving Land Development Code, Chapter 8B, Building Codes (sec. 8B-3 residential code, sec. 8B-7 plumbing code, sec. 8B-27 permits, fees and registration), eCode360 | sections 8B-3, 8B-7 and 8B-27 as adopted by Ordinance 2026-11253 on March 26, 2026; code version 2026-08-27, which includes legislation through Ord. No. 2026-11315 adopted August 27, 2026 | 2026-10-09 |
| City of Irving, Ordinance No. 2026-11253 as passed (adopting the 2024 International Codes), eCode360 Law Ledger | passed and approved by the City Council on March 26, 2026; Section 5 sets the effective date as May 1, 2026; 53 pages; PDF created March 30, 2026 | 2026-10-09 (read as PDF text) |
| City of Irving – Schedule of Fees, February 2026 Amendments (the FY26 Consolidated Fee Schedule; Inspections items 11, 14, 17, 23 and 41) | Inspections section headed EFFECTIVE FEBRUARY 13, 2026; the Inspections fees in force until November 1, 2026 | 2026-10-09 (read as PDF text; every Inspections item this page cites is marked No change) |
| City of Irving – Schedule of Fees, FY26-27 Amendments (the FY27 Consolidated Fee Schedule; Inspections items 11, 14, 17, 23 and 41) | cover reads Effective Oct. 1, 2026, but its Inspections section is headed EFFECTIVE NOVEMBER 1, 2026; 29 pages | 2026-10-09 (read as PDF text; plumbing single trade $65 and re-inspections $75, the same as both earlier schedules) |
| City of Irving – Consolidated Fee Schedule FY24-25 (items 11, 14 and 41) | titled FY24-25; its Inspections section is headed EFFECTIVE OCTOBER 15, 2022; 22 pages. Replaced for Inspections fees by the February 2026 amendments (effective February 13, 2026); still the document the Fees + Forms page links as Permit Fees | 2026-10-09 (read as PDF text) |
| City of Irving – Proposed Ordinances for Adopting the 2024 International Codes (navigation item on every Inspections page) | undated; carries the notice of the March 26, 2026 public hearing at which Ordinance 2026-11253 was passed, with an effective date of 5-1-26; the page title still reads Proposed | 2026-10-09 |
| City of Irving – Residential Contractors’ Checklist (linked from Residential Guidelines) | PDF created April 2025; headed for compliance with the 2021 International Residential Code, which Ordinance 2026-11253 replaced on May 1, 2026 | 2026-10-09 (read as PDF text) |
| Texas Occupations Code ch. 1301, Sec. 1301.551 Municipal Plumbing Ordinances and Permits | current online codification; added by Acts 2001, 77th Leg., ch. 1421, eff. June 1, 2003, last amended by Acts 2013, 83rd Leg., ch. 981 | 2026-10-03 (subsections (a) through (j) read) |
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