Preparing for the 2027 International Codes: It’s Easier to Keep Up Than to Catch Up (Part 1 of 5)

In July, the International Code Council (ICC) completed the 2027 International Codes® (I-Codes) — the culmination of a three-year, consensus-driven development cycle involving thousands of code officials, design professionals, builders and public safety experts. For jurisdictions across the country, publication starts a familiar clock: the decision of whether, when and how to bring the newest editions to their communities.

To find out what separates a smooth adoption from a painful one, I sat down with five ICC staff members who have led or supported dozens of adoption cycles as building officials and department leaders — in five states, under four fundamentally different adoption frameworks. Their careers span plan review, inspections, contracting, architecture and engineering. Their jurisdictions span a two-million-person desert metro, one of America’s fastest-growing cities, a Colorado college town, a Maryland county on a statutory clock and a Florida city rebuilt around hurricane resilience.

What is striking is how much their answers converge. Despite hailing from different states, with different processes and different politics, each shared many of the same conclusions about what works.

Five Officials, Four Distinct Adoption Frameworks

Kevin McOsker, P.E., CBO — VP of Technical Services, ICC Innovation & Growth. Former Building Official and Director of Building & Safety, City of Las Vegas. Southern Nevada’s jurisdictions adopt locally but coordinate regionally through the Southern Nevada Building Officials (SNBO), so a contractor crossing a city line sees one set of codes and amendments.

Jose Roig, CBO, CCEA — Regional Director for Latin America & the Caribbean, ICC Global Solutions. Former Building Official and Director of Development Services, City of Austin, Texas — a home-rule city where the department owns the entire adoption, from technical review to City Council ordinance.

Rich Anderson, CBO — Director, PMG Technical Resources, ICC. Former Chief Building Official, Fort Collins, Colorado, and Deputy Building Official, Amarillo, Texas. Both are home-rule states with adoptions built on citizen committees and locally developed amendments.

Rich Truitt — Senior Technical Trainer, ICC. Former Director of Inspections, Licenses & Permits (Building Official), Harford County, Maryland — Maryland adopts the I-Codes within 18 months of publication and local governments follow within 12 months, with local amendments.

Kris Stenger, AIA, CBO, LEED BD+C — Assistant Vice President, Code Development, ICC. Former Assistant Director of Building, Permitting & Sustainability, City of Winter Park, Florida. The Florida Building Commission maintains a single statewide code on a triennial cycle. Local amendments are limited, with code departments focused on effective implementation.

Why Jurisdictions Should Adopt the Newest Codes

The model codes are the industry standard – they carry the latest lessons from research, product testing and disaster performance. Staying current supports a community’s insurance and Building Code Effectiveness Grading Schedule (BCEGS) standing.

In Florida, that logic is written in the wind. “Since Hurricane Andrew, hardening new and existing structures has been a primary driver of every update to the Florida Building Code,” said Stenger. “Staying current was never a paperwork exercise for us. It was the commitment our state made to the next community in the storm’s path — and it showed up in the exemplary BCEGS risk reduction ratings our building and fire departments worked hard to earn.”

Truitt frames it as a question every community has to answer for itself. A mentor taught him early that an adopted code is “really setting the minimum standard for that community — the community’s own view of acceptable risk,” he said. Set it too low and residents carry the risk; set it thoughtfully and the code becomes a statement of what a community is willing to protect.

Current codes also open doors. When Austin permitted the first 3D-printed house in the country, “we didn’t have any code guidance to deal with that method,” recalled Roig. Provisions later moved through the code development process, “and once the new code was adopted, these structures were so much easier to review and permit.”

Anderson sees the same dynamic in his world of plumbing, mechanical and fuel-gas systems: a current code gives a jurisdiction a tested framework for technologies like water reuse — treatment, identification, separation, cross-connection protection — instead of forcing officials to evaluate every proposal from scratch. And when mass timber arrived with three entirely new construction types, jurisdictions on current codes had a clear pathway waiting that enabled design flexibility.

McOsker added a reason that rarely makes the talking points: the three-year cycle is also a chance to fix your own work. “Every cycle, either the model code changes or you get to go back and re-look at the amendments that are giving you trouble,” he said. “Something you thought was really good when you wrote it down — with a few years of experience, you figure out it isn’t working quite the way you envisioned. The adoption is your opportunity to make it right.”

The Cost of Falling Behind

Every official I interviewed made the same point, unprompted: skipping cycles costs more than it saves. Fall behind, and designers and builders who work across jurisdictions start carrying separate details just for you. Products and systems that are routine everywhere else require alternate-means requests, extra engineering justification and extra paperwork in your jurisdiction.

“You could be doing a bunch more alternate methods and materials for something that’s already in the code,” said McOsker. “It’s an accepted practice — you’re just adding a paperwork exercise because your code is outdated.”

Anderson called the cost “cumulative”: staff reconcile outdated provisions against new products and referenced standards, training and software drift out of alignment, and the eventual adoption becomes “a larger, more disruptive leap.”

“It’s easier to keep up than it is to catch up.”

— Jose Roig

Roig learned that the hard way — and volunteered it as his biggest lesson. When he moved from Development Services to lead another Austin department around 2018, the adoption effort lost its champion, COVID scrambled priorities and the city skipped the 2021 editions entirely, jumping from 2018 straight to 2024. “Staff, stakeholders and customers had to absorb two cycles of revisions at once,” he said.

Builders kept showing up, asking to use 2021 provisions the city hadn’t adopted. Many code changes make things easier. Without them, the City faced more alternate-compliance workarounds for everyone.

What I’d Do Differently: The Skipped Cycle

Kevin McOsker — Southern Nevada adopted the I-Codes on a steady three-year rhythm until the 2015 editions, when committee fatigue and a turnover of code officials led the region to pass. “If I could do it differently, I would have adopted the 2015 code,” he said. “It sent us down a pathway of six-year adoption. The books make it easy to go back one cycle — go back two, and you’re digging through successive editions just to find what changed. And in evolving markets — energy storage, PV, now data centers, the energy codes — if you’re missing a cycle, you’re either over-regulating or under-regulating.”

Jose Roig — “If there’s one piece of advice I would offer any jurisdiction beginning its code adoption journey, it’s to establish a predictable adoption cycle, maintain stakeholder engagement between cycles and treat implementation planning as a continuous process — not something that begins after the codes are adopted.”

Adoption as a Community Strategy

The most successful adoptions in our interviews were never framed as regulatory housekeeping. They were framed as the community getting something it already wanted.

In Las Vegas, the city wanted mid-rise infill downtown, but a post-MGM fire state law defined high-rises at 55 feet — well below the model code’s 75-foot trigger — and the added high-rise provisions made the projects pencil out poorly. McOsker and the city’s fire marshal pressed the issue at the state, confirmed on the record that jurisdictions adopting current codes could deviate, and in 2018 Las Vegas and Henderson returned to the model code threshold. The price of that flexibility was a commitment to keep adopting current codes.

“It did come with having to continually update the codes,” said McOsker. “I don’t know that that’s such a bad thing.”

In Colorado, the connection was an outgrowth of tragedy. Anderson served on FEMA’s Mitigation Assessment Team after the Marshall Fire, walking damaged neighborhoods and documenting how the fire moved from vegetation to structure to structure.

“We were not looking at resilience as an abstract code concept,” he said. “We were standing in communities where families had lost homes, where the consequences of building materials, spacing, landscaping and construction details were visible block by block.” Framing adoption around resilience, he argues, produces stronger support “because people can see the purpose behind the requirements — and the cost of waiting until after the next disaster to act.”

In Winter Park, the city’s municipally-owned utility set out to underground its entire electric system by the end of the decade and to manage the peak demand of power it purchases. The building department became a partner in both — tracking permits to connect residents with rebates for efficient equipment, envelope upgrades and on-site renewables. In Harford County, Truitt used the 2024 International Property Maintenance Code® (IPMC) and the 2021 International Fire Code® (IFC) as the backbone of a county revitalization initiative for aging rental housing.

And in Austin, Roig found the entire conversation changed when updates were tied to goals people already cared about: “Buildings that perform better, lower operating costs, lead to a city better prepared for future challenges. It becomes less about regulations and more about outcomes.”

The Road Map

Adopting a code edition is a project — one with a budget cycle, a legislative calendar, a training plan and hundreds of small operational decisions that determine whether day one feels seamless or chaotic. The accompanying one-page adoption timeline distills our interviewees’ collective playbook: what has to happen and when, working backward from your effective date. The rest of this series walks through it.

The through-line is already clear from Part 1: the jurisdictions that treat adoption as a regular habit — predictable, planned and connected to what their communities value — spend less, fight less and deliver more than the ones that let the clock run out.

Where to Start

The 2027 I-Codes are finalized, and the best time to plan your adoption is now — even if your effective date is two budget cycles away. Your ICC Government Relations representative and your state and local chapters are the first call. And for jurisdictions that are several editions behind, short-staffed or simply stretched thin, ICC’s Expert Services team supports every stage of the journey — from gap analysis and amendment drafting and review to department operations, custom training and stakeholder outreach — bringing the experience of officials like the five in this series to jurisdictions that could use some extra support.

Browse the available the 2027 I-Codes, here.