Gypsum building permits

Tips & gotchas

• Gypsum is an incorporated statutory town with its OWN Community Development Department, Building Department (50 Lundgren Blvd) — Eagle County's Building Division explicitly excludes all incorporated towns within the county, including Gypsum, from its unincorporated permitting program. This is a fully independent authority model, the same pattern found in neighboring Vail (also independent), though this session found real variation among Eagle County mountain towns and each one's authority model was verified individually rather than assumed.
• Gypsum's published design criteria (40 psf ground snow load, 90 mph wind design, 42-inch frost depth, Seismic Design Category C) are notably lighter than Vail's (145 psf, 115 mph, 48-inch frost, Category B) — Gypsum sits at lower valley elevation along I-70. Do not reuse a peer Eagle County mountain jurisdiction's structural design assumptions for a Gypsum project.
• Electrical, Plumbing, and Mechanical each require their OWN standalone permit in Gypsum, separate from the general Building Permit — confirmed directly from the Town's own Building Permit Application form language ('separate permits are required for Electrical, Plumbing, Mechanical').
• The Town's own 2025 Annual Fee Schedule PDF is explicitly labeled 'partial' by the Town itself and does NOT contain a valuation-based building/trade permit fee table — that table is referenced as living in Title 15 of the Municipal Code, which is hosted on Municode as a JavaScript-rendered, access-controlled single-page application. Both a direct fetch attempt and a dated Wayback Machine snapshot (2026-02-13) returned only the unrendered application shell with zero recoverable section text — this is a genuine, honestly-documented data gap in every permitType's fees array, not an omission from insufficient effort. Call the Building Department (970-524-1731) directly for a project-specific fee quote.
• The Town publishes NO numeric plan-review turnaround (days or weeks) for any standard building-permit category anywhere on its site — not on the Build in Gypsum page, the Building Permit Application, the Plan Requirements page, the Inspections page, the Forms/Permits/Applications page, or the 2025 Annual Fee Schedule. Colorado is home-rule with no statewide clock, and every permitType in this file is honestly null/unverified with a documented chase trail rather than an invented figure.
• All contractors need a Town of Gypsum Contractor's License ($152/year per the 2025 fee schedule) in addition to any Colorado state trade license — renewal is due by April 1st annually or a late fee applies (except contractors not engaged in Town work until mid-year).
• Smaller projects that don't require a full plan set — a new roof, electrical panel upgrades, or plumbing fixture replacement are the Town's own named examples — can use a simpler one-time permit application rather than the full Building Permit & Plan Submittal portal process.
• DRB or HOA approval is required before Town submittal for any parcel outside the Eagle River Estate or Bertroch developments; the Town's four core districts (The Front Door, The River, The Yard, The Market) carry additional Master Plan DRB requirements. Contact Town staff (stephanie@townofgypsum.com) to confirm which DRB/HOA governs a specific parcel — no master list is published on the site.
• ADUs are capped at 800 sq ft or 50% of the primary dwelling (whichever is smaller), limited to one per lot, require owner-occupancy of the primary residence, and carry their own fee schedule ($250 new construction, $500 for an existing non-approved unit, $50 transfer re-inspection, $43 deed restriction recording) distinct from the general building-permit fee gap.
• Base permit fee includes only four inspections; every inspection beyond that (including re-inspections) costs $60 and requires 24-hour advance notice — plan your inspection sequence accordingly.
• Gypsum's site is on the same CivicPlus-family platform pattern seen elsewhere in this corpus; direct URL guesses frequently 404 even when a very similar path is correct (e.g., 'business/build-in-gypsum' 404s while the shorter 'build-in-gypsum' 200s) — verify each exact working URL via search rather than assuming a consistent path structure across sub-pages.