Off-Grid Living in Perry County, Indiana

Perry County, Indiana is one of those places where the rules genuinely depend on where exactly your land sits. I've dug through the county's own planning documents and the state's health rules to lay out what I found, but I'll be upfront about a few gaps.

Zoning first. The Perry County Plan Commission and Board of Zoning Appeals only has authority over unincorporated land that's outside a two-mile radius of Cannelton, Tell City, and Troy. If your parcel falls inside that two-mile buffer, or inside town limits, the town's own zoning code (Cannelton has a published Title 7, for instance) governs instead, not the county. So the very first thing I'd tell anyone is: figure out which side of that line your land falls on before assuming county rules apply.

Where the county does have jurisdiction, it requires what it calls an Improvement Location Permit before anyone occupies or uses vacant land or a structure. That's administered by the county's Planning and Zoning Department.

Building and septic are tied together here. The county's building permit checklist won't let you get a building permit without either a Water/Sewage Permit or proof of sewer tap-in. In practice, that means before the Health Inspector signs off on a septic system, you can't get your building permit for a new home. Indiana's on-site sewage rule (410 IAC 6-8.3), issued by the state health department, is administered locally by the county health officer, and it explicitly allows the county to be stricter than the state baseline if it wants. Indiana's health department also publishes guidance on composting and incinerating toilets, but I could not confirm whether Perry County's health office accepts those as a stand-alone system instead of a septic tank, so treat that as unresolved and ask directly.

Greywater and rainwater are both genuinely unclear at the county level. I found no Perry County ordinance addressing either one specifically. Rainwater catchment doesn't appear to be prohibited by anything I could find, so it likely falls back to whatever baseline the state allows, but I'd still confirm with the county before investing in a big cistern setup. Greywater reuse similarly has no dedicated county permit path that I could locate; wastewater generally is expected to run through an approved septic system under the state rule.

Wells fall under state DNR rules, and the county's own site refers water and floodplain questions straight to Indiana DNR's Division of Water. There's no separate county well ordinance that I found.

Bottom line on utilities: going without grid electric or public water isn't itself illegal here, but you can't legally occupy a structure without both the Improvement Location Permit and a health-department-approved septic system. So "off-grid" in the disconnected-utilities sense is fine; "off-grid" in the sense of skipping wastewater permitting is not.

One honesty note: I could not fully verify which website belongs to Perry County Indiana's actual Health Department, since near-identical department names exist in Ohio and Illinois. I'm relying only on the confirmed perrycounty.in.gov pages and steering readers to call rather than trust unverified septic fee figures.