Off-Grid Living in Franklin County, Pennsylvania

Franklin County, Pennsylvania is a beautiful place to think about going off-grid, but the first thing I need to be honest about: there is no countywide zoning ordinance here. Pennsylvania's Municipalities Planning Code hands zoning power to individual townships and boroughs, not counties, and the Franklin County Planning Department itself confirms its job is to coordinate and support municipalities, not to zone land. So almost everything I'd normally tell you about zoning, building permits, and septic depends on which of the county's roughly 22 townships or boroughs your land sits in.

Zoning and raw land. Whether you can legally camp, park an RV, or live in a shed on bare land is set township by township. There's no county rule to point to. You have to pull the zoning ordinance for the specific municipality.

Dwellings, tiny homes, RVs. I couldn't find a Franklin County-specific rule here either. This falls to the local zoning ordinance plus the statewide Uniform Construction Code (UCC), which sets baseline requirements like minimum room sizes for permanent dwellings. RVs as full-time residences are usually a zoning question, not a building-code one, and again that's decided locally.

Building permits. Franklin County has no county building department. Each municipality names its own Building Code Official, sometimes a contracted private inspector, to enforce the statewide UCC and issue permits. You'll need to find out who holds that role in your specific township.

Septic and greywater. This is where Pennsylvania's Act 537 Sewage Facilities Act comes in, administered by PA DEP at the state level but carried out locally: since Franklin County has no county health department, each township appoints its own certified Sewage Enforcement Officer (SEO) to test soil, review system designs, and issue septic permits. Greywater is legally treated as sewage under this same framework, so it goes through the same municipal SEO process, there's no separate lighter-touch greywater rule that I found.

Rainwater harvesting. No county ordinance turned up in my research. It inherits the general Pennsylvania baseline: fine for non-potable uses like irrigation, but not established as an approved sole potable water source for a permanent residence.

Wells. Pennsylvania doesn't require a state well-construction permit, though drillers themselves must be licensed under the state's Act 610 framework. I found no evidence of an added Franklin County well permit requirement, but it's worth asking your township or the county planning office whether local well-testing rules kick in at property transfer or new construction.

Utility disconnection. No state law forces you to hook up to the grid, and I found no countywide ordinance requiring it either. Whether a township's occupancy permit demands electric or water hookup is a local building-code question, so check with your specific municipality.

Bottom line: in Franklin County, the county government mostly steps back and lets each township run its own show on zoning, building, and septic. That means your very first call should be to the township or borough office where the land sits, not the county.