Off-Grid Living in Henderson County, Tennessee

I'll be upfront: Henderson County, Tennessee (county seat Lexington, out in West Tennessee) is one of those places where I hit a wall trying to find official county-level documentation. There's no Henderson County planning/zoning page, building department page, or health department septic page that I could actually verify online. What I could confirm is limited to the City of Lexington itself and to Tennessee state-level defaults. So a good chunk of this guide is "not confirmed, call and ask" rather than a clean yes or no. I'd rather tell you that honestly than guess at a code number that doesn't exist.

Zoning. Tennessee doesn't mandate zoning statewide, and plenty of rural counties skip it. Whether Henderson County has adopted any countywide zoning for unincorporated land, I couldn't confirm from an official source. The City of Lexington does run its own Planning Commission for property inside city limits and its planning region, but that's a city matter, not a county one.

Dwellings, tiny homes, RVs. Inside Lexington, the City's Building Inspector and Codes Enforcement office enforces the current International Residential Code and related ICC codes. Outside city limits, in unincorporated Henderson County, I found no official rule on tiny homes, RV living, or anything like Appendix Q. Tennessee law lets counties choose whether to enforce residential building codes at all, so this really is a "call and ask" situation.

Building permits. Same split: confirmed and active in Lexington through the city's codes office, unconfirmed for the rest of the county.

Septic and composting toilets. This one's a state matter regardless of what the county does locally. Henderson County isn't one of the handful of "contract counties" (like Knox or Shelby) that run their own septic programs, so permitting flows through TDEC's Division of Water Resources via the nearest TDEC Environmental Field Office. No composting-toilet exemption is documented for the county.

Greywater. No county ordinance found; this defaults back to Tennessee's state plumbing code framework, with TDEC and state plumbing officials as the backstop authority.

Rainwater harvesting. No restriction found at the county level, so the unrestricted state baseline applies, collect away.

Wells. Governed by the statewide Tennessee Water Well Act, requiring a licensed driller. No separate Henderson County well ordinance or water authority permitting page turned up.

Utility disconnection. No county mandate to hook up to electric, water, or sewer was found. Off-grid power looks unrestricted under the state baseline; sewer connection would only become an issue if your land sits inside Lexington's service area.

Bottom line: for anything county-specific, your best move is calling the Henderson County courthouse in Lexington directly and asking who handles zoning and building outside city limits, since I couldn't verify that office online.