The county rulebook for rural land
Know what you can build before you buy.
Permits, zoning, septic, RV and tiny-home rules for every county, quoted from official sources. Start from home to see which reachable counties let you live the way you want.
The county rulebook for rural land
Permits, zoning, septic, RV and tiny-home rules for every county, quoted from official sources. Start from home to see which reachable counties let you live the way you want.
National rankings
A first pass through the index: high-scoring counties for bolthole land, with a budget lens when carrying cost matters more.
The rulebook, county by county
Building permits, zoning, septic, owner-builder rights, RV and tiny-home occupancy — for every county in America, cited to the county’s own official pages. 3,066 counties so far carry answers quoted verbatim and re-checked by an independent reviewer, and the number grows daily.
Then compare
The Bolthole Index scores every county for backup land, off-grid living, and long-term resilience: seclusion, self-sufficiency, administrative boringness, durability, property autonomy, and carry cost. The rules above feed the score, so a permissive county ranks on what its rulebook says, not on a proxy.
A British word, an American search
A bolthole is a place of refuge—somewhere to go when ordinary systems fail or you simply need a way out. Here it means reachable rural backup land with enough water and productive capacity to support a household, but modest enough to own quietly and carry for years.
Jon Ragsdale built this independent project after reading Barton Biggs’s Wealth, War & Wisdom, a history of markets, real assets, and wealth preservation through World War II. Read the origin story and the full definition →
Methodology
The score is a first-pass due diligence model for bolthole land. It favors counties with practical self-sufficiency, distance from dense systems, durable climate and hazard profiles, workable local rules, property autonomy, and manageable carrying costs.