Zoning, HOAs & Historic Districts in the Las Vegas Metro (NV)

1. The City of Las Vegas's zoning code: Title 19 and the Unified Development Code

Land inside the City of Las Vegas's own municipal boundaries is zoned under Title 19 of the Las Vegas Municipal Code, the city's Unified Development Code (UDC), administered by the city's Department of Planning. It was originally adopted as Ordinance No. 6289 (the 1983 edition) and has been amended many times since -- most recently in 2026, when the city updated its accessory-dwelling-unit standards to comply with a new state law (see Section 2). Title 19 sets the base zoning districts (single-family and multi-family residential, a range of commercial and mixed-use categories, and planned-development overlays for larger tracts), use tables, parking and sign standards, and design-review procedures for property inside city limits.

The distinction that matters most for homebuyers researching this metro: Title 19 only applies to land actually annexed into the City of Las Vegas. Several of the valley's best-known master-planned communities -- Summerlin and Southern Highlands among them -- sit in unincorporated Clark County, not the city, and are zoned instead under the county's own Title 30, administered by Clark County's Comprehensive Planning department. Clark County has been running a long-range rewrite and update of its master plan and Title 30 development standards since 2020 under the banner "Transform Clark County." Centennial Hills, by contrast, despite also being a newer, far-edge-of-the-valley master-planned area, is inside the City of Las Vegas's own boundaries and is governed by Title 19. One citation quirk worth flagging: Henderson's own zoning code is also formally titled "Title 19" (of the Henderson Municipal Code, its Development Code) -- but it is a completely separate code from Las Vegas's Title 19, and the shared number is coincidence, not overlap. Which jurisdiction actually has zoning authority over a given parcel is a basic, easy-to-get-wrong fact worth confirming before assuming any rule described on this page applies to a specific address.

2. ADUs in 2026: Nevada's new statewide casita law, AB 396

Nevada previously left accessory dwelling units (ADUs -- secondary living units such as a converted garage or a small backyard cottage, widely called "casitas" here) largely up to individual cities to allow, restrict, or effectively block. Assembly Bill 71, passed by the Nevada Legislature in 2021, first required larger local governments -- including the City of Las Vegas, Henderson, North Las Vegas, and Clark County -- to permit at least one ADU on qualifying single-family-zoned lots rather than ban them outright, but left significant room for local restrictions.

That changed further with Assembly Bill 396, introduced in the 2025 Legislative Session (sponsored by Assemblymember Shea Backus) and taking effect July 1, 2026. AB 396 targeted the specific barriers Southern Nevada jurisdictions had been using to discourage ADUs -- some cities had banned separate kitchens in accessory units or required unusually large minimum lot sizes to qualify -- and required qualifying counties (Clark and Washoe) and larger cities to remove them: no minimum-lot-size floor for an otherwise-qualifying ADU, a full second kitchen allowed without a separate special-use permit, and (as before) no more than one residential ADU per lot.

Each jurisdiction in this metro updated its own code to comply on its own timeline. The City of Las Vegas introduced an ordinance in mid-June 2026 clarifying ADU setbacks, size, and lot-size standards, with the City Council voting on it around the July 1 deadline. Clark County's Board of County Commissioners had already acted on March 5, 2026, removing prior lot-size limitations on what county code calls "accessory living quarters" -- though a special-use permit is still required for lots under 4,000 square feet or for units on lots inside mobile-home or tiny-home parks. Henderson made sweeping ADU-friendly changes back in 2022 (following recommendations from the American Planning Association) and passed only minor tweaks in fall 2025 to fully align with AB 396. North Las Vegas officials told local reporters their code already met the new state requirements.

One caution for anyone comparing sources online: because these ordinances were all rewritten within the same few months in 2026, the specific current numbers -- maximum ADU square footage, exact setback distances, and required off-street parking spaces -- vary by source and by jurisdiction, and the pre-2026 Las Vegas standard (an ADU capped at 50% of the principal dwelling's floor area, under a 2012 ordinance) may or may not be the number that survived the 2026 rewrite. Confirm the current, exact size cap, setback, and parking standard for a specific address directly with the relevant city or county planning department rather than relying on a single web summary.

3. Pending zoning reform in the Las Vegas Valley

No major pending zoning-code reform -- a comprehensive rewrite, a citywide upzoning or "missing middle" initiative, or a ballot measure -- was identified for the City of Las Vegas or Clark County as of September 2026. The most significant recent change to zoning-adjacent rules in this metro is the statewide ADU law, AB 396, covered in Section 2 above; because it took effect July 1, 2026, it's now enacted rather than pending.

That doesn't mean the valley's underlying zoning map is static. Individual rezoning cases move through the Clark County Zoning Commission and the Las Vegas Planning Commission on an ongoing basis, reflecting continued fast growth: UNLV's Center for Business and Economic Research forecasts Clark County adding roughly 204,000 residents between 2026 and 2036. Examples moving through the pipeline in 2026 include a Clark County Zoning Commission hearing (agenda date September 2, 2026) on rezoning county-owned public-facility land for a veterans'-housing project, and a roughly 6,000-home development approved for northwest Las Vegas that same week. These are routine parcel-by-parcel rezonings and development approvals under the existing Title 19, Title 30, and related codes, not changes to the codes themselves -- worth distinguishing from genuine zoning-code reform when reading local coverage.

4. Nevada HOA law: NRS Chapter 116

Nevada's HOA law lives in NRS Chapter 116, based on the Uniform Common-Interest Ownership Act framework and commonly called Nevada's Common-Interest Ownership Act. It governs condominiums, planned communities, and cooperatives statewide -- which in practice means it's the law behind the vast majority of the Las Vegas Valley's master-planned communities, including HOA-governed communities such as Summerlin and Southern Highlands (unincorporated Clark County) and Green Valley, Anthem, and Sun City Anthem (all inside the City of Henderson) -- regardless of which city or county otherwise holds zoning authority over the land.

Nevada is unusual in giving common-interest communities a dedicated state regulator: HOAs must register with the state's Common-Interest Communities and Condominium Hotels (CIC) Program within the Nevada Real Estate Division, and homeowners can escalate disputes to that program's Ombudsman's Office and, if needed, to hearing panels or the Nevada Real Estate Commission -- a resource many states without a dedicated HOA regulator don't offer.

On foreclosure, NRS 116 was significantly reshaped by SFR Investments Pool 1 v. U.S. Bank, a 2014 Nevada Supreme Court decision confirming that an HOA's "super-priority" lien -- not merely a payment priority, but true lien priority -- could wipe out a first mortgage if left unpaid through foreclosure. That ruling triggered a wave of litigation, followed by legislative reforms (most notably 2015's SB 306) that added stronger notice-and-cure requirements and a mediation option before an association can foreclose over unpaid assessments. Under the statute as it stands (NRS 116.3116), the portion of an HOA's lien that carries super-priority status over a first mortgage is capped at nine months of regular assessments, plus certain nuisance-abatement charges the association is separately authorized to recover -- a meaningfully more protective, and more precisely limited, framework than a state where HOA liens carry no such cap.

Day-to-day homeowner protections under the statute include the right to inspect and copy HOA financial and governance records, advance notice of board meetings (with meetings generally required to be open to members), a due-process hearing right before an association can impose a fine, and a requirement that associations periodically study their reserve funds so major repairs are planned for rather than sprung on owners as surprise special assessments. Buyers purchasing into a common-interest community are also entitled to a resale package disclosing the CC&Rs, the association's financial condition, and any pending litigation before closing.

5. Las Vegas's historic districts -- designated vs. just old

Worth separating clearly: a listing on the National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) is largely honorific -- it can unlock certain tax incentives but does not, by itself, impose binding local design review on what an owner can do to a property. A local historic district designation, by contrast, comes with binding review of exterior alterations, additions, and demolitions by the City of Las Vegas's own Historic Preservation Commission, which maintains the city's Historic Property Register separately from the federal NRHP. An old or architecturally distinct neighborhood can carry a well-known "historic" name in local real-estate branding without necessarily having either kind of formal protection, so the two shouldn't be assumed to be the same thing.

By the city's own account, two residential neighborhoods currently sit on its local register with binding design review: John S. Park, just east of downtown (bounded roughly by Charleston Boulevard and Las Vegas Boulevard), which carries both NRHP and local designation, and the Beverly Green Historic District (bounded by East Saint Louis Avenue, East Oakey Boulevard, South 6th Street, and Rexford Drive), which the city designated locally on September 21, 2016 -- notably, Beverly Green's protection is local only; it does not carry a separate NRHP listing. The Historic Preservation Commission's local register also covers individual non-residential landmarks, including the Huntridge Theater, the Historic Westside School, the La Concha Motel lobby (now the Neon Museum's entrance), and the former U.S. Post Office and Courthouse (now home to the National Museum of Organized Crime and Law Enforcement).

Huntridge itself is a more nuanced case than it's often given credit for. The broader Huntridge neighborhood -- Las Vegas's first postwar tract subdivision, built 1941-44 -- does not carry a blanket NRHP historic-district listing or a neighborhood-wide local design-review overlay. What is separately, individually listed (both nationally and locally) is the Huntridge Theater, a single non-residential building at 1208 East Charleston Boulevard added to the National Register on July 22, 1993. Individual homes within Huntridge have since been added to the city's local register one at a time -- most recently reported in late 2024 -- rather than the neighborhood being protected as a whole, so a given Huntridge address's design-review status genuinely depends on whether that specific property has been individually designated.

The Berkley Square Neighborhood Historic District, a 148-home subdivision designed in 1949 by the prominent African-American architect Paul Revere Williams and one of the first developments of its kind built for Las Vegas's Black community, was added to the National Register of Historic Places on November 21, 2009. Whether it also carries the City of Las Vegas's binding local design-review designation (as opposed to NRHP status alone) wasn't confirmed against the city's own local-register list this pass and should be checked directly for a specific property.

McNeil Estates, a mid-century neighborhood west of downtown developed in the 1950s by architects Walter Zick and Harris Sharp, is frequently listed alongside these other neighborhoods in real-estate coverage of Las Vegas's "historic" areas -- but no NRHP listing or City of Las Vegas local historic-district designation for McNeil Estates as a whole turned up in this research. Given how much a genuine local design-review designation can affect renovation permits, timelines, and cost for owners -- window replacements, additions, and demolitions can all require extra approval inside a real local historic district -- confirm the current, exact designation status of any specific property directly with the City of Las Vegas's Historic Preservation Commission before buying based on a neighborhood's historic reputation alone.

6. Zoning in the metro's other cities: Henderson, North Las Vegas, and Boulder City

Outside the City of Las Vegas's own Title 19, this metro has several other independently incorporated cities, each running its own separate zoning and planning authority rather than deferring to Las Vegas or Clark County. Henderson (incorporated 1953, the metro's second-largest city) zones under its own Title 19 of the Henderson Municipal Code -- officially the Henderson Development Code, with its current version adopted April 19, 2022 -- administered by the city's Community Development Department. It covers established master-planned areas like Green Valley (Henderson's original master-planned neighborhood, developed starting in 1979) and newer ones like Anthem, both of which are HOA-governed communities inside Henderson city limits rather than separate municipalities of their own.

North Las Vegas (incorporated May 1, 1946, the metro's third-largest city) runs its own police, fire, and planning departments and zones under Title 17 (the Zoning Ordinance) of the North Las Vegas Municipal Code, covering a footprint of just over 100 square miles that includes the master-planned Aliante community in the city's far north, built out largely in the 2000s.

Boulder City (incorporated 1960) is the outlier. Its city charter prohibits gambling within city limits entirely, a ban that survived incorporation and still stands -- making it one of only two places in Nevada, along with the small town of Panaca in Lincoln County, where casino gaming is illegal, a genuine governance curiosity in a state otherwise built around it. Boulder City also runs one of the valley's most restrictive growth-control regimes, in place since 1979: the current iteration, voter-approved Growth Control Measure S (adopted 2016, sunsetting 2035), caps new residential building permits at roughly 120 per year, limits any single developer to no more than half of that annual allotment over a two-year period, and sets an overall population cap of 58,200 for the city -- a slow-growth planning tradition reinforced by the fact that Boulder City is largely hemmed in by Lake Mead National Recreation Area and other surrounding federal land.

One more completeness note: Mesquite, in the far northeast corner of the metro, is also its own independently incorporated city with its own government, separate from all of the above -- though it falls outside the scope of the cities this page covers in detail. Bottom line across this whole page: there is no single "Las Vegas metro" zoning code. Each incorporated city sets its own rules under its own title number, unincorporated Clark County sets its own separate rules for everywhere else (including Summerlin and Southern Highlands) under Title 30, and confirming which jurisdiction actually has authority over a specific parcel should be the first step, not an assumption.

7. How we keep this page current

The structural framework described in Sections 1, 4, and 6 -- that the City of Las Vegas zones under its own Title 19 UDC, that Clark County, Henderson, and North Las Vegas each run separate codes (Title 30, Title 19, and Title 17 respectively), that Nevada HOAs are governed by NRS Chapter 116 with a dedicated state Ombudsman's office, and that Boulder City's charter bans gaming and caps residential growth -- reflects long-standing, structurally stable Nevada and local law and is the least likely part of this page to change quickly.

The specific figures nested inside that framework are the most likely to drift, and 2026 has already been an unusually active year for them: Nevada's new statewide ADU law, AB 396, forced the City of Las Vegas, Henderson, and Clark County to rewrite their accessory-dwelling-unit standards on a compressed July 1, 2026 timeline, which is exactly why this page describes the process and each jurisdiction's compliance status (Section 2) rather than quoting a single, possibly-already-superseded numeric size cap. Other figures worth re-checking directly before relying on them for a specific transaction include NRS 116's nine-month super-priority lien cap in the event of any future Nevada Legislature amendment (Section 4), whether the Berkley Square Historic District carries local as well as National Register status (Section 5), and Boulder City's exact current permit-allotment rules under Growth Control Measure S (Section 6). If you spot something on this page that's changed, or notice a broken link, we'd like to know -- see our contact information.