Home › Residential Roofing Kamloops
Kamloops, BC
Most reroofs on a Kamloops house need no building permit at all. The ones that do carry a rule almost nobody mentions until the day it stops the job: the City will only take the application from the owner, or from someone the owner has authorised in writing.
The useful starting point for a Kamloops homeowner is that a like-for-like reroof is not permit work. The City says so directly, and it says so in a document written for exactly this question.
City of Kamloops — Bulletin No. 23-01, “When Building Permits Are Required”
Only the owner, as described within the Building Bylaw, or the owner’s agent/contractor with a signed Owners Authorization Form can apply for a permit. Where there is more than one owner, only a single signature is required to apply for most building permits.City of Kamloops Bulletin No. 23-01, April 2023, revised April 2025, issued under Building Bylaw No. 11-84 and the BC Building Code 2024.
That sentence is the whole point of this page. Everything else written for homeowners about roofing permits argues about whether one is needed. Hardly anything explains who is allowed to ask for it, and that is the part that stalls jobs.
Whether a permit is needed at all is settled elsewhere on this site: the exemption and the material-weight trigger are covered on the roof repair page, and what counts as increasing dead load is covered in detail on the roof replacement page. This page assumes you have landed on the side where a permit is required, and deals with what happens next.
Not the occupant. Not the person paying for the work. Not a family member who lives there. The registered owner on title, or an agent that owner has authorised on a signed form.
Worth noting what this does not complicate: joint ownership. The bulletin says plainly that where there is more than one owner, a single signature is enough for most building permits, so two names on title is not the obstacle people expect it to be.
In the ordinary case the rule is invisible, because the owner is the person standing in the driveway talking to the roofer. It becomes a real obstacle in four situations that are all common in a city with a lot of rental stock and a lot of property changing hands:
A roofing contractor can absolutely handle the permit process. Most established ones prefer to, because they know what the City wants to see and they would rather not have the schedule hostage to a homeowner’s inbox. What they cannot do is act as applicant on their own authority.
So the practical division is this. You sign; they submit. The authorisation is a one-page administrative step, and it is the step that converts “my roofer is handling it” from an assumption into a fact.
Two things worth asking any Kamloops roofer directly, before signing anything:
Does this job need a permit at all, and why? If the answer is a confident yes for a straight reroof, that is a flag. The City’s own bulletin places reroofing among the work that does not require a permit, provided dead loads and slope are unchanged. A roofer quoting a permit line for a like-for-like shingle replacement is either being cautious about something specific to your roof — which they should be able to name — or is working from generic content rather than the local rule.
Who is submitting, and under what authority? If they are submitting, you will be signing an authorisation. If you are submitting, you need to know what they need from you and when.
The City indicates that minor permits are typically issued within about ten working days, and that major additions and new construction run two to three weeks. Those are queue times that sit in front of the work, not alongside it.
Now put that against the Kamloops roofing calendar. Asphalt shingle wants warmth to seal its adhesive strip properly, which concentrates planned replacements into late spring through early autumn, which is also when every other homeowner in the city has worked out that their roof needs doing. A permit requirement discovered in June is a permit requirement that can push a job into August.
The sequence that avoids this is unexciting: establish whether the job is permit work before you are choosing between quotes, not after you have accepted one. A written inspection is the usual way to get that answered by someone who is not also bidding on the outcome.
Permit or no permit, a few things remain the homeowner’s and do not transfer to the contractor.
The decision about what goes back on. Material class is the thing most likely to move a job from exempt to permitted, because a heavier covering increases dead load. Deciding to upgrade from shingle to something substantially heavier is a decision with a regulatory consequence attached, and it is yours to make knowingly.
Access, and what is in the way. Driveway space for a bin and a materials drop, gates, vehicles, irrigation lines under the drip edge, and anything on the roof — satellite dishes, solar, a swamp cooler — that has to come off and go back. None of this is technically difficult and all of it is a delay when it surfaces on the morning of.
The paperwork you keep afterwards. Whatever the job was, the invoice should describe what was actually done and what was found underneath. Deck condition, anything replaced, how the flashings and penetrations were handled. On a house that changes hands every several years in this market, that record is the difference between a straightforward conversation with the next buyer and a discount.
A reroof on an occupied home is loud, dusty, and shorter than people expect. The noise is transmitted structurally rather than through the air, so it is felt through ceilings rather than heard through windows — closing a window does not help much. Nails and offcuts end up in the yard and in the gutters regardless of how careful the crew is, and the clean-up is a stated part of the scope or it is an argument later. If anything in the attic matters — stored boxes, an unsealed hatch — cover it, because debris comes through the deck from above when the old covering is stripped.
Tell us about the house and the roof, and we’ll pass it to a local Kamloops roofing company.
It is the City of Kamloops form by which a registered owner authorises someone else — usually the contractor — to submit a building permit application on their behalf. You only need it when the work requires a permit in the first place, which a straightforward reroof generally does not. When a permit is required and you would rather your roofer handled the paperwork, this signed form is what makes that legal. Without it the City will not accept the submission from them.
Not as the owner, because you are not the owner yet. The application has to come from the registered owner or from an agent the registered owner has authorised in writing. In practice that means either the seller applies, the seller authorises you or your contractor, or the work waits until title transfers. This is worth knowing early, because it is the sort of thing discovered the week a possession date is looming rather than the month before.
The requirement follows ownership, not occupancy. A tenant cannot authorise structural roof work on a property they rent. If you are a landlord arranging a reroof on a house you own, you are the applicant, and you may authorise your contractor in writing exactly as an owner-occupier would. If you are the tenant, the request has to route back through the owner before anything can be submitted.
Add the City’s processing time to whatever the roofer quotes for scheduling. The City indicates minor permits are typically issued in about ten working days, with major additions and new construction running two to three weeks. That is time before work starts, not time that overlaps with it, and it sits in front of a trade that is already busiest in the warm months.
Reroofing a detached structure sits in the same exemption as reroofing a house, provided it does not alter dead loads or slope. Adding to a detached structure, or attaching something to it, is treated differently by the bulletin and can require a permit. Because the line depends on what is actually being built rather than on the building type, confirm the specific job with the City’s Building Inspection Section before assuming either way.
No — a different rule applies, and it is stricter. The City requires written verification from the strata manager for strata work, and on almost every strata the roof is common property rather than something an individual owner controls. The sequence, and what you can actually do if your own ceiling is leaking, is set out on the strata roofing page.