Buying Land in Pinal County, Arizona

A zoning ordinance being rewritten in real time -- confirm the current version

Pinal County's Planning Division administers land use countywide under the Development Services Code, and Title 2 of that code (Zoning) is in the middle of its first comprehensive update since 2012. Rather than replacing the whole ordinance at once, the county is revising it section by section on a published schedule: accessory dwelling units (targeted December 2025), special events and street naming/addressing (February 2026), hillside development and marijuana regulations (April 2026), sign code and parking code (June 2026), group homes and schools/microschools (August 2026), and outdoor lighting/dark sky overlay (October 2026), according to the county's own posted timeline as of this page's review.

For a land buyer, the practical implication is straightforward: don't treat any secondhand summary of Pinal County zoning -- including older real estate materials, or general descriptions -- as necessarily current. A rule that applied in 2024 on hillside development, sign placement, or accessory dwelling units may be different by the time you close, and a rule that hasn't been revised yet may change on the county's own posted schedule. Confirm the specific, currently-effective standard for your parcel's zone directly with the Planning Division before relying on it.

Arizona's fastest-growing county -- and a jurisdiction that's actively shrinking

Pinal County's population grew from roughly 180,000 in 2000 to about 430,000 in 2020 and an estimated 539,000 by 2025 -- a 3.7% one-year growth rate that made it the highest of Arizona's 15 counties and one of the fastest-growing counties in the nation, driven substantially by people relocating from the pricier Phoenix metro for cheaper housing in places like Casa Grande and Maricopa. Coolidge grew more than 48% between 2020 and 2025 alone, with Maricopa, Casa Grande, and Eloy also each growing more than 25% in that span.

That growth is reshaping county governance itself in one specific, documented way worth knowing if you're looking at land in the San Tan Valley area: San Tan Valley voted to incorporate and, as of July 1, 2026, the Pinal County Board of Supervisors transferred planning, zoning, and land-use authority there to the new town's own government. A parcel in that area is no longer governed by Pinal County's zoning ordinance the way it was before incorporation -- confirm which jurisdiction (the Town of San Tan Valley or Pinal County) actually has authority over a specific parcel before assuming county rules apply. Florence, historically well outside the Phoenix growth corridor, is also now seeing new development pushing toward San Tan Valley from its northwest side.

The groundwater freeze, in practical Pinal terms

The state hub covers the Assured Water Supply program and its 2023-2026 legal turmoil generally; Pinal County is where that turmoil has the most direct, concrete effect on whether new subdivisions actually get built. ADWR's own leadership has stated that new Assured Water Supply applications relying on native groundwater within the existing Pinal groundwater model area will not be approved, and that stance has, in practice, halted construction of new groundwater-dependent subdivisions on the periphery of the Valley -- a real, documented disruption for developers and, by extension, for land values in areas where a project's viability depends on getting that certificate.

The Ag-to-Urban program gives some developers a path around this: under 2025's SB1611 (effective September 26, 2025) and a 2026 amendment (SB1335), holders of certain agricultural groundwater rights in the Phoenix and Pinal AMAs can permanently retire irrigated farmland in exchange for Groundwater Savings Credits a developer can apply toward the 100-year physical-availability requirement. Whether a specific project or area has access to this path, or has otherwise secured an alternative water source (a designated provider, surface water, or effluent), is a case-by-case question that changes as the legal and legislative situation develops -- confirm current status directly with ADWR's Pinal groundwater supply updates and, for a specific subdivision, its own public report and water-provider documentation, rather than assuming either that groundwater-based approval is impossible or that Ag-to-Urban solves it. Note that this whole framework applies only to fee-land subdivisions -- it has no bearing on the Gila River and Ak-Chin reservations inside the county, covered below.

Two self-governing reservations sit inside the county, outside all of the above

The Gila River Indian Community and the Ak-Chin Indian Community both hold substantial trust land inside Pinal County, and neither is touched by the zoning rewrite, the growth story, or the groundwater fight described above -- both nations govern their own leasing under HEARTH Act self-governance authority, entirely outside Pinal County's Planning Division. See the dedicated tribal-trust-land-status page below for how leasing actually works on each, and the dedicated well-water page for the county's own local review step required for a small-parcel exempt well.