Buying Land in Billings County, North Dakota

Roughly half the county is government land, not private -- and that shapes both what you can buy and the local economy

Billings County's own comprehensive plan states plainly that approximately 50 percent of the county is government land -- held and managed by the U.S. Forest Service as part of the Little Missouri National Grasslands, by the Bureau of Land Management, by the National Park Service, and by the State of North Dakota. Theodore Roosevelt National Park itself, split across the county's North and South Units, accounts for 46,355 acres inside Billings County alone. That's a genuinely different land-tenure picture than most North Dakota counties, where private agricultural land dominates: here, roughly half the county's total acreage simply isn't available to buy, regardless of what a map's total county area might suggest.

The flip side, per the same comprehensive plan, is that Billings County's economy is described as highly dependent on economic uses of federal land -- livestock grazing leases, mineral leases, and recreation and tourism access chief among them. That means federal land-management decisions (grazing allotment changes, National Grassland resource-management-plan updates, National Park Service visitation and access policy) can move the county's economic needle more directly than they would in a county with a larger private land base. For a buyer, this also means checking a specific parcel's actual boundary against public land -- and confirming any grazing lease, easement, or access arrangement tied to adjacent federal land -- rather than assuming private land here functions independently of its federal neighbors.

A zoning ordinance built around a real tourism economy, not just ranching

Billings County has an active, maintained zoning ordinance -- and unlike a purely agricultural county's code, it has been specifically amended to address the kind of visitor-driven land uses that a national-park gateway county actually sees: the county's Zoning Board and County Commission have approved amendments covering campgrounds, glamping campgrounds, and recreational vehicle parks, and the county separately permits small park-model tiny homes on a permanent foundation. See the glamping and tiny-homes pages linked below for the current specifics -- minimum acreage, density standards, and permitting steps.

This is worth knowing in both directions: it means the county has a real regulatory framework for tourism-oriented land uses that a buyer with that kind of plan can actually work within, but it also means standard agricultural or residential assumptions from elsewhere in rural North Dakota may not directly apply. Confirm your parcel's district and any recreational-vehicle-park-specific provisions directly with the county's Planning & Zoning office before assuming a use is or isn't allowed.

Badlands terrain: real building-site considerations beyond the ordinary

Billings County sits within North Dakota's badlands -- a landscape of steep, erosion-prone buttes and ridges cut by the Little Missouri River, dramatically different from the flat-to-rolling farmland that defines most of the rest of the state. Local conservation advocates have specifically pointed to ridge-top and viewshed development in the badlands counties, including Billings, as a concern, and have called on county zoning to address it. Whatever your plans for a parcel, badlands terrain deserves real, specific engineering attention to slope stability, erosion, access-road grading, and drainage -- conditions that a standard flat-farmland due-diligence checklist won't fully cover.