Buying Land in Davis County, Utah

An honest starting point: Davis County is mostly a built-out metro county, not a raw-land market

Davis County sits inside the Salt Lake City metro area along the Wasatch Front, and its numbers reflect that: about 1,248 people per square mile, the second-highest population density of any Utah county, packed into the smallest land area of any county in the state. Nearly all of that land is already incorporated into one of the county's cities -- Farmington (the county seat), Layton, Bountiful, Kaysville, Clearfield, Syracuse, Woods Cross, and others -- each with its own municipal zoning code, not the county's. For a buyer coming to this site looking for raw land in the way this site typically covers it (rural acreage, agricultural or recreational parcels, land with a genuine off-grid or homestead use case), Davis County is not that kind of market for the overwhelming majority of its area -- the honest comparison, as with a metro-adjacent county elsewhere in the Mountain West, is that a narrow rural niche exists at the county's edges rather than across the county broadly.

Davis County's own Planning Commission, designated the Land Use Authority under Utah Code 17-27a-302, administers the county's Land Use and Development Management Ordinance (Title 15) for the unincorporated remainder -- and the county's own zoning map explicitly covers only unincorporated areas, not the incorporated cities inside county boundaries. The county has also been actively revising its subdivision ordinance in recent years (a draft final subdivision ordinance circulated in 2024), so confirm you're working from the current version of Title 15 rather than an older cached copy before evaluating a specific unincorporated parcel.

Where the rural niche actually is: the Great Salt Lake shorelands and the AE zone

The county's unincorporated agricultural land is concentrated in its northwest corner, near West Point, Syracuse, and the Farmington Bay/West Farmington waterbird-survey areas along the Great Salt Lake. The county's Agriculture Estate/Limited Agriculture (AE) zone here is described in county code as designed to promote and preserve agriculture and open space while allowing relatively small lot sizes at low overall dwelling density -- but this area also directly borders or overlaps the Great Salt Lake Shorelands Preserve, a roughly 4,000-combined-acre holding built up jointly by the federal Mitigation Commission and The Nature Conservancy since the 1990s to protect wetland and upland habitat along the lake's eastern shore. Davis County has its own Shorelands Master Plan and a jointly adopted Wetlands Conservation Plan governing land use in this zone -- see the wetlands page linked below for how that plan interacts with federal Section 404 permitting, and why neither one alone confirms a specific parcel's status. The state has also flagged the need for updated flood-condition mapping given how much Great Salt Lake levels have fluctuated in recent years; a parcel in this part of the county should be checked against current floodplain maps before assuming buildability.

Hill Air Force Base: a real overlay constraint layered on top of local zoning

Hill Air Force Base, one of the county's largest employers and landholders, runs an Air Installations Compatible Use Zones (AICUZ) program -- most recently updated in a comprehensive 2018 study -- that maps aircraft noise contours and accident-potential zones around the base and lays out which land uses are considered compatible within each zone. In practice, AICUZ guidance steers development in affected areas away from high-density residential, schools, and hospitals and toward agricultural, light-industrial, or recreational uses, and city and county zoning codes in the affected area may incorporate AICUZ compatibility as an explicit requirement rather than a mere recommendation. This is a constraint that exists independently of a parcel's underlying municipal or county zoning district -- a lot zoned for residential use in a city's code can still sit inside an AICUZ noise or accident-potential zone that limits what can actually be approved. Confirm AICUZ status for a specific Davis County parcel with the relevant city or county planning department (and, where needed, Hill AFB's own community-planning office) before assuming a zoning designation alone tells the full story.