Chesterfield County's New Zoning Ordinance, Explained

ZOMod is no longer a draft -- it's the current law

Chesterfield's Zoning Ordinance Modernization project, known as ZOMod, spent several years moving through public drafts, planning commission review, and board hearings before the Board of Supervisors gave it final approval on September 17, 2025. The new ordinance became effective January 1, 2026, replacing the county's prior, decades-old zoning code in its entirety. Any zoning information about a Chesterfield parcel dated before that -- including an older listing, survey, or even an outdated version of this site -- should be treated as superseded; the district names, boundaries, and rules a parcel operated under before 2026 may not be the same today.

Fourteen districts instead of twenty-four

The new ordinance consolidates what had been 24 separate zoning districts down to 14, intended by the county to make the code more predictable and less reliant on case-by-case conditional-use approvals. The residential-to-rural spectrum runs from Agricultural (A) through Rural Community (RC), Semi-Rural Neighborhood (SR), Suburban Community (SC), Semi-Urban Neighborhood (SU), Transition Residential (TR), Urban Residential (UR), and Alternative Residential (AR), alongside a Mixed-Use Center (MU) district for developments blending residential, commercial, and office uses, and a Warehouse & Distribution (WD) district that specifically requires logistics-oriented projects to locate near a major highway, intended to preserve other industrial land for higher-value manufacturing uses.

For a rural-land buyer, the two districts that matter most are Agricultural (A) and the newly created Rural Community (RC). The Agricultural (A) designation is retained under the new ordinance and still covers more than half of Chesterfield's 424 square miles -- meaning that even after this overhaul, a majority of the county's land area remains zoned agricultural rather than suburban or urban. The new Rural Community (RC) district specifically allows subdivisions with lots of at least 5 acres in rural parts of the county served by new or existing public roads -- a distinct, named mechanism for rural-scale subdivision that didn't exist as its own district under the prior 24-district code.

What this means if you're buying land in Chesterfield

Because the entire ordinance is new as of January 1, 2026, the single most important step for any Chesterfield land purchase right now is confirming which of the 14 new districts a specific parcel falls under, and what that district currently allows -- do not assume a district name or boundary from before the rewrite still applies. The county has said the conversion to the new districts should have little to no practical impact on already-developed neighborhoods, but a raw or rural parcel -- especially one near the shifting edge between the Agricultural (A) and Rural Community (RC) districts -- is exactly the kind of property where the district assignment can meaningfully affect what you can build or how you can subdivide. Confirm directly with the county's Planning Department before finalizing any subdivision or building plan, particularly if you're relying on the new RC district's 5-acre subdivision option.