By State › North Carolina

North Carolina: Laws & Legal Considerations

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North Carolina liberalized its rainwater harvesting rules substantially, and state law goes further than simple permission, it explicitly bars local governments from prohibiting the practice.

RuleNorth Carolina
Source water Rooftop or other catchment
Permit required No, for residential systems under 5,000 gallons
Permitted uses Non-potable: toilet flushing, laundry, irrigation; must be a system entirely separate from the municipal water supply
Legal protection from local bans N.C. General Statute §143-138 bars any local building code from prohibiting cistern use for non-potable purposes
HOA rules HOAs may regulate appearance (matching siding color, screening) but cannot use aesthetic rules to effectively ban a system

Where to find it: the N.C. Department of Environmental Quality (deq.nc.gov) publishes rainwater harvesting guidance; larger or non-residential systems fall under the state Building Code Council’s Appendix C-1 requirements.

Water rights: riparian reasonable use, with roots in an 1868 state case

North Carolina follows the same riparian reasonable-use doctrine common across the Southeast, tracing back to a specific 19th-century state Supreme Court case.

ConceptHow it works in North Carolina
Who holds the right Owners of land adjacent to a natural watercourse
Governing principle Reasonable use: a riparian owner may use water for domestic, agricultural, and industrial purposes, but not in a way that unreasonably interferes with other riparian owners
Foundational case Willcox v. Whisnant (1868), which established the reasonable-use framework still applied today

Where to find it: the UNC School of Government (sog.unc.edu) publishes guidance on North Carolina water law for local governments and property owners.

Concealed carry: shall-issue with mandatory training, administered at the county level

North Carolina requires a permit to carry concealed, and unlike Pennsylvania’s no-training shall-issue system, it requires state-approved firearms training before a sheriff will issue one.

RequirementDetail
Standard Shall-issue: a county Sheriff issues a Concealed Handgun Permit (CHP) to any applicant who meets the statutory criteria
Minimum age 21
Residency North Carolina resident for at least 30 days (or military permanently posted in the state)
Training required A state-approved firearms training course, unlike Pennsylvania's no-training system
Duty to inform A CHP holder must inform a law enforcement officer they're carrying upon initial contact

Where this sits relative to the other states covered so far

North Carolina is the first state on this site to pair a shall-issue standard with a real training requirement administered directly at the county level, a meaningfully different combination from Pennsylvania’s no-training shall-issue system, California’s state-administered 16-hour course, and the permitless systems in Utah, Texas, Florida, Ohio, and Georgia.

Sources