LA Has Two Free ADU Plan Catalogs. Your Address Picks One.

ADU type diagrams from LA County Planning's Standard ADU Plans materials. LA County Planning.

You picked a free pre-approved ADU plan to skip the architect and the wait, and then learned there are two free catalogs in Los Angeles, run by two different governments, and you only get to use the one your lot qualifies for. Los Angeles City's LADBS and unincorporated Los Angeles County's Regional Planning each publish their own free pre-approved ADU designs, and today the city's free catalog holds a single active plan, the 455-square-foot YOU-ADU, while the county runs a broader menu of its own.

The short version:

• Two free public ADU plan catalogs cover Los Angeles: one from LA City (LADBS), one from unincorporated LA County (Regional Planning, with Public Works Building and Safety). They are separate programs at separate permit counters.
• Which one you can use depends on whether your lot sits inside the City of Los Angeles or in unincorporated county territory. An incorporated city like Pasadena or Glendale has neither.
• LA City's own free plan is currently a single design, the 455-square-foot YOU-ADU. Its private-firm plans read "Expired." The county's free County Catalog still offers pre-approved detached plans, including a 1,200-square-foot design.

Step one: find out whose counter you are standing at

Before you compare a single plan, settle jurisdiction, because it decides everything after it. If your address is inside the City of Los Angeles, your ADU goes through LADBS. If it sits in unincorporated county territory, the kind of place with a Los Angeles mailing address but no city of its own, it goes through LA County Planning and Public Works Building and Safety. And if you are in Pasadena, Glendale, Burbank, or Long Beach, you are in a separate incorporated city with its own building department and, in most cases, no free pre-approved catalog at all.

This is the part that trips up first-time owners and the A-du-curious alike: "LA" is not one permit system. The county's free plans are not valid inside the city, and the city's plan is not valid in the county. Look up your parcel first. Everything below assumes you already know which of the two counters is yours.

What the city counter gives you

LADBS runs a Standard Plan Program so that a design built repeatedly clears plan check faster. The catalog splits in two. One free plan is owned by the City of Los Angeles itself: the YOU-ADU, a one-story, one-bedroom design at 455 square feet, free to any city property owner. We walked through that plan and its four build paths when it landed earlier this month. It is a genuinely good deal. It is also 455 square feet, so your dining table is now a floor plan.

The rest of the city catalog is the interesting part. Those designs, the private-firm plans from Abodu, Welcome Projects, Jennifer Bonner, First Office, Fung and Blatt, and others, currently carry the status "Expired" on the LADBS page. They were pre-approved, then their approvals lapsed. So the practical count of free, ready-to-use city plans right now is one.

What the county counter gives you

Unincorporated LA County runs its own Standard ADU Plans Program through Regional Planning, and it is structured differently. There is a free County Catalog of plans pre-approved by both LA County Planning and Public Works Building and Safety, including a 1,200-square-foot detached design, plus a separate Private Designer Catalog where you pick a design and then buy the drawings from the architect who made them. Two departments sign off rather than one, which sounds slower and, on paper, is the tradeoff for a plan the county has already agreed to.

The county's catalog is also where the free menu still has more than one item on it. When we lined up California's city plan programs side by side in June, the pattern held: the depth of a free catalog varies wildly by jurisdiction, and the same homeowner can qualify for a rich menu or a thin one depending only on where a boundary line falls.

Where people get stuck. Three things. First, assuming a county plan works in the city, or the reverse; it does not, and a plan checker will tell you at the counter, not before. Second, treating "free plan" as "free permit." The plan set costs nothing; plan check, permit issuance, school fees where they apply, and the city's own surcharges are still yours to pay. Third, counting on an expired city design because it is still visible in the catalog. Listed is not the same as approved.

The cross-street check. Los Angeles is the odd one here. San Francisco runs a single pre-approved ADU catalog through DBI, built around 25-foot-lot row-house designs, with a review fee and a list of hazard-zone exclusions that rule a lot in or out. New York City runs one platform too, ADU for You, with 11 DOB-reviewed backyard designs, though the Regional Plan Association found only about 12 percent of one- and two-family lots actually qualify to use them. Both cities give you one government, one catalog, one counter. LA gives you two parallel free public catalogs from two different governments, and makes your parcel line choose between them.

Our read: in LA, the free-plan decision is really an address lottery, and right now unincorporated county homeowners hold the better ticket. The city's free menu has quietly shrunk to a single 455-square-foot design while its private plans lapsed; the county's still offers real choices. If a free pre-approved plan with options is what you are after, check which counter is yours before you fall for a rendering you cannot actually use.

One more number to keep honest: free is the plan, not the project. A pre-approved design saves you weeks of plan check and an architect's fee, often several thousand dollars, but the build itself still runs on LA construction costs, and the permit stack still adds up. Budget the plan as the discount it is, not the whole bill.

If you are staring at two catalogs and not sure which counter or which plan fits your lot, A-du's build marketplace can match your parcel to the plans and builders that actually apply to it.

The county is still updating its submittal instructions for the Private Designer Catalog, so expect that menu to grow before the city's does. Watch the counter that is yours.

Elsewhere on the ADU beat

• New York City's Plus One ADU program closed its latest intake after thousands of homeowners applied for financing of up to $395,000 per household, NYC HPD.
• New Cal Fire maps are set to pull hundreds more Altadena rebuilds into Chapter 7A wildfire-resistant construction rules once LA County adopts them, LAist.
• San Francisco's ordinance letting owners sell eligible ADUs as separate condos is now in effect, a path LA has not opened, Reuben, Junius and Rose.