Vancouver's entire zoning code changed three weeks ago, and the code aggregators haven't caught up

Vancouver replaced all of Title 20 in Ordinance M-4533, adopted June 1 and effective July 31, 2026. Both of the major municipal-code aggregators are still serving the superseded code — one of them states outright that it is current only through an ordinance from December 2025. The only accurate text is a PDF on the city's own website, which is where every rule on our Vancouver page was read. This matters beyond Vancouver: those aggregators are what most guides, most tools, and most AI answers are built on, so for a city of roughly two hundred thousand people the publicly available answer about what you can build is currently wrong nearly everywhere you might look. Two findings from the new code worth knowing: there is no ADU-specific height limit at all, so a detached ADU takes its district's building-type height, and unlike most of its neighbours Vancouver grants no setback reduction for an alley. Anything permitted between June 2025 and July 2026 fell under interim ordinance M-4517, a different regime again.

Current verified rules: Vancouver ADU rules · All Washington cities