Decoding the International Code Council pt. 1

As I’ve described previously, the International Code Council (ICC) is a strange beast in the pantheon of American organizations. Nominally, it is a non-profit association of building officials and construction industry groups that determines residential and commercial building codes in the US and Canada — everything from how soundproof your walls must be¹ to how many toilets your office has². State and local officials do not have the expertise or resources³ to independently come to their own determination about what constitutes a good building, so they wholesale adopt the codes of the ICC into their local laws with minor modifications. It is hard to think of another private institution in American life that has near copy-and-paste access to the lawbooks. This mechanism is how the ICC invisibly decides vast swathes of the built environment that Americans inhabit everyday.⁴

Much progress has been made towards reducing America’s housing shortage by reforming our zoning laws. The next frontier is reducing construction cost, which represent about 65% of the cost of a home⁵.

In this context, scrutiny of the ICC has intensified. Some have criticized specific rules that add unnecessary cost and others⁶ have examined the process⁷ by which the ICC decides the standards⁸ to promulgate.

My contribution to this movement is to understand the ICC as an organization in and of itself, separate from the building codes. I will analyze its public documents such as filings and governance records. I hope these breadcrumbs can help others in the movement drive real reform.

The 2024 IRS Form 990

For today’s article, I have combed through the ICC’s latest (2024) 990 filing and associated schedules⁹, which is the annual tax filing for a non-profit.¹⁰

Basic Facts

The ICC is based in Country Club Hills, IL.¹¹ It is organized as a 501(c)(6), a tax-exempt designation which is reserved for business leagues that promote the overall welfare of a business interest (think Chamber of Commerce).¹² The organization employs 622 people and brought in net profits of $7.8M in 2024 compared to $6.2M in 2023.

Revenue Breakdown

Of the $110M in revenue in 2024, “program services”¹³ represent $95M. The ICC describes its top three program services as:

1. Conformity assessments: “The ICC acts as a single-source conformity assessment solution … product evaluation reports, inspection, and laboratory testing fees”

2. Publishing and content services: these are the royalties and sales of printed contents and digital access to the codes.

3. Member services: training, education, and certification.

The lion’s share of program service revenue comes from the Conformity Assessments at $65M distantly followed by “Certification” at $14M.

In the $15M of revenue not considered program services, sales from inventory — which I take to mean books and other code-related publications — are $6.8M, investment income off its sizable $61M nest egg of marketable securities is $5.5M, and royalties is $1.7M.

Assessing Conformity Assessments

Revenue source reveals the true priorities of the organization and the picture that emerges is that the ICC’s primary business is to perform the conformity assessment services. This was a surprise to me. My perception (and the projection) of the ICC is that it is a collection of building inspectors, structural engineers, and developers. They get together to write the codes, train their junior members, and certify them to the world. Maybe they do some lobbying too. But this member-driven part of the business is $32M of revenue¹⁴, half the conformity assessment services.

To reiterate, its bread and butter is conducting analyses that its own codes require.¹⁵ It gets to decide what are the requirements, those get copied and pasted into the laws, and then it charges for the required analyses.

And the behavior of the organization follows: it aggressively defends its codes from use by private actors. I am not privy to their internal deliberations, but I speculate that their strategy is to give the code away for free to municipalities and their building inspectors, then charge a license for private actors such as engineers and architects to reference the codes in their work. Anyone who wishes to interpret the codes (whether by human intelligence or otherwise) for profit must pay the ICC a tax. Accordingly, its major moves have been to defends its prerogative over the codes. It sued the startup Upcodes for making its codes available on the internet without paying a license (a court ruled against the ICC in 2025, finding that text that have been adopted into laws cannot be copyrighted).¹⁶ The ICC then responded by lobbying Congress to pass a carveout which would overrule the court (the Pro Codes Act, which is in the House as of this writing).¹⁷ This strategic initiative to lock down its ownership of the codes is ongoing. It attracts the energy of senior leadership that indicates it is of high priority.

Stay Tuned…

Just looking at the revenue part of the most recent public disclosures revealed that the ICC’s core business is different from common perception. In the next few articles, I will dive into topics like:

1. Executive compensation

2. The flow of money between the ICC and its subsidiaries

3. How the ICC maintains its 501(c)(6) status

4. The financial history of the ICC

1. IBC 1206. https://codes.iccsafe.org/content/IBC2024V2.0/chapter-12-interior-environment#IBC2024V2.0_Ch12_Sec1206

2. IBC 2902. https://codes.iccsafe.org/content/IBC2024V2.0/chapter-29-plumbing-systems#IBC2024V2.0_Ch29_Sec2902

3. Or willingness to take responsibility for mistakes

4. An elder fish approached a young fish. “Good morning!” said the elder fish, “the water is wonderful today.” "What is water?” replied the young fish.

5. NAHB https://www.nahb.org/-/media/NAHB/news-and-economics/docs/housing-economics-plus/special-studies/2025/special-study-cost-of-constructing-a-home-2024-january-2025.pdf?rev=00a42a1ce63b4a22a4dba9bda8af954b

6. Zwick https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0xr4x8m0

7. NYT investigation of secret deal for NAHB to be involved in ICC rule making https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/26/climate/building-codes-secret-deal.html

8. https://gizmodo.com/a-travesty-in-the-world-of-building-codes-could-erode-1846415766

9. https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/363999004/202533219349327548/full. For the purposes of this article, assume all figures cited about the ICC comes from this document.

10. The earliest it might submit its 2025 Form 990 is April 15 and the latest is November 15.

11. Fittingly, the ICC pays for its CEO’s social club membership dues. See Schedule J Part I Line 1a.

12. The NFL is a 501(c)(6) too but with a special carveout. A story for another post.

13. Defined by the IRS as “activities which further the purpose of the organization for which it was exempted”

14. $14M in certification, $6M in training and education, $4M in member services, $6.8M in sales of inventory presumed to be code books, and $1.7M in royalties presumably on the codes.

15. An economist conjugates the verb “to profit”: I profit, you have a moat, he/she is a rent seeker.

16. https://techcrunch.com/2020/11/16/a-court-decision-in-favor-of-startup-upcodes-may-help-shape-open-access-to-the-law/

17. https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/4009