A quick screening tool for whether your project is likely to need a licensed structural engineer before plan check — so you can budget for it early instead of discovering it in a correction letter.
Every result is a planning estimate, not a quote or an engineering determination. Real numbers depend on site conditions, existing structure, engineering requirements, and your jurisdiction’s current fee schedule. For structural and engineering work we coordinate with a licensed engineer — we do not perform or stamp engineering ourselves. Get a project-specific estimate before committing to a budget.
Plan checkers are not looking at your project type. They are looking at whether the loads have a clear, verifiable path to the ground, and whether anyone with a license has taken responsibility for that path.
Load path. The moment a bearing wall comes out, something has to carry what it was carrying. A beam, a post, a footing under that post. Conventional framing tables in the residential code cover a lot of routine cases, but once the opening gets wide or the load above is unusual, a plan checker will want calculations.
Lateral. California is seismic country. New homes and second-story additions change the mass and stiffness of the whole structure, so shear walls and hold-downs have to be designed rather than picked from a table. That is why those two scopes almost always involve an engineer regardless of how simple the floor plan looks.
Span. Vaulted ceilings, ridge beams, and long clear openings for a great room push members past what prescriptive tables allow. Engineered lumber sizing usually comes with calculations attached.
Soil and slope. Expansive clay, a hillside, a creek setback or a mapped fault zone all move foundation design out of the prescriptive world. Some Bay Area jurisdictions require a soils report before they will even accept the drawings, and the foundation then has to be designed to that report.
We draw the project — site plan, floor plans, elevations, sections, details, the full permit set — and we prepare the Title 24 energy documentation. When the structure needs engineering, we bring in an independently licensed structural engineer who runs the calculations and applies their own stamp to their own work. We do not perform or stamp engineering ourselves, and we never represent that we do.
What we do handle is the coordination, which is where most projects lose time. The engineer needs accurate as-built dimensions, a clear framing intent and a defined scope before they can price the work. If they get that late, or get it wrong, the structural sheets arrive out of step with the architectural sheets and plan check catches the discrepancy. So the practical advice is simple: decide early. Finding out at plan check that you need engineering typically adds two to four weeks and a resubmittal, while knowing at design stage lets the engineer size members before the drawings are finished, so everything submits together.
See how we manage that handoff on our Engineering Review & Stamps page, or look at the structural and Title 24 combo if your project needs both under one coordinated submittal.
No. We are a drafting, design and Title 24 documentation firm. We produce drawings and compliance documents. When a project requires structural calculations or a wet stamp, we coordinate with an independently licensed structural engineer who performs that work and applies their own stamp to it.
No, and it is not meant to. It is a screening aid that flags the conditions that usually pull an engineer in, so you can plan and budget. The determination belongs to a licensed engineer and to your building department, which makes the final call on what it will accept.
Not always. A straightforward single-story detached ADU on a flat lot can sometimes be permitted with conventional light-frame construction and no separate structural stamp. Hillside sites, expansive soils, unusual spans and larger units change that quickly, so it is worth settling early rather than assuming.
As a rule of thumb, walls retaining more than about four feet of earth, or any wall carrying a surcharge such as a driveway, slope or structure above it, are generally designed by an engineer. Shorter garden walls with nothing loading them are often permitted from standard details. Your city sets the threshold it enforces.
Tell us what you're building and we'll get back to you with next steps — usually within one business day.
(408) 634-6655
Yuna Drafting