About This Guide
An independent reference for patio covers, shade structures and outdoor rooms in Bakersfield and the 22 Kern County communities around it. It exists because the alternative was reading five sales pages and still not knowing what the City requires.
House with a covered entryA guide, not an advertisement
This site does not sell anything. There is no phone number, no estimate form and no claim that anyone behind it will build you a patio cover. The one form on the site takes a question and answers it by email.
That is a legal position as much as an editorial one. California requires a contractor to display a licence number in advertising under Business and Professions Code sections 7027.1, 7029.5 and 7030.5, and California Code of Regulations title 16 section 861. There is no licence number to display here, so the site does not solicit work. The two phone numbers on this site are the building departments, not a business.
What it does instead is put the code, the thresholds and the cost bands in one place, with the source named each time, so you can walk into a conversation with a contractor knowing what to ask.
Four rules this site follows
Name the authority
Every code or permit statement names the document or the department it comes from, so you can check it rather than trust it.
No invented figures
Where a number could not be verified it is absent, not estimated. That is why no permit fee appears anywhere on this site.
Ranges are labelled
Cost figures are planning ranges for this market and say so every time, including inside the calculators.
No locality claims on photos
The photographs illustrate the kind of structure being described. None of them is presented as a project in Kern County.
Why the $1,000 exemption does not help
California exempts minor work under $1,000 from the contractor licensing requirement. The exemption does not apply where a building permit is required, and a patio cover requires one. So the exemption is not available for this work, whatever its size.
The practical consequence is short: whoever contracts to build your patio cover needs a CSLB licence, and you can check that free on the CSLB website in about a minute before any money moves.
The two phone numbers published on this site both belong to building departments. The City of Bakersfield Building Division and Kern County Public Works are the authorities that decide what applies at a given address, and neither of them is affiliated with this site.
About this site
Is this site a contractor?
No. It is an informational guide. Nothing here offers to perform work and no contract is formed by using it or by sending the contact form, which takes questions rather than job requests. If this site were soliciting work in California it would be required to display a CSLB licence number in the advertising copy, and it does not have one to display.
Where do the figures come from?
Code and permit statements come from the City of Bakersfield's adopted code and its published patio cover handout, from Kern County's Code of Building Regulations, and from the California Building and Residential Codes. Climate figures come from published climatology for Bakersfield. Cost bands are market planning ranges, labelled as such everywhere they appear.
What has been deliberately left out?
Anything that could not be verified: current permit fee amounts, Building Division office hours, the seismic design category letter for Bakersfield, an annual sunshine-days count and a climate zone number. Where a figure is missing on this site, it is missing on purpose.
Can this site tell me what my permit will cost?
No, and it will not guess. The only fee schedule found was a proposed one from FY2021-22. The City of Bakersfield Building Division and Kern County Public Works are both named with their phone numbers on the permits page.