Building a VA-adapted home in South Dakota: what "ADA compliant" really means

The Americans with Disabilities Act has five parts, and the two that touch buildings cover governments and businesses open to the public. A private house, whoever lives in it and whoever paid for it, is outside all five. The Fair Housing Act's design rules only start at buildings with four or more apartments. The federal law for buildings built with federal money, the Architectural Barriers Act, writes privately owned houses out of its own definition. So a VA grant does not drag the ADA into your kitchen, and nobody can be sued under it over a house.

Three documents do govern a VA-adapted home. The first is your approved plan: the feasibility review your SAH agent writes, then the plans, specifications and bid the agent accepts. The grant pays for what is on that plan and nothing else. The second is VA Pamphlet 26-13, the Handbook for Design, which carries the VA's own requirements and recommendations and is the document the VA inspector holds while measuring the finished house. The third is the local residential code, which in Harrisburg is the International Residential Code as the city adopts it, enforced through the same permit and inspections as any other house.

A building permit and a passed final inspection prove the house meets the code. They say nothing about the adaptations. The VA's own compliance inspector checks those, three times during the build, and your SAH agent checks the inspector at the end. That is the whole of what "ADA compliant" means on a VA home: the plan, the handbook and the code, each checked by the people who own it.

Four VA programs pay for home adaptations, and only one of them is large enough to shape a new build. The Specially Adapted Housing grant, SAH, is for veterans with certain service-connected disabilities: loss or loss of use of more than one limb, loss of use of one leg combined with another lasting condition, blindness in both eyes, certain severe burns, and loss of use of one leg since September 2001 that keeps you from walking without aids. It can build an adapted home, buy and adapt one, or adapt the home you own or will own. The Special Housing Adaptation grant, SHA, is smaller and covers loss of use of both hands, severe burns and certain breathing injuries. The Temporary Residence Adaptation grant adapts a family member's home you are living in for now. The HISA grant, Home Improvements and Structural Alterations, comes through the VA medical center's prosthetics service for medically needed changes such as a roll-in shower or a permanent ramp, and it does not pay for new construction.

The caps change every October 1 and the current figures are on VA's disability housing grants page. You can draw on SAH or SHA up to six times in a lifetime, and a later draw gets that year's cap minus what you used before, so a grant spent partly on an earlier house still comes with you. The grant usually covers part of a new build, not all of it. The rest comes from a VA-guaranteed home loan, savings or a nonprofit such as Homes For Our Troops, which builds adapted homes for post-9/11 veterans with severe injuries and has completed one in South Dakota.

The grant and a VA home loan on the same house are two separate streams with two rulebooks. The grant runs through an escrow and VA's compliance inspections. The loan runs through the lender, its appraiser and its own draw inspections. A builder who has done both will write the grant's three-stage disbursement schedule to land on the same milestones the lender uses, so no ramp is paid twice and no bathroom is paid by nobody.

The handbook sets Minimum Property Requirements in exactly three places: the ways in and out of the house, the primary bathroom and the primary bedroom. Those are mandatory for an SAH grant and can be waived only on your own written request, approved by the Regional Loan Center, for reasons of feasibility or need rather than preference. Everything else in the house is a recommendation until it lands on your approved plan, and then it is measured like a requirement. The full text, with every dimension, is the Handbook for Design, and your SAH agent will walk it with you room by room.

The entries ask for two ways in and out at different places in the house, one of them giving a quick exit from the adapted bedroom and never routed through the kitchen, the garage or a utility room. Each can be a no-step entry, a ramp with rails and level platforms, a platform lift or an elevator, and the handbook sets the slope, the widths and the backup power for lifts. The bathroom asks for a roll-in shower with no curb, a non-slip floor, a hand-held head, valves that will not scald, and a grab bar on every wall placed where you want it; a sink you can roll under with the pipes covered; a toilet with room to transfer and a grab bar; floor enough to turn a chair; and a door that swings out or slides so it never blocks the room. The bedroom asks for a wide door, room to move around the furniture, a floor a chair rolls over without fighting it, and a way out in an emergency, either a door or a window sized for rescue.

The handbook is written around one veteran's present and future needs, not around a code table, which is why the grab bars are placed where you reach and the handrail height is whatever is convenient to you. A good builder measures those with you in the room, in your own chair, and writes the numbers on the plan.

You apply on VA Form 26-4555, online or through the Regional Loan Center. The Veterans Service Center decides entitlement, and once it does, an SAH agent is assigned to you; for South Dakota that agent sits at the St. Paul Regional Loan Center. The agent meets you face to face, looks at how you move through your current home, and writes a feasibility study covering three things: that you can live in the adapted home, that you can afford to own it, and that the house or lot can be adapted to meet the requirements. That produces conditional approval, which lets you spend on plans, a survey and legal work, reimbursed later, but not on construction.

Then you get three bids. Any VA grant project needs three unless you write a waiver in your own words and the Regional Loan Center accepts it. A bid at this stage is a sketch, an explanation of how the builder will meet the requirements and the adaptations you chose, and a detailed estimate. You pick the builder. The builder registers with VA, proves state and local licensing, and clears a federal-debt check. Together you produce a fixed-price contract that references the signed and dated plans, a full plan set, a signed list of materials with the manufacturer sheets for flooring, appliances and any lift or track system, a cost breakdown and a disbursement schedule in stages. The contract must carry VA's escape clause, which voids it and returns every dollar if the grant does not come through.

You prove an ownership interest in the house, document any money beyond the grant, and the Regional Loan Center gives final approval. The money goes into an escrow under an agreement you, the builder and the escrow agent sign. Construction cannot start until the Regional Loan Center gives final approval, and anything built before that is not reimbursed. During the build a VA compliance inspector visits at least three times, measures the adapted elements against the plan, photographs them and files a report; the escrow releases a stage only after a clean report. Twenty percent of the construction money stays in escrow until the final inspection, your SAH agent's final field review, and a letter of satisfaction you sign. Any change after final approval needs a written change order signed by both of you and approved by VA, or the grant will not pay for it.

Ask any bidder for the following before you sign, because a builder who has not read the handbook will not know what they are. A fixed price, not an estimate that floats. The escape clause, word for word. A plan set with the site, the foundation, a wall section, every floor, the outside of the house on all sides, and the inside walls of the bathroom and kitchen drawn with the heights of counters, grab bars, switches, outlets and the thermostat, because the inspector measures against those drawings. A list of materials you both sign, with the manufacturer sheets attached, so a substitution on site is visible. A builder certification that the drawings meet local code and the VA requirements. A cost breakdown and a disbursement schedule that the Regional Loan Center approves before the grant does. Lien waivers from every subcontractor at every draw. Your selections, colors and fixtures, in writing, because the handbook names those as the usual source of disputes.

Two things about the money that a builder should say out loud. The builder carries the cost of each stage until the inspector passes it, so a thin bidder can run out of road before the first draw. And a re-inspection caused by work that missed the plan is billed to the builder, not to VA and not to you, which is the right incentive and the reason a careful crew measures every ramp and opening before the inspector arrives.

This is how we do it at Hols & Co. We register with VA for your project, write the contract to the handbook, set the three stages to match any lender's draws, and name the plumbing and electrical partners on the plan before anything is roughed in. A composite ramp, a no-step deck off the bedroom door or the framing that widens a hall is our own carpentry. A concrete ramp, apron or slab is poured by a concrete contractor we schedule. We photograph every measured element with a tape in the frame, the same day, so a disputed reading has a picture behind it. If your grant is already underway, bring the SAH agent's feasibility findings to the first walkthrough; it saves a meeting.

South Dakota does not license general contractors, so there is no state board to check a builder against. What a contractor must hold is a contractor's excise tax license from the Department of Revenue and, inside Sioux Falls, the city's building license; ask for both along with a certificate of insurance. Electricians and plumbers are licensed by state commissions, and electrical work is inspected by the state Electrical Commission wherever the house stands. The residential code is adopted city by city and county by county under a state ceiling that moved to the newest edition of the International Residential Code in July 2026, so ask the building department which edition applies on the day your permit is issued.

The people who move a grant along are local. The county veterans service officer is usually the person who got you into the program: Lincoln County's office is in Canton and Minnehaha County's is in Sioux Falls, and the South Dakota Department of Veterans Affairs is in Sioux Falls as well. HISA money comes through the prosthetics service at the Sioux Falls VA Health Care System. The Regional Loan Center for the whole state is in St. Paul, reached through VA's loan guaranty line.

Two property-tax breaks belong on the kitchen table before the plans are final. A home designed for wheelchair use, owned and occupied by a paraplegic veteran or a veteran with loss or loss of use of both legs, or by their unremarried surviving spouse, can be exempt from property tax altogether. A veteran rated permanently and totally disabled from a service-connected condition gets a fixed share of the home's value exempted, an amount the Legislature raised again in 2026. Both are applied for through the county Director of Equalization by November 1, and the approved plans and the VA adaptation list are the evidence that the house was designed the way the statute describes. Keep them.

Families without a grant ask for the same house for a parent, a spouse after a stroke, or their own later years, and they often ask for it with the words ADA compliant. The honest answer is that nothing requires it. South Dakota has no visitability law, the residential code has no accessibility chapter for a house, and the choices are yours. The VA handbook is a free checklist for a home that works from a chair, written for a house rather than a store.

Some of it costs nothing on a new build if it is decided before the foundation is poured: a no-step entry set by the grading, wider doors and halls, a first-floor bedroom and bath, blocking in the bathroom walls for grab bars that may never be needed, lever handles, and switches and outlets at reachable heights. Some of it costs real money later: a curbless shower in a basement means cutting the slab to move the drain, and widening a hall between two bearing walls is a beam and posts, not a wider door. If the house is being drawn now, put the list on the drawing. If the house already exists, start with the bathroom and the entry, which is where the handbook starts too.