The 2018 edition of the International Building Code was published in September 2018. Adoption by Cities, Counties, and States will be gradual – an important milestone being the adoption by the State of California on January 1, 2020. As is well known by now, the IBC sets forth its structural provisions through adoption of a large number of load and material standards. As an IBC edition is updated, the references it makes to various standards are typically updated as well to their latest editions. A question of high interest is: what editions of the various reference standards does the 2018 IBC adopt? The major standards are listed in Table 1 below, with updates from the 2015 to the 2018 IBC shown in red. The updates of cold-formed steel standards are listed separately in Table 2, because of a major consolidation of those standards implemented by AISI.

Table 1: Standard Updates – 2015 to 2018 IBC

Table 2: Cold-Formed Steel Standards – 2015 and 2018 IBC

We expect to publish a separate blog on the topic of consolidation of cold-formed steel standards and an important change in the 2018 IBC concerning seismic design of cold-formed steel structural systems.