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Norwegian Building Regulations: One National Rule Book
Norway builds to one national Byggteknisk forskrift (TEK17), with Direktoratet for byggkvalitet's own veiledning setting the deemed-to-satisfy numbers — so there's no county-by-county rule book to track for stairs, guards, ramps or room heights. This hub carries the TEK17 figures straight from the regulation, and flags plainly where a number (like foundation frost depth) is genuinely left to Eurocode design rather than fixed in TEK17 itself.
Rules by topic
The parts of the code a chippie actually sets out — each one in plain English, with the numbers and a calculator.
One rule book for the whole country
Norway builds to one regulation, and it applies everywhere — Oslo, Trondheim, or a one-off site up a fjord. There is no county-by-county or kommune version of the technical rules. Every building authority (kommune) checks a job against the same national regulation.
That regulation is the Byggteknisk forskrift, universally known as TEK17 — set under the Plan- og bygningsloven (the Planning and Building Act) by Direktoratet for byggkvalitet (DiBK), the Norwegian Building Authority. TEK17 sets out what a building has to do — stand up, keep people from falling, ventilate properly, let in enough daylight — but a lot of the exact numbers a chippy sets out on site sit in DiBK’s own veiledning (official guidance) to each section, not in the regulation’s bare paragraph text.
Where the numbers come from
Each section of TEK17 carries a veiledning — DiBK’s guidance on how to meet that section — and inside the veiledning sits a preakseptert ytelse (pre-accepted performance): a specific number or formula that, if you build to it, is treated as automatically meeting the regulation. That’s the deemed-to-satisfy route most jobs use. A designer can instead show compliance by another method — an analysis or a different design — so treat the numbers on these pages as the normal, safe route, not the only legal one.
One thing worth knowing before you rely on any figure: TEK17 is amended section by section, on its own schedule — each page on dibk.no carries its own “Endringshistorikk” (amendment history), so two clauses in the same regulation can have been last updated years apart. And a real, structural chunk of the numbers a Norwegian house needs — foundation depth, footing width, concrete grade, rebar cover — aren’t in TEK17 at all: the regulation explicitly hands that work to the Eurocode design standards (NS-EN 1990–1999, with Norwegian National Annexes) rather than fixing a number itself. Always confirm the current wording of the section you’re relying on at dibk.no before you build to it.