National Register FAQs

Frequently Asked Questions

Tab/Accordion Items

Check our webmap to see if your property is already listed or documented in our records.

Call or email the Survey and NR staff person who serves your county. Please be sure to include the address or a description of the resource’s location in your voicemail, letter, or email. To learn more please visit our page on historic preservation. 

In North Carolina, the first step toward National Register listing is getting the resource added to the Study List. 

Once the resource is placed on the Study List, the next step is writing a nomination. The HPO encourages you to hire a professional preservation consultant to write the nomination document. If, however, you want to write a nomination yourself, you can find information under the "For Nomination Preparers" tab at the bottom of the FAQ section. A district nomination must be prepared by a preservation professional. 

The nomination also provides a detailed physical description, history and historic context, maps, and photographs that answers two basic questions: Is the resource historically important? And does the resource look like it did when it became historically important. The nomination also provides maps and photographs of the resource. You can review successful nominations here. 

Our office and staff will work with the nomination preparer to achieve a nomination that makes the strongest case possible for National Register eligibility and is presented in the format the National Park Service expects.

Then, North Carolina’s National Register Advisory Committee will review the nomination and either recommend or not recommend the resource for listing in the National Register.

If the nominated property is recommended for listing, the State Historic Preservation Officer forwards the nomination to the National Park Service. Following a 45-day review period the Keeper of the National Register will add or does not add the resource to the Register.

The process generally takes about a year from the time the first draft is submitted until the resource is officially listed.

You can always contact our staff to answer this question, but you may find our webmap useful. The webmap can be searched using the address search at the top of the page (please include the town or city and state; otherwise, you might end up at an address in Iowa rather than at a North Carolina address). Or you can search by clicking on the red arrow at the bottom of the page.

Listing in the National Register is mostly an honorary designation. Unless you are using federal funds, permitting, or licensing for a project that affects your National Register listed or National Register eligible property, you may do anything you like with your property. As the owner of a listed resource, you may decide to take advantage of the historic rehabilitation tax credit program, and in that case, you are required to follow certain standards. However, that program is an optional benefit, not a requirement. As long as no federal permitting, funding, or licensing is involved and as long as you are not using the tax credit program, you can do anything you want to with your property.

Neither our office nor any other state agency issues or provides National Register plaques. This list includes a sampling of companies that fabricate plaques. Find the list here.