2018 North Carolina Residential Code Prescriptive Tables for Selection of Support Elements for Beams, Girders, and Headers: Example Problems

The 2018 North Carolina Residential Code (2015 International Residential Code with North Carolina amendments) provides prescriptive requirements for residential structures of conventional construction. Those requirements include minimum footing widths for exterior walls supporting uniform floor and roof loads for a variety of building heights and load-bearing values of soil. The prescriptive requirements also address girders and headers in exterior walls, as well as the required number of studs to support each end of the girder or header.

The prescriptive requirements, however, do not directly address concentrated loads on exterior walls - such as the concentrated load from a girder truss bearing on an exterior wall. To address this issue, SBCA has published a series of documents with tables, figures, and footnotes titled “2018 North Carolina Residential Code Prescriptive Tables for Selection of Support Elements for Beams, Girders, and Headers.” These tables, separated into documents for 20, 30, 50, and 70 psf snow load, take the prescriptive requirements that are already in the code and extrapolate them to specific requirements for footings and wall studs at concentrated loads in exterior walls.

The tables are intended as a practical tool to assist contractors in the selection of footing widths and the determination of the quantity of wood studs required for supporting the end reactions of beams, girders, and/or headers.