City of Houston basic wind speed — 139 mph V_ult per Houston Public Works design criteria (Form CE-1110)

The Houston Public Works Building Code Enforcement Branch publishes the design wind speed criteria for the City of Houston on Form CE-1110 ("Building Code Design Criteria"), which lists: IRC — 110 mph (3-second gust); IBC — Risk Category I Vult 130 mph, Risk Category II Vult 139 mph, Risk Category III and IV Vult 150 mph; Wind Exposure Category B. The 139 mph V_ult is the residential single-family threshold. V_ult is the ultimate design wind speed — a 3-second gust at 33 feet above ground — used in the strength-design wind pressure calculations modern asphalt-shingle and roof-deck installation specs reference, and is what drives shingle install requirements such as 6-nail high-wind nailing patterns and starter-course adhesive bands within City limits (cross-reference D4 install entries). The publicly available CE-1110 form (rev 09/15/2017) was issued under Houston's 2012 IBC adoption; Houston adopted the 2021 IBC in October 2023 per the Houston Public Works Construction Code Modernization presentation to the Transportation, Technology, and Infrastructure Committee. The 139 mph V_ult value derives from the ASCE 7 Texas wind-speed map for the Houston region and has been stable across ASCE 7-10, ASCE 7-16, and ASCE 7-22 for inland Houston, so the number is expected to carry forward under the 2021 IBC adoption — but the current published design wind speed should be verified against the Houston Code of Ordinances (Chapter 10) and the current HPW design criteria at the time of any specific project. Most of the City of Houston sits outside the TDI Designated Catastrophe Area; per the TDI Harris County map, the DCA in Harris is restricted to areas east of State Highway 146 plus the city limits of Seabrook, La Porte, Shoreacres, Pasadena, and Morgan's Point. For those inland-DCA Harris communities, the TDI windstorm program (cross-reference KB-D5-001 and KB-D5-002) is a separate regulatory framework from the City of Houston code. TDI no longer uses the older "Inland II / Inland I / Seaward" windstorm zone classification — those zones were tied to the 2006 I-Codes (under which the Inland I area carried a 120 mph 3-second-gust nominal design wind speed) and were retired when TDI adopted the 2018 I-Codes; TDI now determines the applicable design wind speed by ASCE 7 risk category rather than by a named zone, so the design wind speed for a given inland-DCA address derives from the ASCE 7 risk-category wind-speed map for that location. The wind speed itself is a building-code requirement, factual and risk-category-based; specific insurance premium implications, deductible structures, or claim/coverage questions belong with the homeowner's insurance carrier, agent, or the Texas Department of Insurance (tdi.texas.gov) — V Advisor educates on the code, not on insurance decisions. [Source: Houston Public Works Building Code Enforcement Branch Form CE-1110 "Building Code Design Criteria" rev 09/15/2017; Houston Public Works Construction Code Modernization 2021 Building Code Adoption presentation, August 2023; ASCE 7 Texas wind-speed map; Texas Department of Insurance Designated Catastrophe Area Harris County map]