McLean Homes for Sale

McLean is an unincorporated Fairfax County community — a census-designated place rather than a town, so there is no separate municipal government or town tax layer, and it is represented on the Board of Supervisors as part of the Dranesville District. The 2020 census counted 50,773 residents across roughly 25 square miles between the Potomac River, the Beltway and Tysons. As of August 2026 the street-delivery ZIP codes are 22101 and 22102, while 22103 and 22106 are PO Box only. The housing runs from 1950s and 1960s ramblers, split-levels and colonials on generous wooded lots to the custom rebuilds that have been replacing them since roughly the turn of the century, plus condominiums and townhouses along the Tysons edge. The Silver Line, the George Washington Memorial Parkway and Route 123 carry the commute.

From a trolley stop to a census-designated place

McLean is not a town and never was one. It took its name in 1910, when the villages of Lewinsville and Langley merged around a stop on the Great Falls & Old Dominion Railroad. John Roll McLean, the Washington Post publisher who had acquired the line with Senator Stephen Benton Elkins of West Virginia in 1902, gave the station his own name; the station cost $1,500 to build, $500 of it raised locally. The electric line began operating in 1906, and its first scheduled car reached Great Falls Park on July 3 of that year. Service ended in 1934, and in 1935 Fairfax and Arlington counties took the right-of-way in settlement of delinquent taxes; most of it became Old Dominion Drive. Franklin Sherman School opened on October 19, 1914 as Fairfax County's first consolidated public school, merging four field schools from Langley, Lewinsville, Chesterbrook and Spring Hill. It made a second kind of history on April 26, 1954, when local pediatrician Dr. Richard Mulvaney injected six-year-old Randy Kerr in the school cafeteria with the first dose in the Salk polio vaccine field trial. Some 1.8 million children in the United States, Canada and Finland followed. Because McLean stayed unincorporated, everything an owner deals with — zoning, permits, schools, police, assessment — runs through Fairfax County rather than a town hall.

The housing stock, era by era

The residential fabric here is overwhelmingly post-war, and it has already been rewritten once. Subdivisions platted through the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s filled McLean with brick and frame ramblers, split-levels and side-hall colonials on quarter-acre to half-acre-and-larger lots, under tree canopy that predates the houses. Since roughly the turn of the century a second layer has been laid over the first: a builder buys an original house, demolishes it, and puts a much larger custom home on the same lot. That is how one block comes to hold a 1958 rambler, a 1990s pop-top addition and a newly built replacement. The mix is what sets touring McLean apart from touring a subdivision built all at once, because it produces three different inspection conversations. On an original house the questions are roof, electrical panel, windows, the sewer or septic line, and original trim, casings and built-ins — residential lead paint was not banned in the United States until 1978, and federal law requires sellers of pre-1978 housing to disclose what they know about it. On a renovated house the question is whether every addition was permitted and inspected by the county. On a new build the questions are the builder, the warranty and the site work. Toward Tysons the stock changes character altogether, adding townhouses and mid- and high-rise condominiums that carry association assessments and rules the fee-simple neighborhoods do not have.

Reading the sub-areas: Langley, Chesterbrook Woods, Franklin Park, McLean Hamlet, Salona Village

McLean is a collection of named neighborhoods, and it is the neighborhood name, not the ZIP code, that tells you which rules and which association apply. Langley, at the fork of Georgetown Pike (Route 193) and Chain Bridge Road (Route 123), is the historic crossroads village and the address the CIA borrowed — the George Bush Center for Intelligence occupies roughly 258 acres at 1000 Colonial Farm Road, reached by a controlled road off the George Washington Memorial Parkway. Chesterbrook Woods, on the eastern side toward the Arlington line, is a neighborhood of about 530 homes developed in the 1950s and 1960s, with a voluntary citizens association that buys supplemental snow removal on top of what the county provides — voluntary being the operative word, since it is not a mandatory HOA with binding covenants. Franklin Park, south of the Kirby Road and Old Dominion Drive intersection, mixes 1920s and 1930s houses from its days as a summer retreat with 1950s and 1960s construction and newer rebuilds. McLean Hamlet, west toward Tysons, is a neighborhood of about 507 homes built between 1965 and 1995 on roughly a third to two-thirds of an acre; it is served by the McLean Hamlet Community Association, which is funded by voluntary dues but administers recorded covenants through an architectural control committee. Salona Village grew in the 1950s out of the Salona farm near Dolley Madison Boulevard and Pimmit Run, and in 2006 Fairfax County bought a conservation easement over 41 acres of the historic Salona property there. The association arrangements described here reflect August 2026, and they are not uniform: always ask which association, if any, actually binds a specific lot and what its covenants require, because in McLean the answer changes from street to street.

Lot size, zoning, and what a teardown actually involves

Residential McLean spans several of Fairfax County's zoning districts, and the rules described in this section are as of August 2026. The county's zoning ordinance defines R-1 as one dwelling unit per acre and R-2 as two per acre, with R-3 and denser categories closer to the commercial cores, so the district on a given lot has to be checked rather than assumed. Those districts set the arithmetic of a rebuild: a demolition permit and a new residential building permit both come from the county, and what you can actually put back is governed by setbacks, maximum height, lot coverage and tree preservation requirements rather than by the footprint of the house that came down. A distinct extra layer applies at Langley Fork. Fairfax County established the Langley Fork Historic Overlay District in 1980, and the district was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on October 19, 1982. It protects the surviving crossroads buildings, among them the Langley Toll House and Langley Ordinary (mid-19th century), the Mackall House (built in 1858 as Trinity Methodist Church), Gunnell's Chapel (built after 1865) and the Langley Friends Meeting House (1893), along with Hickory Hill, built shortly after the Civil War and at different times the home of Justice Robert H. Jackson and of John F. and Robert F. Kennedy. Inside a historic overlay district, exterior alterations that require a building permit go before the county's Architectural Review Board on top of ordinary zoning review. If a property sits anywhere near the fork, confirm the overlay boundary with Fairfax County before you plan an addition, a fence or a new facade.

Septic, wells and the stream buffers — the due diligence on the larger lots

This is the part a listing sheet rarely covers, and on a large McLean lot it can decide the deal. The county requirements below reflect Fairfax County guidance as of August 2026; confirm them for a specific address before you rely on them. Fairfax County puts the number of homes in the county using septic systems instead of the county sanitary sewer at about 24,000, and the larger, older parcels on McLean's northern and western edges are exactly where they turn up. Fairfax County Code Chapter 68.1 requires the septic tank on a conventional system to be pumped out at least once every five years. An alternative onsite sewage system carries more: inspection and sampling within 180 days of system approval, then annual inspections by a licensed operator, with sampling once every five years. Where public sewer service is available, the county requires a single-family home to connect when the sewer main is within 300 feet of the building, and other building types when it is within 500 feet — which is what can turn a failed septic system on one lot into a connection project while the lot next door is replacing a drainfield. That distance is worth knowing before settlement rather than after. County guidance is that homes on private wells should have the water tested annually for bacteriological and chemical contaminants. The second land constraint is the Chesapeake Bay Preservation Ordinance: Fairfax County designates Resource Protection Areas along perennial streams and connected wetlands with a 100-foot buffer meant to stay undisturbed, and McLean is threaded with them — along Pimmit Run, Scott's Run, Dead Run and the Potomac shoreline. Inside an RPA, clear-cutting is not permitted and neither is removing vegetation to create lawn, and land disturbance requires prior approval from Land Development Services; some requests are handled administratively, while an exception goes to the county's Exception Review Committee at a public hearing and can require a water quality impact assessment. Run the address through the county's Watersheds and Resource Protection Areas viewer before you fall in love with the back yard. Those same streams are also the amenity — Scott's Run Nature Preserve covers about 336 acres of woodland at 7400 Georgetown Pike between Route 193, I-495 and the Potomac, with a waterfall where the run meets the river and a segment of the Potomac Heritage National Scenic Trail running through it.

Tysons next door, and downtown McLean's own plan

Tysons is the reason McLean's context keeps shifting. Fairfax County adopted the Tysons Comprehensive Plan in 2010 with the goal of a walkable urban center able to hold up to 100,000 residents and 200,000 jobs by 2050, concentrating roughly three-quarters of new growth within a half mile of the four Silver Line stations. Much of it has been built. Capital One Center occupies about 24.5 acres next to the McLean Metro station, where an 80,000-square-foot Wegmans opened on November 4, 2020 and Capital One Hall opened October 1, 2021 with a 1,600-seat main theater, a 225-seat black box called The Vault and a rooftop park called The Perch. Farther west, within walking distance of Tysons Galleria, the senior living community The Mather opened its 27-story first tower in March 2024 and its 18-story second tower in September 2024, for 293 residences in total. Downtown McLean is planned separately and at a far smaller scale: the McLean Community Business Center covers roughly 230 acres around the Chain Bridge Road and Old Dominion Drive intersection, and the plan amendment the Board of Supervisors adopted on June 22, 2021 raised the potential residential unit count there from 2,175 to 3,850, which remained the planned ceiling as of August 2026. As of August 2026, everyday errands downtown mean the Safeway at 6244 Old Dominion Drive, Balducci's farther out the same road at 6655 Old Dominion Drive, and the McLean Farmers Market, a producer-only Fairfax County Park Authority market held Friday mornings at Lewinsville Park, 1659 Chain Bridge Road; the 2026 season runs May through October, and days and seasons are worth confirming with the Park Authority before you plan around them. One local quirk belongs on the closing checklist. The McLean Community Center at 1234 Ingleside Avenue is funded by a real estate tax surcharge on Small District 1A-Dranesville, created by a 1970 bond referendum. As of August 2026, addresses inside that district pay the surcharge and in return get resident program rates and a vote for the center's governing board; addresses outside it pay nothing and get neither. The center houses the Alden Theatre and, each May, puts on McLean Day at Lewinsville Park. Verify the district on the county property record rather than assuming. Nearby, Clemyjontri Park at 6317 Georgetown Pike opened in 2006 on land the Fairfax County Park Authority acquired from McLean resident Adele Lebowitz, and is named for her four children — Carolyn, Emily, John and Petrina. Its two-acre playground is built so that children who use wheelchairs, walkers or braces, or who have sensory or developmental disabilities, can play alongside everyone else.

Getting around: Silver Line, the Beltway, and the Parkway's truck rule

McLean station opened July 26, 2014 in the Silver Line's first phase. It sits at 1824 Dolley Madison Boulevard, at Route 123 and Scotts Crossing Road — technically within Tysons, about two miles west of downtown McLean — on an elevated island platform reached by pedestrian bridges over Route 123, with a third entrance added on the north side in November 2025. Plan around one fact: as of August 2026 the station has no commuter parking garage or lot. What it does have is a kiss-and-ride lot, a bus bay, bicycle parking, and Metrobus and Fairfax Connector service. Check the current route numbers with WMATA and Fairfax Connector directly rather than with a listing sheet, because both have redrawn their networks recently — WMATA renamed and restructured its bus routes in June 2025, and Fairfax Connector made further route changes in June 2026. Three more Silver Line stations sit inside Tysons: Tysons, renamed from Tysons Corner in 2022, plus Greensboro and Spring Hill. By car, Route 123 runs through as Dolley Madison Boulevard and Chain Bridge Road, Georgetown Pike (Route 193) crosses the north end, and I-495 meets the Dulles Toll Road (Route 267) at the western edge. The roughly $660 million 495 NEXT project, a partnership between VDOT and Transurban, extended the Express Lanes 2.5 miles north to the George Washington Memorial Parkway near the American Legion Bridge. Those lanes opened November 23, 2025, and a parallel 2.5-mile shared-use trail between Lewinsville Road and Live Oak Drive opened June 27, 2026. One restriction catches new owners and their contractors off guard, and it still applies as of August 2026: the George Washington Memorial Parkway is a National Park Service road, and a commercial vehicle needs a special use permit to drive on it. The Park Service denies that permit where another route can reach the destination, and several parkway bridges have low clearances. Route the moving truck and the trade vehicles accordingly.