About US Sign Code

US Sign Code is a free screening tool for storefront signs. It is published by USSignCode Editorial. We publish under that name rather than individual bylines, and we claim no professional qualification in law, planning or sign engineering.

Who this is for

The site is for the moment before money is spent on a sign: a business owner sizing a wall sign against the space the ordinance allows, a landlord checking what a tenant can put on a facade, or a sign shop sanity-checking a design before fabrication. You give an address and the sign you have in mind; the checker looks up the zoning district from the city's own open-data service, applies that city's sign rules and returns where your sign sits against the limit.

It is free, needs no account, and covers the cities listed on the front page. Each city page also explains the rules in plain language: how that city measures a facade, what it counts as a sign, and which steps a permit involves.

What US Sign Code is not

What you type into a checker stays in your browser; the privacy note says what the site does and does not collect. We are not a city government, a permitting office or a licensed sign contractor, and we are not affiliated with any of them. A result here is not a permit, not a zoning determination and not legal advice, and using the site creates no advisory relationship.

A screening result can be wrong about your specific building. Overlay districts, historic and scenic corridors, planned-development agreements, variances already granted, easements and the exact measured facade are all things a public dataset does not carry. Sign ordinances are also amended mid-year. Before fabrication or installation, confirm with the city's permitting office and a licensed sign professional.

How the rules are made and checked

Of the 24 city pages, 17 cite the ordinance text itself — the municipal code as the city or its code publisher posts it — and 7 cite the city's own permitting or guidance pages; none is left without a linked source. The audit lists any page that has none, so a page that loses its source shows up in the next run. For 12 cities the checker also looks the zoning district up in that city's own open-data service. Trade-press summaries and sign-company blog posts are not used as the source of a rule.

Where a page runs a checker, its rule set records the ordinance chapter the rules were built from, the official text they were verified against and the date of that check. Checks then run on their own: each city has an ordinance watcher on a monthly cycle, an ordinance-event watcher reads council and planning agendas weekly for nine cities, and a weekly numeric audit re-reads the sources linked from each page and compares them with the figures shown. When a figure no longer matches the ordinance, the page is corrected to the ordinance.

Drafts are written with the help of AI tools, and a figure we add or change is checked against the ordinance text before it is published. Some numbers are ours rather than the code's — worked examples and the values a checker starts with — and some are estimates of private costs the ordinance does not set, such as what a sign shop charges or how long a plan reviewer takes in practice. Those are outside the source check.

How US Sign Code is funded

The site is supported by advertising through Google AdSense. Referral placements exist in the page templates but are switched off at present; if one is switched on, the disclosure will sit beside the link. No payment is accepted to change a rule, a threshold or a result, and advertisers have no input into what a page says.

Corrections

If a rule on a page no longer matches your city's ordinance, that is the most useful thing you can send us. What a report needs, and how corrections are handled, is on the contact page and in our editorial policy.