Most guidance about finding the right sign code focuses on location: which state, which county, which city. That framing misses something that turns out to matter just as much — the type of government sitting over a given project. Across the 33,535 governments we track, whether “your” local government writes its own sign code at all depends heavily on whether it is a township, a county, a city, or something else. That is a genuinely different lens than state-by-state or verdict-by-verdict breakdowns, and it changes how you should approach research depending on what kind of jurisdiction you are dealing with.
What kind of governments we’re actually tracking
Across the full set of 33,535 tracked governments, here is the breakdown by type:
| Government type | Count |
|---|---|
| City | 8,722 |
| Township | 7,770 |
| Town | 7,031 |
| County | 3,313 |
| Village | 2,865 |
| Borough | 1,421 |
Beyond these six, a smaller residual of governments fall into narrower or unrecorded type categories. But cities, townships, towns, counties, villages, and boroughs together make up the overwhelming majority of what we track, and each of those six types behaves differently when it comes to who actually writes the sign code that governs a given parcel.
Cities, towns, villages, and boroughs: authority stays local
For four of the six major government types — city, town, village, and borough — the pattern is simple and consistent with what most technicians already assume: these governments overwhelmingly hold and write their own sign authority directly. If a project sits inside an incorporated city, town, village, or borough, the default assumption that “this government’s own code governs” holds up the vast majority of the time. These are the government types where the “find the local code and read it” workflow works about as cleanly as it can.
Townships are different: they’re the only type that meaningfully cascades to the county
Townships break that pattern in a specific, measurable way. Of the 7,770 townships we track, 1,272 — 16.4% — cascade to their county, meaning the township does not hold its own sign authority and the county government steps in instead. No other government type shows this behavior at meaningful scale: cities, towns, villages, and boroughs essentially never cascade to a county the way roughly one in six townships do.
The practical implication is direct. If a project sits inside a township, you cannot assume the township’s own code is the governing document the way you reasonably could for a city or a village. There is a real, non-trivial chance — about one in six, based on this data — that the actual governing sign code belongs to the county, not the township you started your search with.
Counties: authority is the exception, not the rule, for some
Counties themselves show a different kind of gap. Of the 3,313 counties we track, 1,043 — 31.5% — never adopted a sign code of their own at all. That is nearly a third of all counties in our data with no county-level sign ordinance to find, regardless of what a township beneath them might be cascading toward. On top of that, 72 counties — 2.2% — are explicitly state-barred from regulating signs at all, meaning even if they wanted to adopt a sign code, state law does not give them the authority to do so.
Put those two figures together and roughly a third of all counties we track are not a reliable source of sign-code authority — either because they chose not to legislate, or because state law took that option off the table entirely. The second of those is far more geographically concentrated than the first: all 72 state-barred counties sit in just seven states, while township-to-county cascades are concentrated in two states almost entirely.
Why government type matters more than most technicians assume
Put the pieces together and a clear picture emerges: whether “your” government actually writes its own sign code depends heavily on what type of government it is, not simply on where the project is located. A city, town, village, or borough project almost always has a direct answer sitting at the local level. A township project has a real, measurable chance — about one in six — of needing to look one level up to the county instead. And a county-level project, for unincorporated land, has close to a one-in-three chance of running into a county that either never wrote a sign code or is legally barred from having one, in which case the operative rule sits somewhere else in the hierarchy entirely.
This is a genuinely different way to triage a new project than checking state or verdict statistics alone. Knowing the state helps. Knowing the specific verdict for that exact government helps more. But knowing the government type going in tells you how much you should trust the assumption that the local government’s own code is the end of the search — and for townships and counties specifically, that assumption deserves more scrutiny than it usually gets.
One methodology note worth being upfront about: this piece was originally planned as an analysis of how often sign codes get updated, but the date field meant to support that (source_fetched_at) turned out to be null across the rows we sampled, and the other available date field reflects our own extraction batches rather than the ordinance’s real amendment history — so that claim wasn’t supportable, and this government-type analysis replaced it.
Government type is the second question, though, not the first. The prior question is the verdict itself, which we break down nationally by count and by population in who holds sign authority in America— and the two views disagree in useful ways, because government type correlates with size and size decides how many people a verdict actually touches.
How to confirm the right government for your project
A report identifies which specific government actually holds sign authority for an address — including the township-to-county and county-never-adopted cases above — so you are not left guessing whether the government you started with is the one that governs. Creating an account is free.