“Who do I even call about signs here?” sounds like a simple question, but the answer depends on a legal fact most contractors never check: whether the local government you’re standing in front of actually has the authority to write and enforce its own sign code. We track that fact — an ahj_verdict — for every one of the 33,535 governments in our database, and the breakdown is not what most people assume.
The six verdicts, by count and by population
Counting governments and counting people tell two different stories. A verdict can be rare among governments but common among residents, or the reverse, depending on whether it clusters in a handful of large jurisdictions or thousands of small ones. Both views matter, so here is the full national breakdown both ways.
| Verdict | Governments | % of governments | Residents covered | % of population |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| HOLDS_AUTHORITY | 28,325 | 84.5% | 448,701,239 | 78.5% |
| UNIDENTIFIED | 1,855 | 5.5% | 1,960,401 | 0.3% |
| NO_AUTHORITY_cascades_to_county | 1,272 | 3.8% | 863,521 | 0.2% |
| NO_AUTHORITY_county_never_adopted | 1,221 | 3.6% | 57,414,957 | 10.0% |
| HOLDS_AUTHORITY_permit_only | 770 | 2.3% | 22,431,363 | 3.9% |
| NO_AUTHORITY_state_denies_counties | 72 | 0.2% | 40,374,299 | 7.1% |
(A residual 20 governments carry no verdict at all and are omitted from the table above; the population figures are a straightforward sum of each government’s population field and are not deduplicated between overlapping county and municipal boundaries, so treat the population column as a measure of scale, not a precise resident headcount.)
The gap between the two columns is the interesting part
Look at NO_AUTHORITY_state_denies_counties: just 72 governments, a mere 0.2% of every government we track. By count, it is the smallest category on the board — easy to dismiss as a rounding error. But those 72 governments cover 40.4 million residents, or 7.1% of the population figure above. A verdict that barely registers as a share of governments turns out to matter to more people than several categories with ten or twenty times as many rows, because it is concentrated in a small number of very large counties in states whose constitutions or state statutes strip counties of sign-code authority outright.
The reverse pattern shows up too. NO_AUTHORITY_cascades_to_county accounts for 3.8% of all governments — more than fifteen times the government-share of the state-denial category above — but covers only 0.2% of the population, because it is made up almost entirely of small townships. We cover exactly where and why in township, county, or city: who writes the code. Government count and population share are simply answering different questions, and a coverage number quoted without specifying which one you mean is easy to misread.
Where the 72 state-denial counties actually are
The state-denial category is the one most likely to catch a technician out, so it is worth knowing that it is not scattered thinly across the country. All 72 sit in just seven states: Texas has 36 of them — half the national total on its own — followed by New Jersey with 12, New York and Massachusetts with 8 each, Connecticut with 5, New Hampshire with 2 and Maine with 1. Every other state in the union has zero. That concentration is why the category can be a rounding error nationally and the single most important fact about a job in one specific state; the state-by-state detail is in the states where counties can’t regulate signs, and the practical mechanics of a county-governed parcel are in when county code governs, not city code.
An honest note on what a verdict is and isn’t
A verdict answers “who governs signs here,” not “what do they require.” Those are separate research problems and we are much further along on the first than the second: of the 33,535 governments we track, we have extracted actual sign rules from 11,156 — 33.3%. So for roughly two-thirds of American local governments we can currently tell you confidently which office holds authority, and not yet tell you what its code says. That is a real limit, and the gap between the two numbers is the single largest piece of remaining work behind this site; how the extraction side of it works is described in how we actually read a million pages of municipal code.
What each verdict means if you’re standing in that jurisdiction
- HOLDS_AUTHORITY — the municipality writes and enforces its own sign code. This is the default case for the large majority of both governments (84.5%) and residents (78.5%): call the municipal planning or zoning department.
- HOLDS_AUTHORITY_permit_only — the municipality issues sign permits but the substantive sign standards themselves are set at a different level (commonly the county or a unified development code). You still apply locally, but the rules you’re held to may live in a different document than the one the local office hands you.
- NO_AUTHORITY_cascades_to_county — the municipality (almost always a township) never adopted independent sign authority, so the county’s code governs instead. Calling the township office will send you in the wrong direction.
- NO_AUTHORITY_county_never_adopted — the county itself never adopted a sign code for its unincorporated areas, which at 10.0% of the population figure is a materially larger share than its 3.6% government share suggests, meaning a nontrivial number of people live somewhere with no local sign-code authority at all above the state level.
- NO_AUTHORITY_state_denies_counties — state law affirmatively bars counties from regulating signs, full stop. As the table shows, this is rare as a count of governments but large as a share of people, because it lands on a handful of populous counties.
- UNIDENTIFIED — we have not yet confirmed which government holds authority here. This is a data gap, not a legal finding, and it should never be read as “no authority exists.”
Why this matters before you make the call
Jurisdiction mistakes are expensive in a way that’s easy to underestimate: a permit application filed with the wrong government doesn’t just get rejected, it burns the lead time you budgeted for the job while the correct office’s queue keeps moving without you. The verdict framework above exists specifically to answer “who actually governs signs here” before you pick up the phone, rather than after a rejected application tells you.
How to check sign authority for your project
A report states which of the six verdicts above applies to one specific address — including whether authority cascades to the county, is permit-only, or is currently unidentified in our data — before you file anything. Creating an account is free.