About CityRuleLookup

Why this site exists

Finding out whether you can have a fire pit, park your RV, or keep chickens in your backyard should not require reading 200 pages of municipal code. But for most cities, that is exactly what you are up against. City websites bury the information in PDFs. Legal language makes simple rules unreadable. And Google results are clogged with SEO spam that never actually answers the question.

CityRuleLookup was built to fix that. We take the ordinances that actually matter to homeowners, renters, and landlords, and translate them into plain English. Every page has the key facts, the penalties, and answers to the questions people actually ask.

Who runs CityRuleLookup

Martyn O'Neill is the founder and editor of CityRuleLookup. A technical product manager with over a decade of experience: including leading product for a platform serving 50M+ users and building large-scale content-verification and trust & safety systems: he started CityRuleLookup after getting buried in municipal-code PDFs trying to answer simple questions about his own home. He directs the site’s research methodology and its primary-source verification process.

Find Martyn on LinkedIn, GitHub, or email contact@cityrulelookup.com.

How we source our data

Our ordinance pages are researched from primary sources: municipal and county codes, official city and county websites, and state statutes. Most US municipalities publish their code through a library such as Municode, American Legal Publishing or eCode360, and that published code is what we read and quote. Every page links to the source it was written from so you can check it yourself.

110,000+ of our pages quote the governing provision word for word alongside its exact section number. Where we cannot find and quote the rule on an official source, we publish nothing for that topic rather than guess at it.

Pages are re-checked on a rolling basis and each carries the date its source was last checked. When a city changes its rules we update the page and refresh that date.

What this site is not

This is not legal advice. We are not lawyers, and this site is not a substitute for consulting with an attorney. Local ordinances have nuances, exceptions, and enforcement patterns that a summary cannot fully capture. Use this site as a starting point, not a final authority.

We also do not cover every city or every ordinance. We currently cover 700+ cities and 400+ counties across all 50 states and DC, spanning 59 categories and 367 topics, weighted towards the questions people actually ask: noise, short-term rentals, fire, parking, fences, animals, landscaping, home businesses, swimming pools and accessory structures. Coverage is uneven by design, deeper in larger jurisdictions, and we are adding more over time.

Found an error?

We take accuracy seriously. If you spot outdated or incorrect information, please submit a correction. Every submission is read and checked against the official code before anything changes on the site. Most are dealt with within a couple of days; ones that need a fresh reading of the source can take longer, and we would rather be slow than publish a correction we have not confirmed.

Our editorial process

Every ordinance entry on CityRuleLookup goes through a multi-step editorial process:

1. Locate the provision, we find the governing section in the jurisdiction’s own published code or, where the state has taken the subject over from local government, in the state statute.
2. Quote it verbatim, we copy the text word for word and record its exact section number and the page it was read on. A page that cannot be grounded this way is not published at all: on a preempted topic we write one statewide page about the statute instead of a local page for every city.
3. Plain-English translation, the quoted rule is written up as a clear summary built from its own specifics: the limits, hours, fees, penalties and appeal routes that provision actually sets out.
4. Publish with the source, the verbatim quotation, the citation and a link to the source appear on the page, so you can read the law yourself rather than take our word for it.
5. Re-check over time, pages are revisited on a rolling basis, most-visited first, and each carries the date its source was last checked.

Contact us

CityRuleLookup is independently operated and not affiliated with any government agency. For general inquiries, corrections, or partnership opportunities, reach us at contact@cityrulelookup.com. For privacy-related requests, email privacy@cityrulelookup.com.