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.
Martyn runs the site alone. Its pages are compiled with software and AI assistance from the official text they quote, and the editorial process page sets out what is automated and what he reviews.
CityRuleLookup is independent. It is not a government website or a law firm, and nothing on it is legal advice. It is funded by advertising, supplied by Google AdSense, and its ordinance data can be licensed on request through the API and data licensing page. It carries no affiliate links.
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 a source for its quoted text so you can check it yourself.
140,000+ of our pages carry an excerpt of legal text alongside its section citation. Under the current process, where the rule cannot be found and quoted on an official source, nothing is published for that topic.
Each page carries a date. It is the day the page was last written or edited, or the day a software re-check last found no newer edition of the code and no change to the source page, whichever is later. A page is updated when a change is found or reported.
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 900+ cities and 500+ counties across all 50 states and DC, spanning 60 categories and 349 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. There is no fixed turnaround: we would rather be slow than publish a correction we have not confirmed.
Our editorial process
New ordinance pages go through the steps below. Many older pages were produced differently; the editorial process page says how, and what that means for relying on them.
- 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.
- 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, new pages are written as one statewide page about the statute, not a local page for every city; older local pages on some of these topics remain.
- 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.
- 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.
- Re-check over time, official sources are re-checked by software for a newer edition or a changed page, and each page carries the date it was last written, edited or passed that re-check.
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.