Wicomico County, MD Outdoor Lighting: Billboard Lighting (2026)

Wicomico County Code § 225-126, Outdoor advertising structures, sets the billboard standards for unincorporated Wicomico County, and Subsection B(6) addresses lighting directly: all outdoor advertising structures, where lighted, shall be indirectly illuminated. That single sentence bars direct, glaring illumination of a billboard face, in effect requiring a lighting method such as external floodlighting aimed onto the sign rather than internally lit or backlit panels. The lighting rule sits inside the same permit framework as the rest of § 225-126B: no outdoor advertising structure may be erected without a sign permit from the Wicomico County Building Inspector, structures must be set back 100 feet from the property line facing a public road (or 150 feet from the road's center line, whichever is greater), each sign face is capped at 300 square feet, structures cannot exceed 30 feet in height, and a lit billboard within 100 feet of an adjacent residential dwelling is barred outright if visible from that dwelling.

Because the indirect-illumination requirement applies to every outdoor advertising structure covered by the section, it reaches any billboard the county permits outside the 660-foot federal-aid highway buffer set by Subsection A, tying lighting design into the same permit review that checks setback, spacing and size.