Orange County, CA Parking Rules: Preferential Parking Districts (2026)

Section 6-4-607 sits in Article 6 of Title 6, Division 4, the same article that lets the county's Director sign loading zones, bus stops and no-parking areas. It gives the Board of Supervisors, not the Director, the power to create a residential permit parking district where a special permit program is determined to be necessary to the community. Once the Board designates a district, residents inside it apply to the county for a permit before parking in front of their own garage or driveway; the ordinance is explicit that a permit covers only that frontage and never authorizes parking in the road or street traveled way, so a permit does not create a private curbside space in the roadway itself.

As with every other restriction under this article, the Director maintains an inventory of the parking restrictions the county has established, including permit districts, under Section 6-4-602, so a resident can confirm exactly where a permit is required before parking. Unlike the loading zone, bicycle lane and oversized vehicle restrictions in Sections 6-4-603 and 6-4-606, permit parking is not one of the subsections Section 6-4-608 (Ord. No. 10-001, 2-2-10) singles out for the civil-fine track under the Orange County Uniform Traffic Bail Schedule; a permit district violation therefore falls back to the Code's general penalty in Section 1-1-34, which makes any Code violation not otherwise specifically punished a misdemeanor subject to a fine of not more than one thousand dollars or imprisonment in the county jail for not more than six months, or, if charged as an infraction, a fine of one hundred dollars for a first violation, two hundred dollars for a second within a year, and five hundred dollars for each additional violation within that year.

As with the rest of Article 6, this permit program applies only inside the unincorporated pockets of the county; cities such as Anaheim, Santa Ana, Irvine and Huntington Beach run their own preferential and residential permit parking programs under their own municipal codes, none of which is governed by this section.