Chapel Hill, NC Sign Regulations: Digital Billboards (2026)

Chapel Hill has no permitted sign category for a standalone billboard, digital or otherwise; the Land Use Management Ordinance's Sec. 5.14.7 permitted-sign table covers only building-mounted signs (wall, awning, canopy, projecting, shingle) and lot-based ground, commercial-center and cantilevered ground signs, none of which is an off-premise advertising billboard. Sec. 5.14.5 then closes the door on digital versions specifically: subsection (a) bans animated, rotating or other moving or apparently moving signs, expressly naming vehicular billboards, and subsection (c) bans digital changeable copy, defined broadly to include LCD, LED and any similar technology that scrolls, blinks or flashes.

The only exceptions written into (c) are digital displays used for time and temperature or for gas price. Sec. 5.14.10(4) repeats the same limit from the changeable-copy side of the ordinance, stating that no electronic or digital changeable copy is allowed except for digital time-and-temperature signs and gas price signs at gas stations, and further restricts even manual changeable copy, the kind changed by hand rather than electronically, to places of worship, schools, theaters with marquees and gas stations, capped at 50 percent of the sign's total display face.

Because both the moving-sign ban in Sec. 5.14.5(a) and the digital changeable copy ban in Sec. 5.14.5(c) and Sec. 5.14.10(4) apply townwide with no district exception, a digital or LED billboard cannot be permitted anywhere in Chapel Hill outside the two named exceptions.