Granville County, NC Sign Regulations: Digital Billboards (2026)

Digital and electronic sign faces are not a separate use in Granville County's Land Development Code; they are regulated as a feature bolted onto an existing sign type under Sec. 32-494(g). The board may only ride on a freestanding on-site identification sign, meaning it cannot be a standalone digital billboard or attached to a wall-mounted sign, and it cannot exceed 25 percent of that sign's total face area, so the bulk of the sign must still be a conventional static face. Content changes are capped at once per minute, though the message can scroll during that one-minute window to finish communicating, and the display is limited to a single color, either amber or red, which rules out full-color LED boards.

The code separately bans animation, video and audio, and bans rotating, fluttering, blinking or flashing effects, carving out only the once-a-minute message change as an exception to that ban. Boards sited in a residential zoning district carry an added time restriction: they may only be lit or operated between 7:00 a.m. and 10:00 p.m., shutting them off overnight. Because these are feature-level standards layered onto Sec. 32-497's sign table, an electronic message board is still governed by whatever base permit category its host sign carries: a freestanding on-site identification sign is generally permit-required in the HB, NB, I-1 and I-2 districts and prohibited in the AR-80, AR-40, R-25 and MHPD districts, so the electronic feature inherits that district-by-district availability.