New Brunswick, NJ Sign Regulations: Digital Billboards (2026)

The New Brunswick Municipal Code does not carve out a digital or electronic billboard category. The governing text is Section 17.06.030, the prohibited-signs list in the signage chapter, which opens by declaring that all types of signs not expressly permitted are prohibited. Item A lists billboards, unless otherwise permitted by this title. Item F says no sign shall display flashing or intermittent light or lights of changing degree of intensity or changing colors. Item S prohibits internally illuminated, animated, flashing or illusionary signs that use mechanical or electrical devices to revolve, flash or display movement or the illusion of movement, with only time and temperature displays and barber shop poles excepted.

Those printed prohibitions apply to any sign, which is why a message board that rotates copy, changes colors or varies its brightness has no path in the code as printed. Item E separately bars any sign that moves in whole or in part by any means, and item T prohibits illuminated signs using red, yellow or green light within two hundred feet of any street intersection. The only billboard permission the code prints is a relocation rule in the sign regulation table of Section 17.06.060, where the I-2 and I-2E rows say existing billboards located elsewhere in the city can be removed and relocated to the I-1 zone upon application to and review by the administrative officer, with the billboard sign not exceeding the size of the billboard being removed and relocated and set back at least 25 feet from all property lines.

The code prints no rule for a brand-new billboard of either kind. Permits for signs run through Section 17.06.010, and the zoning officer enforces Title 17.