Gilroy, CA Sign Regulations: Freeway-Facing Signs (2026)

Gilroy City Code § 30.37.51 allows one on-site freeway-oriented sign per qualifying parcel in addition to the site's regular monument sign, but caps that sign at sixty feet in height and one hundred square feet of sign area. To qualify, the parcel must clear three tests at once: it must exceed twenty thousand square feet of land area, sit within six hundred sixty feet of an off-ramp from U.S. 101, and carry a use that is permitted in the HC highway commercial district. Section 30.37.51 also offers a trade-off: a site can push its freeway sign to one hundred fifty square feet of area, but only if it gives up additional freestanding signage and keeps its remaining freestanding sign to a single monument sign no larger than thirty-six square feet.

This sits inside the broader commercial and industrial sign scheme at section 30.37.50, which bars any sign from mounting on a building side that abuts and faces a freeway and limits ordinary freestanding signs to seven feet in height, a limit the freeway-oriented sign exception at 30.37.51 exists specifically to override. Section 30.37.50(h) separately requires that any sign within the downtown specific plan districts, apart from the gateway district, comply with the city's downtown specific plan document, restricting internally illuminated cans and raceways there regardless of the freeway rules.

Community Development's planning division reviews freeway sign applications for the 20,000-square-foot lot size, the 660-foot off-ramp proximity, and the HC-permitted use before issuing a sign permit, and a sign erected without meeting all three criteria, or built taller or larger than the sixty-foot, one-hundred-square-foot cap, is not entitled to the freeway exception at all.