Owensboro, KY Sign Regulations: Holiday Displays (2026)

The joint Owensboro-Daviess County Zoning Ordinance carves out an unusually broad exemption for holiday displays. Appendix F Section 9-1(b) lists seven categories of signs 'outside the scope of this article,' and item (7) covers 'temporary traditional displays or decorations, when such are clearly incidental to and customarily and commonly associated with any national, local or religious holiday, celebration or festival.' Being outside the scope of the article means these displays are exempt from every requirement in Article IX: no sign permit, no size ceiling, no illumination limit, and no time restriction of the kind other temporary signs face.

That distinguishes holiday decor from ordinary illuminated decorative lighting strings and spotlighting, which Section 9-3(b)(2) exempts from most of the article but still requires to 'comply only with the general provisions of this article relating to lighting,' expressly excluding 'temporary traditional displays' from that narrower carve-out since holiday decor already has the fuller exemption in Section 9-1(b)(7). Ordinary temporary signs, by contrast, are capped at two per lot and forty square feet under Section 9-3(d), and most are limited to a hundred-twenty-day display period in a calendar year under Section 9-5(f)(6); the holiday exemption removes decorations from those caps entirely.

If a display stops being 'clearly incidental to' a holiday and instead functions as ordinary signage, for example advertising a business under the guise of decoration, it loses the exemption and falls back under full Article IX regulation, including the permit and size rules and the penalty in Zoning Ordinance Section 5.6.