Spotsylvania County, VA Soliciting & Door-to-Door: No-Knock Registry (2026)

Article III of Chapter 18 of the Spotsylvania County Code, covering door-to-door residential solicitors, gives homeowners two direct tools to stop unwanted visits. Sec. 18-31 makes it unlawful for a door-to-door solicitor, defined in Sec. 18-26 as anyone who goes door to door selling goods or services or soliciting charitable contributions, to enter upon any residential premises for soliciting when the owner or occupant has displayed a 'no soliciting' sign on the property. Sec. 18-33 separately bans any person from engaging in door-to-door solicitation after sunset, regardless of whether the property is posted.

The two prohibitions sit alongside related protections in the same article: Sec. 18-30 bars a solicitor from entering under false pretenses, and Sec. 18-32 makes it unlawful for a solicitor to remain on the premises once the owner or occupant has asked him to leave. The article's exceptions in Sec. 18-28 pull certain visitors out of the whole chapter, including people visiting at the resident's own invitation, unpaid members of a registered civic or charitable organization, newspaper subscription sellers, monthly route deliverymen, approved school projects, and farm-product sellers, but none of those exceptions overrides the no-soliciting-sign or after-sunset rules for anyone else covered by the chapter.

Sec. 18-27 sets the penalty for the article as a whole at a Class 1 misdemeanor, the code's most serious misdemeanor class, unless another section specifies otherwise, and Sec. 18-34 separately bars any person under 18 from acting as a door-to-door solicitor at all. The Sheriff's Office administers the related permit system in Article IV, and a posted sign or the sunset clock is enforceable independent of whether the solicitor holds a valid permit.