King County, WA Special Events & Permits: Parade Permits (2026)

C. 010 applies to all public roads within unincorporated King County), makes it unlawful to hold a procession or parade on a county road without a special use permit issued by the county. The only carve-out written into the ordinance is for funeral processions, which may proceed without a permit. Every other organized procession, whether a civic parade, a fun run, a religious procession or a community march, needs the permit before it steps off. C. 020, protects a permitted parade once it is moving: no one may interfere with the parade or procession, and a driver whose vehicle is not part of the parade may not drive between the vehicles or marchers that make it up.

That interference rule yields at signalized intersections controlled by traffic devices, unless a King County Sheriff's deputy is stationed there to direct traffic and keep the parade moving as one continuous unit. Both sections trace to Ordinance 18743, adopted in 2018 as part of the county's Title 14A traffic-code recodification, and both apply only to county roads in the unincorporated area; Seattle, Bellevue, Kent, Renton, Redmond, Kirkland, Auburn and Sammamish issue their own parade permits under their own municipal codes, so an organizer running a route that crosses from unincorporated King County into any of those cities needs a separate city permit as well.