Miami sign permit — will your storefront sign get rejected?

Miami uses a Transect Zone system (T4, T5, T6 and so on) instead of conventional commercial zones. For commercial transects, your wall sign scales with your building frontage up to a hard cap per frontage: 300 sq ft in T5, T6 and D, 150 sq ft in T4. Residential-tier transects (T5-R, T6-R) are capped far tighter. Table 15 also caps how wide a wall sign may be, as a share of your linear frontage rather than of the wall, and the share differs by transect — read your own transect row before you fix the width. Flashing and animated signs are prohibited.

This tool reads the Miami 21 sign rules that the City’s Planning and Building departments apply and tells you where your plan stands before you pay for fabrication or file a permit.

Maximum total on-premise sign area. "Mult" = multiply by your street frontage in feet; cap is the hard ceiling.

Source: Miami 21 Code Article 10, Table 15. The aggregate area for all sign types is capped at 300 sq ft per frontage in T5, T6, C and D (40 sq ft for T5-R/T6-R, 25 sq ft for CS), 150 sq ft in T4 (24 sq ft for T4-R). Wall signs may use no more than 60 percent of that aggregate in T5, T6, C and D, and 50 percent in T4. Wall-sign width is capped at 70 percent of linear frontage in T5, T6, CI and D, 50 percent in T4 and 40 percent in CS, and wall signs may project no more than 12 inches. Illumination is limited to a maximum of 0.3 foot candles above ambient light, per the City’s Sign Code Design Standards page (read 30 September 2026) — see “Placement, area and illumination standards” below.

Miami runs two tracks that are easy to confuse: the zoning area check, and the structural engineering the Florida Building Code requires before anything goes up.

Source: City of Miami (Sign Code FAQ; Building Permit Fee Schedule; Miami 21 Zoning Code Article 10); Miami-Dade sign permit procedures. Fees and timelines change — confirm current figures with the City of Miami before filing.

The City’s design-standards page starts with this point: “Regardless of whether or not a sign requires a permit, signs must comply with all associated regulations,” and compliance is determined against the Florida Building Code, the City Code and the Miami 21 Zoning Code — size and area (aggregate area calculation), location standards, sign placement, and illumination regulations. The detailed standards by sign type and Transect Zone are in Table 15, which the City says “is located in Section 10.2”; this page points at it rather than reproducing it.

Placement

• All signs, excluding monuments, placed between the average sidewalk elevation and fifty (50) feet above the sidewalk are subject to the Table 15 sign design standards.
• Signs above 50 feet follow §10.3.6: they need a Warrant, may name only the building or one major Commercial, Office or Lodging tenant occupying more than five percent (5%) of the gross leasable floor area, and are limited to two (2) signs per building on two separate facades. They must be individual letters or a logotype, no longer than eighty percent (80%) of the wall width, and an illuminated sign on an unlit building is not allowed.
• Maximum area under §10.3.6 rises with height: 140 sq ft for the portion from fifty (50) feet to under two hundred (200) feet above grade, 210 sq ft to under three hundred (300) feet, 280 sq ft to under four hundred (400) feet, and 350 sq ft above that; a seal or emblem serving as the principal building identification gets 200 sq ft, 300 sq ft, 400 sq ft and 500 sq ft in the same bands. No Waiver of logotype size, sign length or number of signs is granted.
• All monument signs shall be placed along the principal frontage within the base building line of the establishment.
• No establishment should have more than two (2) monument signs — the City words this one as guidance rather than a flat prohibition.
• Signs should not exceed a tenant’s occupied establishment (also worded as guidance).
• Monument signs should not be located within the public right-of-way unless allowed by the City’s Public Works Department.

How the area is figured

• The sign area “includes a regular geometric shape, or combination of regular geometric shapes which form or approximate the perimeter of all elements in the display surface” — the outline around everything on the face, not the sum of the letters.
• The total allowed area comes from the aggregate area formula the City prints: Aggregate Area = (total linear frontage) × (aggregate area ratio). The ratio itself is a Table 15 value, which this page does not state.
• Monument signs may include up to two (2) display surfaces, and the base of the sign structure is not counted in the display surface calculation.

Illumination

• Sign luminance levels cannot exceed the maximum of 0.3 foot candles above ambient light.
• Illuminated signs are not permitted within one hundred (100) feet of a residential frontage (T3, T4, T5-R, T6-R) unless permitted by Warrant. The Miami 21 text itself words this differently: no illuminated sign within 100 feet of any part of a T1, T3, T4-R, T5-R or T6-R property, measured along the frontage on the same side of the street or in a straight line across it, unless authorized by Warrant; and illuminated signs in T1, T3, T4, T5-R, T6-R and CS are reviewed by Warrant, while other Transect Zones allow them by right (Article 10, Illuminated Sign Requirements). Where the City page and the code differ, the code governs.
• Animation is prohibited.

What Miami prohibits

The City’s prohibited-signs page lists: flags beyond one per property (and national or state flags beyond three per property); flashing or animated signs; electronic message signs that flash, blink or animate; attention-attracting devices that flutter, ripple, move, spin or inflate; freestanding signs; portable signs; and roof signs. The City gives the reason in its own words: prohibited signs “are not allowed because of safety hazards and visual pollution effects that they create adjacent to the public right of ways and abutting properties.”

Source: City of Miami — Sign Code Design Standards, https://www.miami.gov/Business-Licenses/City-of-Miami-Sign-Code/Sign-Code-Design-Standards, and Prohibited Signs, https://www.miami.gov/Business-Licenses/City-of-Miami-Sign-Code/Prohibited-Signs (both read 30 September 2026). Heights, distances, counts and the foot-candle limit are reproduced as the City states them, and items the City words as “should” are marked as guidance. §10.3.6 and the Warrant procedure were not read for this page.