Sign permit packages, drafted from the city's own checklist, your survey and your drawing.

A sign permit starts from three things: the jurisdiction's sign code and application checklist, the site survey, and the drawing of the sign itself. Your coordinator reads each requirement, pulls the answer from the survey or the drawing, works out area and frontage the way that code defines them, gathers the landlord's letter and the electrical details, and chases whatever isn't there.

For the test, AI reads copies of those same inputs and drafts the packet for each location: every application field with its value and where the value came from, the attachments the checklist calls for, and a separate list of requirements with nothing on file for a person to resolve. Frontage and area, height and setback, illumination, zoning and landlord approvals and electrical listing each get their own lines. The draft reports what your files say and where the checklist asks for more, and stops short of saying whether a sign will pass.

Frontage is a defined word. Sacramento's Sign Permit Submittal Checklist, form CDD-0276, revised June 5, 2025, wants Building Tenant Frontage in lineal feet for attached signs and Parcel Street frontage for detached ones. Boulder's puts building frontage on the site plan, cites its definition at B.R.C. 9-16-1, then asks for tenant frontage separately on the elevation. Bend, Oregon has you give the primary facade as its code defines it. Paramus, New Jersey sizes a sign with a rectangle drawn around all of it, highest point to lowest. So the draft quotes each code's definition beside each number and shows which survey measurement it used.

The number of filings changes by city. Sacramento takes up to ten signs on one application for the same parcel, while Chicago wants a separate application for each sign, online and then a paper supplement. Chicago also requires a City Council order for any sign over 100 square feet or over 24 feet above ground level, and a Public Way Use Permit plus a council ordinance for anything extending over the public way, floodlights included. Its list of signs needing drawings sealed by an Illinois architect or structural engineer includes new sign boxes and channel letters, which then puts a licensed general contractor on the application. New York City separates the SG permit, filed for the copy, from an ALT permit when the sign hangs on a structure rather than directly on the wall, with electrical work filed apart by a licensed electrician. Each filing becomes its own line in the draft.

Illumination and listing ask for different details. UL 48, the Standard for Electric Signs, and NEC Article 600, Electric Signs and Outline Lighting, sit behind most of these lines. Paramus wants UL numbers on the electrical permit. Sacramento wants UL-approved electrical details giving illumination type, power source, disconnect switch, volts and amps, plus California's sign lighting certificate, NRCC-LTS-01-E. Washington's WAC 296-46B-600 holds every electric sign, whatever its voltage, to being listed or field evaluated by an accredited lab. Boulder asks for a full specification sheet with lumen rating and correlated color temperature on internally lit signs. Bend wants an image of the sign at night as well as by day, and its checklist says electronic message signs are currently prohibited. The draft sets what each form asks beside what your drawing and cut sheets supply.

Some approvals belong to someone else. Boulder requires a Building Owner Authorization Form when the applicant isn't the owner. Sacramento may need written approval from the owner or the management company for a shopping center, and separate encroachment permits for work in or over the right of way. Bend can ask for the master sign plan governing a tenant space and, for a historic site, photographs of every side of the building and of its neighbors along with the historic review application number; Boulder names a Landmark Alteration Certificate. The draft names each approval, who grants it and whether a copy is on file. Those decisions stay with the people who make them, and none of this is legal, zoning or engineering advice.

What stays open for a person. Sacramento's checklist asks for the composition of the existing wall, the mounting hardware's size, type, embedment, quantity and spacing, and the sign's weight, and may call for a special inspection form on field welds, foundations and post-installed anchors. Bend wants engineering on anything over 80 pounds or whenever its building official asks. When a survey doesn't answer one of those, the line stays open with a note on who can. Your reviewer, usually your permit coordinator, holds each draft against the packet that went in and the corrections that came back: values, code versions, attachments, and whether the open-items list caught what the city later asked for.

If your reviewer says yes, new locations get the same draft packet for about 30 days.

Your permit coordinator checks every packet and sends it the way your office does today. Licensed people still seal, sign and answer for what they always have.

Live drafts keep being compared with what your team files. Whether a next job follows is up to you, at its own price.