A monument sign is the low sign that sits on the ground at the front of a property, on a base rather than on a pole. It is the sign most towns prefer, and it is also the one people are most surprised by when the quote comes in, because the sign itself is often less than half of what you pay.
I am not going to print a price range here. The same monument sign on two properties three miles apart can be two very different jobs, and a number in a blog post would only mislead you. What I can do is show you every line on the quote and tell you what pushes each one up.
Quick version: you are paying for design, a permit, a base, the sign, a concrete footing, an electrical run and an install. The town sets your maximum height, your maximum sign area and how far back from the road it has to sit, and those three limits are decided before anybody draws anything.
What counts as a monument sign
A monument sign sits on its own base at ground level. The base can be masonry, stone veneer, or a fabricated aluminum surround, and it is usually as wide as the sign or wider. Nothing is holding the sign up in the air.
The sign in the photo above is a pole sign. The cabinet is held up on posts with open air underneath, which is a different animal from a monument sign. Plenty of towns on Long Island stopped allowing new pole signs years ago and will only approve a monument, which is why so many replacements end up lower and wider than what was there before. If your existing sign is on poles, ask about that before you plan a like-for-like swap.
Both types show up in our custom signs work. Which one you end up with is usually decided by the code that applies to your property.
What you are actually paying for
Here is the quote broken into the pieces it is actually made of. Any one of these can be the biggest line on the job depending on the site.
| Line item | What it is | What pushes it up |
|---|---|---|
| Design and drawings | Layout, colors, and the drawings the town wants to see | Engineering stamps, and several rounds of revisions before anyone agrees |
| Permit | The application, the fees, and the time spent chasing it | A variance hearing, an overlay or historic district, or frontage on a state road |
| Base | Masonry, stone veneer, or a fabricated surround | Brick or stone chosen to match a building, and any base wider than the sign |
| Sign | The cabinet or the letters, built in the shop | Internal illumination, two faces instead of one, and changeable tenant panels |
| Footing | Concrete below the frost line, with steel reinforcement | Poor soil, a high water table, or a tall sign that needs more concrete |
| Electric | Trench, conduit, and a circuit run back to the panel | Distance from the building, and cutting through pavement to get there |
| Install | Truck, crew, and setting the sign plumb and level | Traffic control, night work, or a site too tight to get a boom into |
We build the sign itself at our own shop, the same way we build custom commercial awnings, so the fabrication schedule is ours to move. The parts we do not control are the permit and the utility, and those are usually what set your timeline.
What towns allow: height, area and setback
Three numbers get decided before design starts, and every town writes them differently.
- Maximum height above grade, measured from the ground to the top of the sign, base included.
- Maximum sign area per face, often tied to your road frontage or your building size.
- Minimum setback from the property line and from the road right of way.
- Whether internal illumination is allowed at all, and whether it has to shut off after business hours.
- Landscaping required around the base, which some codes make a condition of approval.
- A required street number on the sign, which has to be sized to the code and not to your layout.
The setback is where people get caught. The road right of way usually reaches further into your lawn than the curb does, sometimes by several feet, so a sign measured from the curb can end up sitting inside land you do not control. Get the line off a survey before you stake anything.
Height, area and setback are set by the town or the village, not by the county, so the same sign is approved in one place and needs a variance a few miles away. That is why we keep a separate section for each town we work in, including retractable pergolas brentwood and retractable pergolas sayville, since the local rules change what we can build there.
The footing and the electric
Under every monument sign there is a concrete footing that goes below the frost line, with steel reinforcement tied inside it and anchor bolts set into the wet concrete. The bolts have to match the sign’s own bolt pattern, so the footing gets poured to a drawing that gives their exact positions. Then the concrete has to cure before the sign goes on it.
The electrical run happens at the same time, because both need the same trench. Conduit comes up through the footing and runs back to a panel in the building. Distance is the cost driver. Twenty feet across a lawn is easy. Ninety feet across a paved lot means saw cutting, trenching and patching the asphalt, and the patch is not cheap.
Get the trench in before the landscaping goes back. Digging it up again afterwards costs more than doing it in the right order.
Lighting it
There are three normal ways to light a monument sign. An internally lit cabinet glows from the inside. Reverse-lit letters throw light back against the sign face and read as a halo at night. Ground floodlights sit in the landscaping and wash light up the face.
Floodlights are the cheapest option and often the only one a town will approve when the property backs onto houses. They also have to be aimed carefully, because light spilling into the road or a neighbor’s window is a complaint that comes back to you. Some codes require the sign to be off outside business hours, which a timer or a photocell handles.
Whatever you pick, decide it before fabrication. Adding light to a sign that was built unlit means building it again.
Install day
The install is usually the shortest part of the whole job. The crew sets the sign on the cured footing, levels it, tightens it down, grouts the base, backfills, and hooks up the electric. Most single-sign installs are a day.
The things that stretch it are traffic control if you are working close to a busy road, a boom truck that cannot get to the spot because of a curb or a tree, and a final inspection that has to be scheduled with the town. On a multi-tenant sign, the header panel goes in with the sign and the tenant panels get added as leases are signed, so plan a slot count you can live with for a few years.
What to have ready before you ask for a price
Everything below shortens the quote turnaround, and most of it you already have somewhere.
- A survey showing the property line and the road right of way.
- The sign section of your town or village code, or just the name of the town so we can pull it.
- Landlord or property manager approval in writing if you lease the space.
- Whether the sign carries one name or several, and how many tenant slots you want.
- Where the nearest electrical panel is and roughly how far that is from the sign location.
- A photo of the frontage taken from a car at the speed limit, which tells us how big the letters have to be.
Mike does the site visit and the final measurements himself, so the numbers on the drawing are the ones he took at your property.
Get a real number for your property
Send us the address, the town, and a photo of the frontage, and we will come back with what the code allows there and what the sign will cost to build and install. Use the contact form on the site, or call the shop at (631) 502-3444, Monday through Friday, 8am to 5pm.