Election Lawn Signs in Ottawa: Costs, Quantities and the 2026 Rules

An election lawn sign looks like one product and is really four decisions stacked together: the board, the size, the number of printed sides, and the hardware that holds it up. Every one of those moves the price, and two of them decide whether your signs are still standing the week before the vote.

The board is coroplast— corrugated plastic, the same fluted sheet used for real estate and job-site signs. It does not absorb water, so it will not swell or warp in rain the way a paper-cored board does, and the hollow flutes running through it are what a wire stake slides into. How it compares to rigid alternatives is in coroplast versus PVC.

We have produced campaign materials for mayoral and city-council campaigns — signs, door hangers and volunteer apparel — and we know how the season actually runs: a burst of ordering in the first two weeks, a quieter middle, and then a scramble for a second run when the first batch turns out to be short. It is worth planning for that second run now rather than discovering it in October.

One thing to be clear about up front. We print what a campaign approves. We are printers, not lawyers, and nothing here is legal advice. Election sign rules are set municipality by municipality and the clerk's office is the authority. What we can tell you accurately is what the material does, what it costs, and how long it takes to make.

Coroplast is sold by thickness, and for lawn signs the two that matter are 4mm and 6mm. The number is the depth of the flute — the corrugation sandwiched between the two printed faces.

4mm is the industry standard and the right default for the majority of campaign signs. It is light, cheap enough to order in the hundreds, takes full-colour print beautifully, and holds up through a normal autumn on a residential lawn.

6mm is the upgrade, and it costs roughly a third more per sign. The deeper flute is stiffer, which matters in exactly one situation a fall municipal campaign runs into constantly: wind. A 4mm sign on a wire H-stake in an open field, on a highway-adjacent lot, or on a corner that funnels gusts will bow, and a bowed sign eventually folds along a flute and stops reading. A 6mm sign usually rides it out.

The practical answer for most campaigns is a split: run the bulk of the order in 4mm for residential lawns, and put a smaller number of 6mm signs in the exposed, high-visibility locations you already know are windy. That is cheaper than upgrading everything and it protects the placements that actually get seen.

Flute direction is not a footnote.For a staked sign the flutes must run vertically so the stake legs slide in. If any of your signs are being zip-tied to a frame or fence instead, say so when you order — the sheet has to be cut the other way.

18×24 in is the standard election lawn sign and the correct default. It reads from a car at residential speed, it fits every stake on the market, and it is economical enough to order in real quantity. 24×36 in is the step up for signs set well back from the road, on higher-speed roads, or on a stretch where several campaigns are competing for the same glance. 12×18 in is too small to work as a primary sign. We break the sizes down further in the lawn sign size guide.

Single-sided or double-sidedis the decision people underestimate. A single-sided sign is invisible to half the traffic on the street — fine on a one-way, wasteful on a corner lot or any two-way street. Double-sided adds roughly 55% to the per-sign price rather than doubling it, because the setup and the board are already paid for, and it is the highest-return upgrade on the order.

Stakes come in two shapes and they are not interchangeable.

• Wire H-stakesare the standard: a galvanized frame with two legs that slide up into the flutes and a bar you step on. About $2 per sign, light to transport, fast to plant, ideal for turf — what almost every municipal campaign uses.
• Stake-through and framed mountsput a wooden or steel stake through the sign, or clamp it into a rigid frame. Heavier, slower, more expensive, and genuinely better on hard, stony or partly frozen ground — which late October in Ottawa can deliver on an early cold snap.

Order a handful more stakes than signs. They bend and disappear, and a sign with no stake is a sign in a trunk.

An election sign has a short, brutal life: planted in September, rained on repeatedly, frozen and thawed a few times, and expected to look deliberate on the last weekend of October. Three separate things are being tested, and they fail differently.

Water is the easy one. Coroplast is plastic through and through and the inks are UV-cured onto the surface, so rain does nothing to either. Water entering the open flutes drains out. This is why nobody prints outdoor signs on cardboard.

Frost is mostly a hardware problem, not a print problem. The board stays fine below freezing. What suffers is the ground: a stake driven into soft September soil can heave loose after a freeze-thaw cycle, and a loose sign becomes a leaning sign and then a flat one. The fix is a walk-around with a mallet, not a reprint.

UV is the slow one.Sunlight is what actually degrades a printed sign, and it goes after saturated reds and blues first — which, awkwardly, is most of what ends up on political signage. Over a single six-week campaign this is rarely visible; it becomes visible if you store signs in a sunny garage and expect to reuse them four years later. A gloss UV coating is about $1.50 per sign and slows the fade.

The failure that actually ends most signs is none of the above. It is wind fatigue at the stake line— the sign flexing against the wire legs until the flutes crease. That is the argument for 6mm in exposed spots.

Lawn signs are one of the few print products where the quantity curve is steep enough to change your strategy. Here is what an 18×24 in, 4mm coroplastsign costs at our quantity breaks. Treat these as indicative list pricing rather than a quote — the figures move with stock and volume, and the live number for your exact size, quantity and options is the one you see in the lawn-sign designer or on a free written quote.

Read that curve carefully, because it is the whole budgeting story: the hundredth sign costs about a third of what the first one does. A campaign ordering 40 signs and then panic-ordering 40 more three weeks later pays meaningfully more than one that ordered 100 at the start, and pays it twice in production time.

The modifiers are simple to reason about. 6mm coroplast is about a third more per sign. Gloss UV coating is about $1.50 each. Wire H-stakes are about $2 each. Ontario HST is 13%on top of all of it. So a realistic flagship order — 100 double-sided 18×24 signs on 4mm with stakes — lands near $1,500 before tax, and you can price your own configuration instantly on the lawn sign product page or on our lawn sign printing service page.

If you are trying to work out how many you actually need before you look at a price, start with how many lawn signs a campaign needs — guessing the quantity is a far more expensive mistake than guessing the material.

Lawn signs take 2–4 business days in production, and that clock starts when two things have both happened: you have approved the free mockup, and you have paid. It does not start when you first email us. If we are shipping rather than handing them to you in Ottawa, add transit on top — production and delivery are separate numbers, and campaigns routinely add them wrong.

Voting day is Monday, October 26, 2026— about eight weeks out. We are deliberately not publishing an "order by" date, because your real deadline depends on when your by-law lets you post, how long your approval chain takes, and whether your artwork exists yet. Here is what to do the arithmetic with:

• 2–4 business days of production after approval and payment.
• Ottawa private property opens Friday, September 11, 2026. Signs cannot legally go up before that.
• Ottawa road allowance opens Saturday, September 26, 2026.
• Everything must be down by Thursday, October 29, 2026, 72 hours after the vote.

The three things that reliably blow a print deadline are all upstream of the shop, and they are the same three every cycle: artwork that turns out to be a screenshot of a logo, wording still being argued about, and an approval sitting unread in someone's inbox. Lock those and almost any timeline works. Rush production is available on most jobs, but ask before you plan around it, and be suspicious of any shop that promises a date sight unseen — more on that in how to choose a print shop in Ottawa.

The City of Ottawa's election sign framework has been in force since January 1, 2022, and it sets different start dates depending on whose land the sign is standing on. Every number below is Ottawa'sand applies only inside Ottawa — other municipalities set their own, and the next section explains why that matters. Applied to a voting day of Monday, October 26, 2026:

• Private property — 45 days before voting day. A sign may not be placed earlier than Friday, September 11, 2026.
• Public property and city road allowance — 30 days before voting day. That is Saturday, September 26, 2026.
• Removal — within 72 hours after voting day. Every election sign must be down by Thursday, October 29, 2026.
• Intersections. On private property, a sign may not be placed within three metres of an intersection.

The rules behind those dates come from the Municipal Elections Act, 1996, Ottawa's Temporary Signs on Private Property By-law, and the Signs on City Roads By-law (No. 2003-520). Sign complaints in Ottawa go to 3-1-1.

Two practical notes follow from those dates. First, the 45-day and 30-day windows mean two waves of placement, not one — volunteers who planted the private-property wave get re-mobilized two weeks later for the road allowance. Second, the removal deadline needs a crew booked before voting day. The 72-hour window lands on the exact three days when everyone involved in a campaign is least inclined to do anything, which is why abandoned signs are such a familiar sight.

Registered third-party advertisers are a separate category from candidates. If you are advertising as a registered third party rather than as a candidate's own campaign, you must register with the municipal clerk, and your advertising has to identify you — the registered advertiser's name, the contact information the Act requires, and the municipality where you are registered. That identification has to be designed into the sign, so tell us at artwork stage rather than after the proof. A candidate's own campaign signs are a different thing; do not assume what applies to one applies to the other, and confirm your own situation with the clerk. Timing rules are covered in more depth in when you can put up election signs in Ontario.

This deserves its own heading because it is the single most common way a campaign gets this wrong. The 45-day, 30-day, 72-hour and three-metre figures above are Ottawa's. They are not Ontario-wide, they are not Canada-wide, and they do not travel.

Toronto, Mississauga, Gatineau and every other municipality set their own election sign by-laws. The earliest posting date, whether road allowances are permitted at all, the setback from an intersection, the removal deadline, and what happens to a sign found in the wrong place are all local decisions, and they genuinely differ. A campaign that copies Ottawa's dates into another city is planning against the wrong calendar.

Confirm with your own municipal clerk's office before you print.It is one phone call or one page on the municipality's website, and it is the difference between a legal placement plan and a pile of signs you cannot use yet. We are happy to print for a campaign anywhere — we ship across Canada — but we cannot tell you what your by-law says, and any printer who confidently does is guessing.

To state it once plainly: we print what a campaign approves, and this is not legal advice.The clerk's office is the authority. We are also non-partisan — we print for any registered candidate or campaign, and nothing about taking an order implies we support it.

A lawn sign gets about two secondsof a driver's attention at residential speed. That is the entire design brief. Every layout problem on a bad election sign traces back to someone trying to fit more than two seconds of information into it.

The name is the sign.On a municipal campaign, the candidate's name should be the largest element by a wide margin — large enough that it is the only thing legible at the far end of a block. The office being sought is the second element and it is much smaller. Everything else is optional.

One accent colour, high contrast. Legibility at distance is driven by contrast between text and background, not by which colours you pick. Dark on light or light on dark reads; mid-tone on mid-tone does not, however good it looks on a laptop. Complementary pairs like red on green vibrate and are genuinely hard to read for a lot of people.

No paragraph. Not a slogan and a tagline and a website and a social handle and a list of priorities. If it needs to be read, it belongs on a door hanger, held in a hand at arm's length. The sign's job is name recognition; the door hanger's job is the argument.

Send vector artwork.A logo pulled off a website is typically a few hundred pixels wide, which is fine on a screen and hopeless blown up to 24 inches. Vector files (SVG, PDF, AI, EPS) scale to any size with no loss. If all you have is a small image, say so early — the last week of a campaign is not when you want to discover it. Our guides to print-ready artwork and PNG versus vector cover the details.

Then test it the cheap way. Print the design at letter size, tape it to a wall, and walk to the far end of the longest room you have. Whatever you can still read is what is actually on your sign.

The safety net underneath all of it: every order is reviewed by a human designer before it goes to press. A person checks resolution, colour, sizing and placement, and either fixes the file or tells you exactly what is wrong — it is not an automated preflight, and nothing prints until you have approved a free mockup.

Lawn signs are the visible part of a campaign's print budget and rarely the whole of it. The pieces that get ordered late, because nobody thought about them in September, are the ones that touch voters directly.

• Door hangers.The canvassing workhorse — the piece that gets left when nobody answers, which is most doors. See door hangers for canvassing and our door hanger printing page.
• Volunteer apparel. Twenty people in matching shirts at a community event read as a campaign; twenty people in their own clothes read as a crowd. Start with campaign t-shirts and volunteer apparel, or go straight to t-shirt printing and design your volunteer shirts free.
• Banners and larger signagefor the campaign office, launch night and debates — the signs and banners page covers the formats.
• Business cards for the candidate and the campaign manager, because people ask, and cards are cheap and always run out.

If you would rather see the whole thing as one list with the 2026 dates attached, the municipal campaign print checklist for 2026 is the piece to bookmark.

Everything is produced in-house in Ottawa, so when a campaign needs a second run to move up the queue, the press is down the hall rather than down the highway. Free local pickup and delivery across Ottawa–Gatineau, shipping Canada-wide, and a real person at 613-666-9292 who will tell you honestly when a date is not realistic. Lay out your own artwork in the free online design studio or email the file to order@yayaprints.ca and we will build the mockup for you.