713-662-3123
Yard signs are lightweight panels of corrugated plastic, called coroplast, printed in full color and pushed into the ground on wire stakes. A standard sign in our online store’s default configuration costs $33.05, and the per-sign price falls as your quantity rises. Most buyers land between 18×12 and 24×18 inches, though we stock nine standard sizes, from a 24×6 real estate rider up to a 48×48 site sign.
We’ve been making yard signs in Houston since 1946, and they remain the cheapest way to put a message in front of people who pass a specific spot every day. This guide covers the material, all nine sizes, single versus double sided, stakes and grommets, honest pricing, the actual research on whether signs work, and how to order online without touching design software.
Key Takeaways
- Yard signs are full-color prints on coroplast, a corrugated plastic that shrugs off water and most chemicals.
- Nine standard sizes are available; 18×12 is the economy pick and 24×18 the all-around favorite.
- One sign runs $33.05 in the default setup, and per-unit cost drops with quantity.
- 76% of consumers have entered a store they’d never visited because of its signs (FedEx Office, 2012).
What Are Yard Signs and How Are They Made?
A yard sign is a sheet of coroplast printed in full color and mounted on a wire stake. Coroplast is an extruded high-impact polypropylene copolymer sheet. It’s chemically inert, and water, most oils, and most solvents have no effect on it, which is exactly why it became the outdoor sign standard (Coroplast product properties).
Picture plastic cardboard. Two flat walls with vertical flutes running between them. Those flutes give the panel stiffness without adding weight, so a sign big enough to read from the street still weighs next to nothing and ships flat in stacks. The flutes also happen to be the perfect channel for wire stake prongs, which is a big part of why the whole category standardized around this one material.
Printing is digital and full color on one or both sides. You can order a standard square cut or a contour cut that follows the shape of your design. If you want the deeper material story, our complete guide to coroplast signs covers it, and we compare it against aluminum, foam board, and banner vinyl here.
One nuance worth knowing before you buy anywhere: UV protection is an optional additive that gets blended into coroplast at the factory, not a standard feature of every sheet (Coroplast). Under Houston sun, that detail matters. Ask your printer about the stock they run. We do, because we’ve watched what an August on a west-facing lawn does to cheap material.
Ready to price one out? Our yard sign product page shows live pricing for every size, side, and add-on combination. Pick your options, see your number, order in minutes.
Who Uses Yard Signs in Houston?
The five industries that order the most yard signs from our store are real estate, construction, retail, events, and political campaigns. Families round out the list with birthday and graduation signs. The common thread: every one of them needs a message planted at a specific street address, and needs it cheap enough to buy in stacks.
Real estate agents are the classic case. A 24×16 or 24×18 panel with a 24×6 rider on top (“Sold,” “Pool,” agent phone number) is the industry uniform. We build real estate signs for agents across the metro, and we’ve written before about how yard sign printing supports property sales.
Contractors and home-service companies treat every job site as a free billboard. Roofers, pool builders, landscapers, and remodelers stake a sign the day work starts and leave it up a week after it ends. In a subdivision where neighbors compare bids, that sign does quiet work.
Political campaigns buy coroplast by the pallet in election years. Same material, same stakes, plus name-recognition rules of its own. Our 2026 campaign yard sign guide covers Texas placement law and design do’s and don’ts, and our campaign signs service page covers local production.
Events, schools, and fundraisers use signs two ways: directional arrows that route cars from the feeder road to the parking lot, and spirit signs that families plant voluntarily. A booster club selling team signs at a modest markup has built many a travel-ball budget.
Birthdays and graduations became a yard sign staple in 2020 and never left. We produce custom graduation yard signs, happy birthday yard signs and letters, and full corrugated plastic yard letter sets that spell out names across a lawn.
What Sizes Do Yard Signs Come In?
Our store carries nine standard yard sign sizes, from a 24×6 inch rider to a 48×48 inch site sign. If you’re unsure, 18×12 is the economy workhorse and 24×18 is the most versatile all-around size. Here’s the full lineup, with the job each size actually does best:
| Size (inches) | Best use |
|---|---|
| 24×6 | Rider strips for real estate frames: “Sold,” “Pool,” agent name and number |
| 12×9 | Small directionals: parking arrows, “Office,” “Entrance” |
| 12×12 | Square directionals and wayfinding: open house arrows, event routing |
| 18×12 | The standard economy size: promos, garage sales, small campaigns on a budget |
| 24×16 | The real estate standard, sized for common agent frames |
| 24×18 | Most popular all-around size: campaigns, contractors, listings, events |
| 24×24 | High-visibility square: job sites and events with faster passing traffic |
| 36×24 | High-visibility rectangle: busy roads, deep setbacks, corner lots |
| 48×48 | Site signs: construction projects, developments, grand openings |
The honest rule from 80 years of doing this: buyers overestimate how close viewers will be. A sign that looks huge on your workbench looks like a postage stamp from a car doing 40 on Westheimer. When in doubt, go up one size.
Need something outside these nine sizes? Call the shop at 713-662-3123 and we’ll quote a custom cut.
Single Sided or Double Sided: Which Should You Order?
Order double sided when traffic passes your sign from both directions, which describes most curbside placements. Order single sided when the sign faces one way: against a fence, in a store window bed, or as a directional arrow where the reverse side would point people the wrong way.
Think about how the sign will actually sit. A campaign sign staked perpendicular to a residential street gets read by cars coming from the left and from the right, so single sided wastes half its impressions. A “Now Leasing” sign flat against a property fence only ever shows one face. Directional arrows are the sneaky one: an arrow pointing right on the front points left on the back, so those should almost always be single sided.
Double sided costs more per sign. If the placement earns views from both directions, it’s usually the better cost per impression. If you’re mixing placements, split the order. Plenty of our real estate and event customers order both in one cart.
Wire Stakes and Grommets Explained
Wire stakes are the H-shaped frames that hold a yard sign upright; grommets are metal-ringed holes that let you zip-tie or screw the sign to something solid. Both are inexpensive add-ons at checkout, and the right choice depends entirely on where the sign is going.
The H-stake’s two prongs slide up into the coroplast flutes, which is why flute direction matters: order your sign so the flutes run vertically. Installation is a ten-second job in normal soil. In a Houston August, when the gumbo clay bakes into something close to brick, water the spot first or you’ll bend the wire before it penetrates. We tell customers this every summer, and every summer somebody learns it the hard way.
Grommets take over where stakes can’t go: chain-link fences around construction sites, stage barricades, parking garage columns, or anywhere you’re mounting to a surface instead of soil. Zip ties through four corner grommets will hold a sign through a Gulf Coast thunderstorm far better than tape or staples ever will.
One hurricane-season note. Coroplast is, as our store copy puts it, lightweight yet durable enough to handle typical outdoor conditions like wind, rain, and sun exposure. A named storm is not typical conditions. When a tropical system heads for the coast, pull your signs. They take two minutes to reinstall and zero minutes to become projectiles.
What Do Yard Signs Cost?
A single yard sign in our store’s default configuration costs $33.05, and that number is the ceiling, not the norm. Per-unit pricing drops as quantity climbs, which is why campaigns, brokerages, and contractors order in bulk rather than one at a time.
Here’s the honest framing. One-off signs, a graduation surprise or a single job-site sign, are where the per-unit price is highest, because setup and handling get spread across one piece. The economics improve quickly with volume. Size, single versus double sided, contour cutting, stakes, and grommets all move the price, and the product page calculator shows your exact total as you click through options. No mystery pricing, no “call for quote” wall on standard sizes.
Shipping is calculated by zip code right in the cart, and Houston-area customers can arrange pickup at the shop on Chimney Rock. For odd sizes, unusual quantities, or anything the configurator doesn’t cover, call 713-662-3123 for a custom quote.
Even at the single-sign price, it’s hard to find outdoor advertising this cheap that runs 24 hours a day. We’ve compared custom yard signs against traditional advertising options in Houston before, and the cost-per-day math is the whole argument.
Do Yard Signs Actually Work?
Yes, and there’s real research behind that answer rather than printer-industry folklore. Consumer surveys, an economics study, and randomized political field experiments all point the same direction: physical signs move behavior in measurable amounts. Here’s what the evidence actually says, with the numbers in context.
In a 2012 FedEx Office survey of 914 American consumers, 76% said they had entered a store they had never visited before based on its signs, 68% said a store’s signage reflects the quality of its products or services, and 52% said they were less willing to enter a store with misspelled or poorly made signs (FedEx Office, 2012, ±3.1%).
That survey measured signage broadly, storefront included, not lawn signs alone. Fair caveat. But the mechanism it documents, that people judge a business by its printed presence and act on it, is exactly what a job-site or curbside sign trades on. That 52% figure is also the strongest argument for professional printing over the hand-lettered route.
The University of Cincinnati Economics Center’s 2012 study, “The Economic Value of On-Premise Signage,” found that businesses which changed or improved their signage reported increases of roughly 10% in sales, profits, and transactions (Sign Research Foundation, 2012).
For campaigns, the evidence is even more direct. A Columbia University-led research team ran randomized field experiments across four political races and found lawn signs increased a candidate’s vote share by about 1.7 percentage points on average (Green et al., Electoral Studies, 2016). In a close race, 1.7 points is the whole ballgame. Our 2026 campaign sign guide digs into what that means for how many signs to buy and where Texas law lets you put them.
So do yard signs for business promotion pay for themselves? At roughly $33 or less per sign against those effect sizes, one new customer usually covers the order.
Design Rules That Keep Yard Signs Readable at a Distance
Contrast wins, fewer words win, bigger letters win. Those three rules settle nearly every yard sign design question. Dark text on a light background, or the reverse, reads at distances where tasteful low-contrast palettes turn into mush. Navy on white, black on yellow, and white on red have been performing on lawns since before this shop opened in 1946.
The three-second rule is our practical yardstick, not a lab statistic: a driver passing your sign gets about three seconds with it, so the sign has to land its message in that window. That means one big idea, a phone number or short web address, and nothing else. Every extra line of text shrinks every other line.
A few shop-floor habits worth stealing. Print your design on letter paper, tape it to a wall, and back up across the room; if you squint, your future customers will too. Skip thin script fonts, they collapse at distance. And leave breathing room at the edges, because a sign crammed to the borders reads as noise. If your message genuinely needs more words, that’s a job for a banner, not a yard sign.
How Do You Order Yard Signs Online?
Ordering takes about five minutes on our yard sign product page, and you don’t need design software or a designer. There are two paths: upload a print-ready file, or build your sign in the Designer Studio using free templates.
Here’s the whole process:
- Pick your size. All nine standard sizes are listed; the table above tells you which fits your job.
- Choose square cut or contour cut. Square is standard; contour follows your design’s shape.
- Select single or double sided. Curbside placements usually earn double.
- Add wire stakes and grommets if your placement needs them.
- Add your artwork. Upload a print-ready design, or open the Designer Studio and start from a template. The studio runs in your browser with your text, colors, and logo dropped in.
- Estimate shipping by zip code, then check out. Houston locals can arrange pickup at 5801 Chimney Rock Rd.
Have a file but not sure it’s print-ready? Our step-by-step online ordering guide walks through resolution, bleed, and file specs, plus a full Designer Studio walkthrough. And if you’d rather talk to a human first, 713-662-3123 reaches the same shop that’s answered that line for decades.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much do yard signs cost?
A single sign in the default configuration costs $33.05 in our online store, with per-unit pricing dropping as quantity increases. Size, double-sided printing, contour cutting, stakes, and grommets each adjust the price, and the product page calculates your exact total before checkout. Shipping is estimated by zip code in the cart.
How long do yard signs last outdoors?
Coroplast is chemically inert, and water and most oils have no effect on it (Coroplast), so signs handle typical wind, rain, and sun. Nobody can honestly promise a specific lifespan; sun exposure and placement vary too much. One tip: UV protection is an optional additive, so ask whether your stock is UV-stabilized.
What is the most popular yard sign size?
24×18 inches is the most versatile all-around size, big enough to read from a moving car while staying cheap to print and easy to stake. 18×12 is the economy pick for tight budgets and short campaigns, and 24×16 with a 24×6 rider is the real estate standard.
Do I need wire stakes or grommets?
Going into soil? Wire stakes. Mounting to a fence, wall, or barricade? Grommets with zip ties. Stakes slide into the sign’s vertical flutes, so most lawn placements need nothing else. Many customers add both so crews can adapt on site. Both are low-cost add-ons at checkout.
Can I design a yard sign without design software?
Yes. The Designer Studio on our store runs in your browser and includes free templates: pick one, swap in your text and colors, add a logo, and order. If you already have a print-ready file, upload it instead. Our online ordering guide shows both paths screen by screen.
Are yard signs recyclable?
Yes. Coroplast material is 100% recyclable (Coroplast), though curbside programs vary on whether they accept corrugated plastic, so check with your hauler. Plenty of customers get a second life out of signs first: repainting them, cutting them for stencils, or reusing blanks for the next open house.
Where can I legally place political yard signs in Texas?
On private property, with the owner’s permission. Placing campaign signs in the highway right-of-way is illegal, and TxDOT removes them without notice (TxDOT). Texas HOAs also can’t ban political signs from the 90th day before an election through the 10th day after (Texas Election Code §259.002). Our campaign sign guide covers the details.
Where can I get custom yard signs near me in Houston?
If you’re searching for custom yard signs near me, our shop has been at it in Houston since 1946: order through our online store for shipping or local pickup at 5801 Chimney Rock Rd, or call 713-662-3123 for custom sizes and bulk quotes.
The Bottom Line
Yard signs earn their place through simple math: full-color coroplast starting at $33.05 a sign, nine sizes for everything from open house arrows to 48×48 site signs, and survey evidence that 76% of consumers have walked into a business because of its signs (FedEx Office, 2012). Pick the right size, keep the design to one bold idea, add stakes or grommets to match the placement, and order double sided when traffic flows both ways.
When you’re ready, build and order your yard signs online or request a quote for custom work. Eighty years of Houston signs, now a five-minute checkout.