Signs & Print · 2026-08-11

Yard Signs in Bulk: Real Pricing and What the Cheap Number Leaves Out

A customer asked us last month why our quote for fifty yard signs didn't match a number he'd found online. Completely fair question. So we went and checked — real carts, real quantities, shipping to a Colorado Springs ZIP, August 2026. Here's everything we found, including the parts that don't flatter us.

The national price ladder, as verified

For an 18″ × 24″ coroplast yard sign, single sided, no stakes, from the largest online printers:

• 1 sign — $17.99
• 10 signs — $117, or $11.70 each
• 50 signs — $366, or $7.32 each
• 100 signs — $450, or $4.50 each
• 1,000 signs — $3,541, or $3.54 each

Those are real prices and we're not going to squint at them. At a hundred pieces, $4.50 a sign is a low number by any measure. Volume coroplast is close to a commodity, and anybody telling you otherwise is protecting a margin.

But read the spec line again: single sided, no stakes.

What the headline number doesn't buy you

The second side. The cheapest ladder above is single-sided only — that printer doesn't offer a double-sided option in that size at all. Once you spec double-sided with stakes at fifty pieces, the honest market range is roughly $420–$520, which works out to $8.40–$10.40 per sign. Still reasonable. Just not $7.32.

Stakes. A yard sign without a stake is a piece of plastic. Wire H-stakes are cheap — ours are a published $2.50 per sign on the yard sign page, listed as a line item so you can see it — but they're almost never in the price you clicked on.

Time. Free shipping kicks in over $100 on most of these sites, and that free tier is economy: we measured roughly 15 days in transit. If the grand opening is in two weeks, the $4.50 sign costs you the event.

A file that prints. Upload-and-hope means the sign that arrives is exactly the sign you built, seam-line, low-resolution logo, cut-off phone number and all. There's no one on the other end looking at it.

Reprints. Which is the real cost of the previous item.

What we'd actually tell you to order

4mm coroplast, not 3mm. The thinner stuff exists, it's a couple of cents cheaper, and it folds in the first serious Front Range gust. We spec 4mm as the default and don't offer down from it.

Double-sided for anything on a road. Single-sided is fine for a fence line, a booth, or a sign people only approach from one direction. On a corner, at a subdivision entrance, or anywhere traffic moves both ways, single-sided means half your placements are blank plastic facing oncoming cars. The 40% or so you save is not a deal.

Wire H-stakes for weeks, metal frames for seasons. H-stakes are consumables — bring extras. If the sign is living on a corner from spring through fall, the heavier metal frame is worth the upgrade; it also holds the panel flat, which is what actually keeps signs readable from a moving car.

18″ × 24″ as the default; 24″ × 36″ when it's on a fence. Bigger reads farther, and construction fence signs are usually viewed from across a street.

Order past a quantity break, not up to it. Per-sign pricing steps down hard at 10, 25, and 100 in almost every ladder including ours. If you need 22, price 25. You'll pay less and have three spares for the ones that get run over.

Designing a sign somebody reads in five seconds

Yard signs get about four seconds of attention from a driver at 35 mph. That's the whole design brief.

Letter height is the rule that matters. Plan on roughly one inch of capital letter height per ten feet of viewing distance. If people are reading from forty feet away — the width of a residential street plus a lawn — your main line needs to be about four inches tall. On an 18″ × 24″ sign, that's most of the panel. Which tells you how much copy fits: not much.

Six words on the top line, maximum. ROOF LEAK? WE FIX IT. NOW HIRING — DRIVERS. Your logo is not the headline unless you're a household name in this town.

One action. A phone number or a short URL, never both. Phone numbers still win for trades and emergencies; short domains win for anything people will look up later from their couch. Pick the one that matches how you actually get hired.

Real contrast, not brand loyalty. Black on yellow, white on dark blue, black on white. If your brand colors are a light gray and a slightly darker gray, the yard sign is where you break the rules.

Keep type two inches off the bottom. That's grass, snow, and the stake zone. Copy that lands there disappears the day it goes in the ground.

How we quote it

We publish our sign pricing and we quote the whole thing — panel, sides, stakes, and the file work — as one number with the parts visible. If double-sided at your quantity comes out above what you'd pay a national printer, we'll say so out loud and tell you what the difference buys: someone checking your artwork before it prints, a local pickup this week instead of a two-week transit, and a person to call when eight of the fifty come back bent.

Sometimes that's worth it. Sometimes you should just order the hundred single-sided signs online and staple them to a fence. We'd rather tell you which one you're in than win the job by staying vague.

Get a real number

Tell us what the signs are for, how many you need, and when they have to be in the ground. Our free assessment takes about two minutes and comes back with a written estimate you can e-sign — stakes, sides, and shipping included in the number, not discovered at checkout.

Ordering a banner for the same job? Read the outdoor banner guide before you pick a material — the wind here punishes the wrong choice faster than the sun does.

One more thing worth saying out loud: the single most expensive yard sign is the one with a typo in the phone number, and it costs exactly the same as the good one. Read the proof twice. Then have someone who doesn't work for you read it once.

Prices attributed to national printers were cart-verified in August 2026 for delivery to Colorado Springs and change without notice — ours are published on the product pages.