There are 19 states where if you see purple paint on trees or fence posts while out hiking, you should leave immediately.
That’s because purple paint denotes private property in these areas, which means you are trespassing and could open yourself up to criminal prosecution.
What’s more, in a country where citizens have a constitutional right to own guns, disregarding these markings could put your life in serious danger.
States that have purple paint laws include Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Missouri, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia.
However, it’s important to note that in North Carolina, Virginia and West Virginia, purple paint is not for dissuading criminal trespassers. It’s solely used to notify people that they are not allowed to hunt or fish in the marked area.
Purple paint markings are used to warn people they are trespassing if they remain in the area
Throughout the 2000s, many state-level lawmakers believed that using paint was more cost effective than putting up signs that could be stolen or defaced.
Kentucky is the most recent state to allow landowners to use purple paint in this fashion, with Democrat Governor Andy Beshear signing Senate Bill 118 in April.
Similar bills were progressing through the general assemblies in Connecticut and Georgia before their respective legislative sessions concluded this year.
It is unclear why purple became the color of choice, but it’s likely that when other states saw their neighbors using the color, they chose to keep a sense of uniformity to cut down on confusion.
Despite this, some states have still opted to use different colors.
Idaho, Montana and Nevada laws rely on orange paint to alert trespassers.
Orange paint is also used in Arizona and Utah, but only to prohibit hunting on private property. Utah also allows landowners to use bright yellow paint for this same purpose.
The true outliers are Maryland and Nebraska, which use blue and red paint respectively.
Nearly all states with these laws also regulate the size of the markings on trees or posts. Above is how Maine regulates them
Many states stipulate how far apart these markings should be from one other. Pennsylvania law states they should be 100 feet apart at the furthest
Nearly all states with these laws also regulate the size of the markings on trees or posts and how far apart they should be from one another.
The near universal standard is that they should be around eight inches long, one or two inches wide and three to five feet off the ground.
When it comes to the distance between the markings, some states have a maximum of 100 feet apart, while others mandate a cap of 1,000 feet.
Other states do not laws allowing citizens to paint objects on their land in lieu of private property signs.
Some have tried and failed over the years to pass such bills.
Legislators in Minnesota and Mississippi, for example, introduced purple paint bills but both failed to get through the committee stage.
Nearly identical efforts in Vermont and Ohio floundered in recent years.
Oklahoma arguably had the most high profile failure to pass a purple paint law back in 2005. The bill narrowly passed both the state house and senate, only to be vetoed by then-Governor Brad Henry, a Democrat.
Henry argued in his veto order that while ‘the concept of this legislation is good,’ it could cause confusion because ‘many citizens may not have understood the significance of purple paint.’
The Oklahoma Farm Bureau blasted this move, accusing Henry of putting lawbreakers above landowners.
‘Governor Henry’s veto of Senate Bill 430 aids and abets those lawbreakers who trespass on private property,’ said Jeramy Rich, then-Director of Public Policy for Oklahoma Farm Bureau. ‘He clearly chose to protect lawbreakers and to ignore the wishes of landowners.’
Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear, a Democrat, signed a purple paint law on April 17, 2024, making his state the latest to adopt such a measure
Landowners often paint other objects within their property boundaries other than just trees, including rocks. Some also pair the painted markings with actual ‘no trespassing’ signs
But now these types of laws are catching on more, activists and lawmakers are discussing what it would mean to adopt similar measures.
An outdoor advocate from New York, where the only legally binding way to warn people to stay off your property is with signs, told The Times Union in 2021 that he believes there are pros and cons to using purple paint instead.
‘If they have a lot of land, which could mean miles and miles of boundary lines, they have to maintain signs yearly and sometimes they’re vandalized,’ said Andy Mossey, an advocacy coordinator for the Catskill Center. ‘Purple paint prevents all of those issues from happening.’
But as Governor Henry said nearly 20 years ago, Mossey believes the risk is that paint markings will mean nothing to those who are uninformed.
‘The advantage to signage is that anyone who is walking by a boundary can easily read that there’s a private land boundary,’ he said.
‘If it’s just purple paint with no signage, people may be less likely to understand what that is unless the state itself and organizations across the state have done a significant job getting that info across to all visitors.’
This is why some states, such as Tennessee, mandate that property owners put up at least one clearly visible ‘no trespassing’ sign alongside any painted markings.
At present, just over half of states in the US have standardized using paint to ward off trespassers, and it’s likely that more states will follow in the coming years.
