Ocean City Halloween House Decorating Contest: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Ocean City Halloween House Decorating Contest is

Ocean City, New Jersey, bills itself on its city site as "America's Greatest Family Resort," and the City of Ocean City uses that same site, ocnj.us, to run a Halloween House Decorating Contest for local homes. The contest page opens with a rules and regulations block, and it is the city, not a newspaper or a platform, that sets the terms. That makes this a municipal event: residents decorate, the city registers the houses, judges visit, and the public can vote for a People's Choice Award.

Two tracks run side by side. The judges' track looks at decorations only and at their overall creativity, special effects and similar qualities listed on the page. The voters' track is the People's Choice Award, which is the only part of the contest that a supporter can influence by voting. A homeowner who wants both recognition from judges and popularity with neighbors needs to treat them as separate goals.

The table below sets out the facts that the city's page states.

The October 2026 calendar and the confirmed years

The city's page gives the dates for the 2026 round, and the live ballot shows the program in 2025 and 2026. The calendar is compact. Registration closes first, judging follows on two evenings and the public vote ends on a Sunday.

What the page does not give is the opening day of public voting, and the list of prizes and categories is not printed in the text on file; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The 2025 round shows the program is not a one-off, but a different year may use different days. Homeowners reading in the autumn should work backward from the registration deadline, since a house that misses it cannot appear in either track.

How judging and public voting differ for Ocean City houses

A supporter's role is the People's Choice Award. The page states that the public can vote for it and that voting ends on Sunday, October 25th. How a vote is cast and whether a voter may cast more than once are not spelled out in the text on file, so a supporter should read the contest page before sharing a link.

The judges work differently. They visit on the evenings of October 22nd and 23rd between 6:00 PM and 9:00 PM and look at decorations only. They are not asked about popularity or a household's story, and they do not count votes. A house can therefore win with judges and lose with the public, or the reverse, and the contest is built to allow both outcomes.

For a visitor to the shore, the practical idea is simple: drive or walk the decorated blocks, pick the display that stands out, and vote before the Sunday cutoff. For a homeowner, the evening window of judging means lights and displays should be working by October 22nd, since the judging hours are fixed. After the vote ends, the page notes a Monday, October 26th step for participants, which suggests results and follow-up come right after the weekend.

Visitors have an advantage the judges lack: they can come back. A family staying at the shore can walk the same block on a different night, compare displays and decide at leisure. The page gives no vote cap or ballot format, so the decision of when to vote is simply when the supporter is satisfied that a house has earned it, before the Sunday close.

How the Ocean City contest compares with New Jersey ballots

New Jersey's other public ballots on this site are mostly readers' polls from newspapers and magazines. Ocean City's contest differs in kind: it is run by a city, it rewards households instead of businesses, and part of it is decided by judges. The siblings are the Asbury Park Press Readers' Choice, the Bergen & Morris Top Dentists, the Best of Bergen Community's Choice Awards, the Best of Jersey Shore Contest, Best of New Jersey and the Jersey Bites Monmouth County Readers' Choice.

The Best of Jersey Shore Contest is the nearest cousin by geography, but it is a business poll, so the two do not compete for the same audience.

That contrast helps a supporter set expectations. A readers' poll asks for dozens of picks across many categories and runs for weeks, while the Ocean City contest asks about decorated houses and compresses its calendar into the back half of October. Because the host is a city, the contest page also carries rules and regulations in plain municipal language, which is not how a newspaper poll presents itself. Anyone comparing New Jersey ballots should read each organizer's own page, since a rule from one contest does not carry over to another.

Building support for an Ocean City house

Registration is the step that is easiest to forget. A household that decorates beautifully but misses the 4:00 p.m. deadline on October 21st has no entry for the judges or the public to consider, so the first piece of advice for any Ocean City homeowner is to register early and keep the confirmation close.

A People's Choice vote depends on foot traffic and neighborly goodwill. A household can post its address-free photos, invite friends to walk by during the judging evenings and remind them that voting ends on Sunday, October 25th. The city's page is the authority on any rule about repeated voting.

Our guide to getting more votes online explains outreach for public ballots, and buy votes online describes the paid service. The city has said nothing about outside help in the text on file, and a win cannot be promised.