Was street cleaning scheduled when you got your ticket?

When a ticket is worth contesting

• The time is outside the posted hours. The checker shows the window for each side of the block.
• The date was a holiday. Daytime sweeping stops on SFMTA holidays; night routes still run on most of them. See the street sweeping holiday list.
• The block is not swept that day, or only on certain weeks of the month (1st and 3rd, 2nd and 4th).
• The sign was missing, wrong or unreadable. Our data cannot show this; a dated photo of the sign can.

If the checker says sweeping was scheduled on your side at that time, and the sign agrees, the ticket matches the schedule and a protest is unlikely to succeed on the schedule alone.

How to contest it with SFMTA

1. Within 21 days of the date on the ticket (or of the first courtesy notice), submit a protest. SFMTA says not to pay a ticket you want to protest. You can protest online and upload photos and other evidence, or mail SFMTA's protest form to SFMTA Customer Service Center, ATTN: Citation Review, 11 South Van Ness Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94103.
2. The ticket is placed on hold while it is reviewed. SFMTA says reviews can take up to 90 days and the decision arrives by mail or email.
3. If the protest is denied, you can request an administrative hearing within 25 calendar days of the denial letter, by email, phone, video or in person. A hearing needs a deposit of the ticket amount first, refunded if the ticket is dismissed.
4. If the hearing goes against you, you can appeal to San Francisco Superior Court within 30 days of the decision letter.

Every step and deadline above is from SFMTA's contest a citation page, read on October 26, 2026. The fine itself is $105; what it costs if you pay late is on our street cleaning ticket page.

What to include

• The citation number and a short statement of why it is wrong (the checker's summary is a start).
• A dated photo of the posted street cleaning sign on that block, and of where the car was parked.
• The city record: SF Public Works' street sweeping schedule on DataSF (dataset yhqp-riqs), with the record numbers the checker shows.

Where the answer comes from

The schedule is SF Public Works' published street sweeping data as of May 14, 2026, the same data as our street sweeping map. Holidays are the SFMTA enforcement calendar. We check from January 1, 2026, the start of the holiday calendar we hold. We are not affiliated with SFMTA and this is not legal advice: the posted sign is the rule, and SFMTA decides every protest.