Flag of Utah

What the flag shows

• The blue band. At the top, Utah’s skies, standing for faith.
• The white band. In the middle, with a five-peaked mountain edge, the center peak tallest: Utah’s snowy mountains and peace. The peaks stand for the state’s Indigenous peoples.
• The red band. At the bottom, the red rock of southern Utah, standing for perseverance and the state’s distinctive landscapes.
• The hexagon. A blue hexagon with an inner gold outline, for the strength of Utah’s people.
• The beehive. A gold beehive with five sections inside the hexagon, for industry, community and 1847, the year pioneers first settled Utah.
• The star. A white five-pointed star under the beehive, for hope and 1896, the year of statehood.

The flag’s proportions are 3 to 5. The law places it in the public domain and lets every citizen use it on any fitting occasion.

The first flag

Utah’s first flag was made in 1903, when Governor Heber M. Wells asked for a flag for the state’s delegation to the St. Louis World’s Fair. The Utah State Society of the Daughters of the Revolution sponsored it, and the artist H. L. A. Culmer helped the seamstress Agnes Teudt Fernelius finish the design: the state seal on a blue field. It was carried in the fair’s Parade of States on May 1, 1903. The Legislature formally adopted it as the state flag on March 9, 1911, and in 1913 a resolution by Representative Annie Wells Cannon set the design that later stood in law, the seal on blue ringed by a narrow gold circle.

A long-copied mistake

A third flag made in 1922 put the date 1847 under the shield instead of on it, and flag makers copied that mistake for decades. In 2011 the Legislature reaffirmed the 1913 description and asked manufacturers to follow it.

More Than a Flag

In 2022 a task force chaired by Governor Spencer Cox, called “More Than a Flag,” invited the public to help design a new flag. It received more than 5,700 design submissions and over 44,000 survey responses, narrowed them to 20 and then five finalists, and its design committee combined elements of the five into one design, approved unanimously on November 10, 2022. The Legislature adopted it in Senate Bill 31, signed on March 21, 2023, with a five-pointed star in place of the finalist’s eight-pointed one, and it took effect on March 9, 2024.

The historic state flag

The old seal-on-blue design was not discarded. Under state law it remains the “historic state flag,” flown on state property on legal holidays as the governor sees fit and at the Capitol during the legislative session, beneath the new flag when both fly together.