Your Official Best of North County Resource

Best of North County invites, engages, and allows you, our audience, to recognize the best businesses, organizations, and people in our area. Our focus is on businesses and professionals who support, serve, and do business in North County and the surrounding area.

Nominations and voting will take place on votenorthcounty.com.

Nomination surveys require registration of basic information from the submitter for when we need to clarify an entry. We do offer you the opportunity to share your name and email with us so we can keep you up to date on the program. You may submit your nominees in any given category and return to complete the survey any time before the deadline. Registration may be necessary for the voting phase to promote fair voting. You may be asked for your name and email address.

No. All nominations and voting are done online at votenorthcounty.com.

The nomination period begins at 12 PM on Monday, February 24 and ends at 5 PM on Friday, March 7. We rely on our audience to supply us with the names of outstanding people, businesses and establishments in 250+ categories. Once the nominees are finalized, our audience is asked to vote on one choice in each category. Per our guidelines, you are allowed to nominate/vote once every 24 hours. ​​ Our audience and business owners nominate their favorites in the North County area by selecting one of 10 topic areas: Eat & Drink Education Health & Beauty Home & Garden Law Motors Real Estate Services Shopping Things To Do Nominees should be individuals and businesses that serve North County and surrounding areas. Nominating is as simple as entering a name and city in text entry fields. It’s best practice, but not required, to provide additional information on the nominee so we can verify them (phone number, address, URL). Businesses with multiple locations appear as a single nomination for the voting phase unless otherwise specified by the business. Users are not required to nominate in all categories but must submit the nomination form by hitting the "submit" button at the bottom of the page. Users are permitted to nominate a single business in more than one category. The Coast News does not review or consider factors such as business licenses, trade affiliations, Better Business Bureau ratings, or online ratings when determining nominees or winners. The Best Of North County nominations and winners are solely chosen by the public through online nominations and voting.

For a category to qualify for the ballot, there must be a minimum of 5 separate businesses that are competing for votes. If a category is not qualifying, we will make reasonable accommodations to move the nominee to a relevant category. Once a category is qualified, we will ballot each individual business that has been nominated.

Businesses, organizations, or individuals that are nominated by our audience are placed on our ballot after they are verified. Should a business earn enough votes to be voted a Gold win, they may be required to complete a simple online questionnaire with basic business information including name, location(s), year established, business hours, phone number, web address (if any) and submit a photo of the business, organization or individual. There is no cost or obligation to participate. Be sure to download your free promotional assets to use on your website, social media, or business to promote your nomination during the voting period.

The regular voting period begins at 12 PM, Monday, March 24 and ends at 5 PM, Friday, April 11, 2025 at votenorthcounty.com. Votes are tabulated by a third-party. The Coast News Group does not know the results of the contest until after the votes are tabulated. In each category, readers vote on their favorite nominee. Readers are permitted to vote in each category once per day. Businesses, institutions, individuals and schools are encouraged to promote the contest in order to gain nominations and/or votes. Competitive advertising, special offers, and campaigns are permitted; however, the producers at their sole discretion, reserve the right to exclude from the competition any businesses or individuals that engage in activities intended to “rig” or “fix” the voting process. Votes that are suspect may be disqualified in the count. ​ Use of bots, robotic, repetitive, automatic, programmed, vote exchange websites, vote “farming”, scripts or other automated means designed to circumvent “one ballot per person per day” rule, are not allowed. Contestants discovered using these methods for vote acceleration are subject to suspected votes being disqualified without notice, and the jeopardy of the Contestant being completely disqualified and removed from the competition. Contestants risk disqualification if they use promotions involving quid pro quo strategies, such as, but not limited to "vote for us, and we’ll enter you into a drawing" or "vote for us, and we’ll give you a discount." These approaches create an unfair advantage by incentivizing votes, which goes against the contest guidelines and can result in disqualification to ensure a level playing field for all participants. ​

All nominations have to be verified prior to being placed on the final ballot. During the nomination process, we welcome all submissions. ​ Our ballot is a closed ballot, however, we will accept late entries into an established category by request. After nominations have closed, all late entry requests must be sent to support@votenorthcounty.com for consideration.

The names of the winners are posted and announced on Friday, July 18, 2025 online at TheBestofNorthCounty.com and honored in The Best of North County special winners magazine. In the event of a tie in any category, more than one winner or runner-up may be awarded.

Best of North County and the unique logos are the property of The Coast News Group and may only be used with express, written permission. Logos are licensed to winners at a marketing spend or direct payment of $995 or more. Best of North County merchandise does not count toward the logo license spend. Contact us to request your logo. If you have already signed your logo agreement and have received your winner's logo, please review the Usage Guidelines here.