Utah's flag is the newest in the United States, and one of very few adopted this century through a full public redesign. Since March 9, 2024, the state has flown a bold geometric banner: blue sky over white mountain peaks over red desert, with a gold beehive in a hexagon at the center and a small white star beneath it. It replaced a century-old blue flag bearing the state seal, a design most residents could not describe from memory. The change was contentious enough to spawn two petition drives, a lawsuit, and a repeal bill, and the compromise that got it through the legislature means Utah now technically has two official flags.
A century of the seal on blue
Utah's first flag was not really designed so much as accumulated. In 1911, Senate Joint Resolution 17 took the existing governor's flag, a blue field with the state seal embroidered in white and the date 1896 below, and made it the state flag. Two years later the Sons and Daughters of Utah Pioneers ordered a flag as a gift for the battleship USS Utah. The flag came back from the manufacturer with unrequested extras: the shield rendered in full color and a gold ring around the design. Rather than send it back, the legislature amended the law in 1913 to match the error.
A second manufacturing mistake proved even more durable. In 1922 a flagmaker placed the date 1847, the year the pioneers entered the Salt Lake Valley, above the shield instead of on it. Flag companies copied the mistake for 89 years until a 2011 concurrent resolution ordered manufacturers to put the date back where the statute said it belonged. The same session produced House Bill 490, which declared March 9 the annual Utah State Flag Day, a date that would later matter more than anyone expected.
A task force and 5,703 designs
The push for a new design came from Senator Daniel McCay, whose 2021 legislation created a state flag task force. The stated problem was the one vexillologists had complained about for decades: Utah's flag was a seal on a bedsheet, indistinguishable at a distance from twenty other state flags. The task force ran the redesign as a public campaign, and in 2022 it opened submissions to anyone. It received 5,703 designs, roughly 2,500 of them from students. Twenty semifinalists were announced in September 2022 and drew about 44,000 survey responses.
The final design was a synthesis rather than a single winner. It merged elements from submissions by Mark Brooks and Sarina Ehrgott with earlier prototype work by Ben Barnes, the lead designer for the Utah Jazz, who had circulated concepts to lawmakers. The result kept the state's oldest symbol, the beehive, and dropped everything else: no eagle, no flags, no sego lilies, no dates, no lettering.
Reading the beehive flag
The flag's official colors are a navy blue (hex 071D49), white, a dark red (AA0200), and gold (FFB81D), at proportions of 3:5. The blue band carries the sky, the lakes, and, in the official description, principles of faith, knowledge, and freedom. Its lower edge is cut into peaks, so the white of the middle band reads as snow on mountains; there are five peaks, for the state's major ranges. The red base is southern Utah's canyon country and the perseverance of the people who settled it.
The centerpiece is a gold beehive on a blue hexagon, the hexagon being a honeycomb cell, for community strength. The hive itself is the emblem Utah has used since the provisional State of Deseret in 1849: industry, thrift, cooperative labor. Below it sits a single white five-pointed star honoring the five tribal nations of the region, the Navajo, Shoshone, Goshute, Paiute, and Ute, with a secondary reading as Utah's place as the 45th state.
The backlash and the compromise
Not everyone wanted a new flag. Critics called the process wasteful and the design a corporate logo, and some framed the change as an insult to the pioneer heritage carried by the old seal. A March 2023 poll by the Hinckley Institute found 48 percent in favor of the new design and 35 percent opposed. The legislature's votes were close for a flag bill: 17-10 in the Senate in January 2023, 40-35 in the House that March.
The bill's sponsors bought peace with a compromise written into SB31 itself: the old flag was not abolished but redesignated the "historic state flag," keeping official status. Governor Cox signed the bill on March 21, 2023, and issued an executive order confirming the historic flag would continue to fly year-round at the Capitol.
Opponents tried to undo it anyway. A 2023 referendum drive collected 21,030 of the 134,298 signatures needed. A second effort in 2024 gathered 99,125 signatures but fell short on validated totals before the deadline, and a federal lawsuit over the initiative process was denied an injunction in March 2024 and withdrawn two days later. A repeal bill from Representative Phil Lyman died in committee. The beehive flag became official on schedule, on March 9, 2024, the flag day the legislature had created thirteen years earlier for a different flag entirely.
References
[1] "Flag of Utah," Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Utah
[2] "It's official: Utah's new flag takes its place," Utah News Dispatch (March 9, 2024). https://utahnewsdispatch.com/2024/03/09/new-utah-flag-official-start-date/
[3] "Utah Legislature adopts new state flag, transitions current design to 'historical' flag," Deseret News (March 2, 2023). https://www.deseret.com/utah/2023/3/2/23622938/new-utah-flag-approved-beehive-star-design/
[4] Utah State Flag official site, flag.utah.gov. https://flag.utah.gov
[5] Utah Senate Bill 31 (2023), "State Flag Amendments," Utah State Legislature.