What HOAs Get Wrong About Light Reflectance Value

Lori Sawaya, Color Strategist | Albert R. Sawaya II, EE, MBA • Metrology Expert

TL;DR: LRV measures one thing — the percentage of light a color reflects. It doesn’t measure boldness, depth, or “appropriateness” for a neighborhood; that’s not its job.

Published LRV numbers vary by source. Sometimes by several points for the same color from the same brand . Because brands don’t publicly verify the what, when, how of their published LRV values.

That makes LRV the wrong tool for a hard cutoff rule e.g. “nothing under LRV 35” applied across different paint brands, and it exposes an HOA to fair debate about enforcement.

So, what’s the solution? Identify one consistent source everyone agrees to and stick with it. For example, a date-stamped fandeck.

Getting Into It

If you sit on an architectural review committee, you’ve probably encountered Light Reflectance Value (LRV) at some point. It sounds reasonable — a number, a cutoff, a rule that treats every homeowner the same. “Nothing under LRV 40.” Clean. Fair.

Except it isn’t, and understanding why requires going deeper into color science than most HOA guidelines ever do. The science behind LRV is actually remarkable. The problem, however, is HOAs expect LRV to do a job it was never intended to do.

What LRV Is (and Isn’t)

Light Reflectance Value measures one thing: the percentage of visible light a surface reflects, on a scale from 0 (theoretical pure black) to 100 (theoretical pure white). In practice, the darkest paints land around 3–5, and the whitest around 92–93. That’s it. That’s the whole job description.

LRV is not a measurement of “depth.” It’s not a measurement of boldness, warmth, mood, or how “loud” a color reads. Those are discernible qualities of color, and color science has dedicated tools for them — CIE L* Lightness and Munsell Value both quantify how light or dark a color appears, using different math and different reference structures than LRV.

If LRV already did everything bloggers and HOAs want it to do, those other values wouldn’t need to exist. Having separate metrics that supposedly measure the same thing would be sloppy science, and color science is not sloppy. Each one earns its place by measuring something the others don’t.

So when an HOA guideline says “no exterior color below LRV 35,” it’s using a light-versus-dark scale to try to regulate the visual light and dark weight of a color choice — not the right way to use LRV.

Where LRV Numbers Actually Come From

Here’s the question worth asking: when you look up a paint color and see ‘LRV 84,’ where did that number come from?

There are two possibilities. Either the brand physically measured a dried, cured paint chip with a spectrophotometer and recorded the result, or they calculated the LRV mathematically from the original color formulation and let that calculated number travel with the color everywhere it’s published.

The second is almost certainly what’s happening at scale. The formulation math produces the color recipe, and the formulation math produces the LRV notation, in the same pass.

Brands are trusting their formulation data — reasonable, since it’s their own proprietary system end to end.

What we couldn’t find is public documentation of manufacturers re-verifying LRV against physical chip measurements after the fact. Paint chemists on industry forums have noted that manufacturers don’t talk about which testing standards and instrument geometry they use, which is itself telling.

The formal reference standard for this kind of measurement is ASTM E1477, which specifies using a spectrophotometer calibrated to a known white standard, under standardized illumination, with the reflectance data weighted according to human eye sensitivity (the CIE Y tristimulus value, typically under D65 illuminant).

It’s specific. It’s also not something every brand necessarily applies identically — more on that below.

Rubber Ruler Rules

Here’s the thing about color data: every number comes with conditions and a degree of uncertainty. That is not a flaw. It is the nature of quantifying color.

Color is not a purely physical property like length or weight. The color we perceive results from the interaction of light, a material surface, and the human visual system. LRV, CIE L*, Munsell Value, and Delta E each quantify a different part of that relationship.

LRV describes luminous reflectance, CIE L* and Munsell Value describe lightness, and Delta E estimates the difference between two colors. None captures the complete experience of seeing a color.

It is remarkable that color scientists developed standardized ways to quantify a perceptual experience with the consistency and repeatability colorimetry achieves. It is about as close to catching lightning in a bottle as measurement science gets.

But that’s also why it’s a different category of measurement than a tape measure against a 2×4.

My late husband Al spent his career as a metrology expert for the U.S. Air Force and later Honeywell Aerospace, calibrating instruments precise enough to park a fighter jet’s landing gear on a dime — literally.

He truly disliked the term “rubber ruler.” Coming from someone who spent a career in precision measurement, that tracks. But it also gets to the truth about LRV: unlike a physical dimension, it is not a single, pin-pointable value.

It’s a well-engineered approximation of something inherently perceptual, and treating it as absolute is where it goes off the rails.

Why LRV Is Controversial in Color Science

If LRV were an airtight, universally standardized number, organizations with regulatory teeth would have already tried to enforce it. They haven’t — and it’s worth looking at an example where LRV does show up in a legal-adjacent standard.

The 2025 ICC A117.1 accessibility standard (the code most U.S. jurisdictions reference for ADA-related signage) does use LRV in a formula: a required 65% contrast ratio between a sign’s characters and its background, calculated as [(B1 − B2) / B1] × 100, where B1 and B2 are the LRV of the two surfaces.

But notice what it actually regulates: the relative contrast between two colors, measured the same way, on the same material, side by side. It’s not used to declare that a single color, in isolation, is “too dark” or “too light” by some absolute cutoff — which is what an HOA guideline like “no LRV under 35” tries to do.

Even the U.S. Access Board’s own guidance on this standard concedes that measuring LRV accurately in the field is difficult and is affected by sign materials and lighting conditions.

And if they’re hedging on field accuracy and limits use to relative contrast rather than an absolute threshold, that tells you something about trying to use LRV as a blanket “no colors below X” rule for an entire neighborhood.

The deeper issue is that LRV values aren’t produced by one universal, tightly policed process. Different brands may use different instrument geometries (0/45 directional versus integrating-sphere measurement, for example), different illuminants or observer standards in their internal quality assurance, and — as covered above — different degrees of rigor in whether the number was ever verified against a physical sample.

Add to that the fact that gloss level changes how much light a surface reflects — a sphere spectrophotometer can measure the exact same sample two different ways, specular included (SPIN) or specular excluded (SPEX), and get two different numbers.

SPIN cancels out the gloss and reads color alone; SPEX reads the surface the way your eye actually sees it, sheen and all. Brands don’t publish which mode they used.

Stack that on top of everything else, and you’ve got several physical sources of variance sitting underneath a single two-digit number that gets treated as gospel.

The Same Color, Five Different LRV Numbers

To see this play out with a real color, look at Benjamin Moore’s notation for Lightning Bolt 323, an LRV of 82.82. Yet other widely used color-data sites publish 83, 84.58, 84.7 and nearly 87 for the same color. That is a spread of roughly four points.

The discrepancy doesn’t prove that five color labs measured the same chip and got five different answers. In many cases, the sites do not disclose whether the number came from a physical measurement, manufacturer data, or a calculation based on digital RGB or Lab values. And that lack of traceability is the problem

PPG officially lists Soft Cream PPG1205-2 at 84. Other published sources place it at 85, 85.09, approximately 85.8 and nearly 86. Again, the issue is not just rounding. It is that the provenance and methodology behind many published LRV values are unclear.

Now put the two brands’ official numbers side by side: Lightning Bolt at 82.82 and Soft Cream at 84 — close in LRV. And yet visually, the two colors read VERY different. Lightning Bolt is a higher-chroma yellow — bold, clean, saturated. Soft Cream is lower-chroma — softer, calmer, more muted.

Two colors with nearly identical LRV, obviously different in character, from two brands whose internal measurement processes we can’t fully verify or reconcile — and that’s before accounting for the fact that a single brand’s own number for a single color can itself drift by several points.

This is the whole controversy in a nutshell. LRV can’t reliably tell you granular differences in luminance between colors — even from the same brand, let alone across brands — because we don’t know where every published number originated or how/if it was verified.

What This Means for HOAs Trying to Use LRV as a Hammer

An HOA that writes “exterior colors must have an LRV of 35 or higher” into its architectural guidelines is applying a number as if it were an unassailable data point.

It isn’t, and that opens the floor to legit debate not just disagreement abut aesthetics.

An LRV cutoff that draws from whatever number happens to be printed on a given brand’s swatch — numbers that, as shown above, can vary by several points for the same color depending on the source — is not applying one consistent standard.

It’s applying a moving target and calling it a rule. Two homeowners could each submit a color that is, in real-world appearance, equally light or equally dark, and land on opposite sides of the HOA’s cutoff purely because their color came from different brands whose LRV numbers were calculated by different processes.

And an HOA can’t limit homeowners to one paint brand. So a hard LRV cutoff, applied across brands whose numbers don’t agree with each other, pretty much guarantees the kind of inconsistency it was meant to prevent.

The Fix: Pick a Lane and Stay In It

None of this means LRV is totally useless. Understand it correctly and it’s plenty accurate for a color design application.

If LRV is going to matter for an HOA’s decision-making, the workable approach is:

• Pick a single source of truth. The easiest, most defensible option is the paint brand’s own published listing — its website or the index in its own fan deck.
• Get everyone to agree on it, in writing. The architectural review committee, the guidelines document, and homeowners submitting for approval all need to be pointing at the same source.
• Stop comparing LRV across brands as if it means something. It doesn’t, because the values come from different sources, different instruments, and possibly different processes. A four-point spread on the same color from the same brand should be a fat clue that treating a cross-brand LRV difference of two or three points as meaningful is not defensible.

This principle isn’t unique to LRV, either — it applies to every color data value. All of them are only as comparable as their point of origin allows. Consistency of source is what makes any of these numbers usable.

Why This Is Frustrating (and Why You Have to Live With It)

If you’re a homeowner caught up in brand-to-brand LRV confusion, the only place you can compare LRV values is the Paint Color DNA Studio. Because we’re brand agnostic, we measured all major brands and have them in our database.

The origin of most published LRV numbers isn’t qualified — you don’t know, and often can’t find out, how a brand generated the number for their product.

The most anyone can do is agree on a source and stick to it — everyone has to reconcile with the fact that brand-to-brand LRV inconsistency is just the nature of the beast that is LRV.

What About Custom Colors?

Custom or hand-mixed colors add another layer. Here at The Land of Color we can measure custom mixes using an X-Rite Ci6X spectrophotometer — the same class of instrument used in professional color labs — so we can document the LRV of a custom color directly from instrument data.

That’s a physically measured number, not a calculated one, and it’s about as solid as LRV data gets.

But it’s important not to overstate what that measurement covers. An LRV reading from a spectrophotometer tells you the reflectance of that sample, at that moment, under that measurement condition.

It says nothing about how that custom color will hold up over time — light fastness, weatherability, UV fade, or how the LRV itself might shift as the paint ages on an exterior surface. Manufacturer-formulated colors typically have that kind of long-term performance data behind them (or at least, the brand claims to). A custom mix generally doesn’t, unless it’s been separately tested for it.

All the instrument can tell you is what the reflectance measurement is right now — not what it will be in three summers.

Where This Research Started

I first wrote about LRV in 2013, and updated that original guide again in 2023. At the time, LRV was printed in the index of every fandeck and appeared on the back of every paint chip — and there was nothing written anywhere explaining what it actually was or why it mattered.

I know, because I looked.

I knew the term from my earlier career as a graphic designer, where LRV is part of how you make signage legible.

When I moved into architectural color specification and saw those same three letters showing up, I was excited to recognize something familiar — and then stunned that I couldn’t find a single color professional in the paint industry who could tell me why it was there or what anyone did with it.

So I went and found the white papers and standards myself. Al — an electrical engineer and metrology expert — helped me track down the original source documents, and that research became the blog post.

That post has been copied, in large chunks and sometimes nearly word for word, more times than I can count — by a paint manufacturer’s marketing VP, by a chief technical officer at a smaller paint company, and by contributors who lifted it into other public reference pages without credit.

The evidence can be found in one line. My original definition still reads: “Light Reflectance Value (LRV) is the total quantity of visible and useable light reflected by a surface in all directions and at all wavelengths when illuminated by a light source.” I’d sourced that from British Standard BS 8300:2001/A1:2005 — and misquoted it, adding the word “useable,” which isn’t in the standard.

When I asked Al to proof the post, he caught it immediately: no scientist, engineer, or mathematician writes “visible and useable.” He was right. By then I’d sunk enough hours into the post that fixing one word was not a priority, so it stayed.

To this day, if you find that exact phrasing anywhere else, you’ve found a copy of my original research — knowingly or not.

Getting credit was never really the point, and mostly it didn’t happen. Thirteen plus years since I hit publish on that blog post, I can count the citations on one hand.

What mattered was the undertone of validation: when a color-science-trained CTO at a paint manufacturer thought the research was good enough to publish, nearly verbatim, under his own brand’s name, that was a signal that I was right.

That’s really where all of this — the Paint Color DNA Table, the patent, Camp Chroma, all of it — started: a gap nobody else had bothered to fill.

If Your HOA Wants This Rebuilt Properly

Everything above is the reasoning for why LRV isn’t intended to be used as an enforcement mechanism. In practice, I don’t use LRV to build community color palettes — I use hue, value, and chroma, the three dimensions that describe how a color looks to a human.

For one HOA, that meant building a custom, private DNA Table filtered down to only the colors that meet their restrictions: homeowners aren’t calculating or comparing anything themselves, they just pick from a pre-vetted list. If your board is ready to replace “no dark colors” with something that’s orderly and repeatable, reach out and let’s talk about scope.

A Note on Custom LRV Data — and a Better Single Source

If you made it this far, you now know why comparing published LRV numbers across brands is an exercise in futility.

In the Paint Color DNA Studio, it’s a different situation: we measure LRV from new, wrapper-sealed fandecks using an X-Rite Ci6X spectrophotometer — the same instrument, the same method, the same settings, the same standard, applied consistently across every brand in the Table.

That means our Paint Color DNA Studio LRVs won’t always match what’s published on a brand’s own website or fandeck — which, considering everything above, shouldn’t be surprising.

What it does mean is that any two colors compared within the Studio are apples to apples, measured the same way, which is the one condition this whole article has been emphasizing you need before LRV comparisons mean anything.

And because the data lives in a searchable, sortable table, it’s usable the way anyone who wants to compare LRV needs it to be — as a single, consistent point of reference.

The Bottom Line

LRV is real and can be useful — it just measures one thing, and it isn’t lightness in the way people assume, it isn’t chroma, and it definitely isn’t “appropriateness” for a neighborhood.

Where the numbers come from, how they’re measured, and whether they’re ever verified against a physical sample varies by brand, and that variance is baked into every published fan deck and website listing available today.

An HOA that wants LRV to function as an enforceable, comparable, cross-brand standard is asking a measurement to do a job beyond its scope. The workable path is picking one consistent source, sticking to it, and being honest with homeowners about what LRV really is.