Boone County, IN Business Licensing & Operations: Auto Repair on Residential Property (2026)

Section 157.035 lets a residence host only a narrow band of personal-service work as a home occupation: Table 10 permits crafts trades like dressmaking and carpentry outright, and allows advice-only professional work such as law or accounting, but its prohibited-uses row draws a hard line against a specific set of higher-impact business types. That prohibited list closes with all uses associated with vehicle dealers, repair and services, placing auto repair, detailing, tire shops, used-car sales and similar vehicle-service work in the same excluded category as clinics, funeral homes and kennels.

The rule is not a limit on how many bays or hours a home-based shop may run; it is an outright bar on the classification itself in any residential district covered by this section. A resident who wants to fix cars for pay, sell vehicles from the property or run any commercial vehicle service therefore cannot rely on the home occupation provisions at all and would instead need a use classified and located in a business or industrial zoning district, subject to the county's separate performance standards for those districts, such as the outside storage and screening rules for commercial equipment under § 157.031.

Working on one's own personal vehicles in a residential driveway or garage is not what this table addresses; it targets the business classification of offering repair or sales services to the public from a residential lot.